Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge 9783110328387, 9783110328035

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Pierfrancesco Basile, Leemon B. McHenry (Eds.) Consciousness, Reality and Value Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge

PROCESS THOUGHT Edited by Nicholas Rescher • Johanna Seibt • Michel Weber Advisory Board Mark Bickhard • Jaime Nubiola • Roberto Poli

Volume 13

Pierfrancesco Basile, Leemon B. McHenry (Eds.)

Consciousness, Reality and Value Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

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Contents

9

Preface

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The Philosophical Idealism of Timothy Sprigge Leemon B. McHenry

27

Timothy Sprigge: The Grinch that Stole Time Richard M. Gale

41

Timothy Sprigge and Panpsychism Geoffrey Madell

53

Dialectical Ascent on a Spriggean Theme Alastair Hannay

67

What Sort of Idealism is Viable Today? Nicholas Rescher

79

Sprigge’s Vindication of Concrete Universals James W. Allard

93

The Compounding of Consciousness Pierfrancesco Basile

109

From Consciousness to the Absolute William J. Mander

123

How Many Divine Minds? John Leslie

135

Sprigge’s Spinoza Peter Forrest

153

Idealism and God Leslie Armour

181

God, Sprigge, and Idealist Philosophy of Religion William Sweet

211

A Leibnizian God of Metaphysics? Pauline Phemister

229

God and Evil: A Process Perspective Marcus P. Ford

245

How Alien Are Animals? Stephen R. L. Clark

259

Ecosophy, Sophophily and Philotheria John Llewelyn

275

The Principle of Humanity and the Principle of Utility Ted Honderich

299

My Philosophy and Some Defence of It Timothy L. S. Sprigge

323

Selected Publications of T. L. S. Sprigge

329

Notes on Contributors

Preface

This volume celebrates the philosophy of Timothy Sprigge, former Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, with a collection of essays, almost all of which appear here for the first time. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes in a more subterranean but still effective fashion, Sprigge has exerted a considerable influence upon many areas of contemporary philosophical research, especially in such fields as philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ethics and animal rights. Moreover, he is unanimously recognized as one of the leading authorities on the philosophies of Spinoza, Santayana, James and Bradley. Until the publication of this volume, however, there has been no systematic, booklength treatment of his work. Our aim was to find philosophers who would engage directly themes in Sprigge’s metaphysics and ethics and provide a critical assessment of his ideas and arguments. There is very little that can be said as a way of introduction, criticism or praise of Sprigge’s work in this prefatory note that has not already been said by the several contributors to this volume. These are all philosophers of international reputation or acknowledged scholars in their own specialized field of inquiry. We are grateful to all of them for having accepted our invitation and for the enthusiasm with which they have set at work, and to Sprigge himself for his replies to some of the most significant objections raised by his critics. We thank the editors of Bradley Studies (now Collingwood and British Idealism Studies) and Idealistic Studies for permission to reprint essays by Leemon McHenry and Nicholas Rescher. We also wish to thank Johanna Seibt, Nicholas Rescher and Michel Weber for having accepted this book in their series.

Pierfrancesco Basile Leemon B. McHenry

The Philosophical Idealism of Timothy Sprigge1 Leemon B. McHenry

1. Introductory For the past forty years, Timothy Sprigge has been a major player on the British philosophical scene contributing to discussions as diverse as consciousness, the ontology of time, personal identity, animal rights, punishment, censorship and wider issues in metaphysics, ethics and the history of philosophy. He is, however, less well known for his own highly original system of metaphysics and ethics—a synthesis of Absolute Idealism, panpsychism and utilitarianism. This system was constructed against the current of the dominant linguistic and analytical trends in Britain. While working within an intellectual milieu largely hostile to his views, he attempted to provide color to what seemed to him a rather sterile and narrow orthodoxy. In his magnum opus, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, he says that his manner of doing philosophy attempts to arrive at answers to the “deep ontological questions about the concrete nature of reality” instead of viewing philosophy as a self-contained intellectual game.2 Guy Stock says of Sprigge that he “has, in a contemporary context, a fair claim to be the most independent of thinkers within the field of metaphysics”.3 In a tightly worked out system, Sprigge combines the ideas of philosophers who have had the greatest impact on his thought, mainly Baruch Spinoza, William James, Francis Herbert Bradley, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Alfred North Whitehead and Arthur Schopenhauer. He found in these thinkers a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness, time and existence. Sprigge is especially close to James in his emphasis on building a philosophy up from concrete lived experience. He also shares with James a certain antipathy to the professionalism of academic philosophy. The point is to develop a system that is not merely academic but also relevant to one’s life. In this connection, Sprigge espoused a system of ethics that is meant to accord well with his metaphysics but can also be seen as independently viable; it is a version of utilitarianism that recognizes the intrinsic value of sentient beings, including nonhuman animals and the environment. In this essay I focus on the systematic character of Sprigge’s thought, and attempt to show the relations between the different parts of his metaphysics and ethics. While I am sympathetic with his general approach to philosophy and his bold manner of defending unfashionable theses, I also wish to raise a problem about his view of time and the prescriptive features of his ethics.

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2. Consciousness and Ontology Sprigge began to develop his views on ontology and philosophy of mind in Facts, Words and Beliefs where he investigates the problem of what goes on in consciousness when one is thinking.4 This is something of a transition period as Sprigge was essentially a Russellian in his approach, but eventually he found in Santayana a more satisfactory answer to his problem. His book, Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy, explores in detail the ontological basis of consciousness from a naturalist and realist perspective.5 He says: “The serious study of Santayana’s works transformed my own philosophical outlook and enabled me to escape from a variety of absurdities into which I had been led by premises I did not think to question”.6 Two articles from this period are especially noteworthy for Sprigge’s departure from what was then contemporary English philosophy: “The Privacy of Experience” and “Consciousness”.7 Both point to his later philosophy of consciousness developed in terms of a fully-articulated panpsychism, and based in the first instance on an examination of the stream of experience known to us most intimately and privately. Philosophical thought in Britain during the latter half of the twentieth century was dominated by the tough-minded, rigorous approach established by logical positivism and linguistic analysis. Metaphysics was regarded either as literal non-sense—that is, the use of terms that had no empirically verifiable meaning—or as resulting from an inability to understand the way ordinary people use language. According to linguistic analysis, and especially that of Wittgenstein, metaphysical problems were merely linguistic confusion. Logical positivists such as A. J. Ayer held up for ridicule isolated statements of metaphysicians of the past. Bradley and other absolute idealists were considered some of the worse offenders of making sense. Those few philosophers who made various inroads in defense of metaphysics against these methodological strategies had to spend their energy demonstrating the possibility or value of metaphysics rather than actually doing it; “meta-metaphysics” was about all one could manage in an intellectually respectable manner. Philosophers who held metaphysical views underpinning their formal contributions had to keep those views hidden. Logician Kurt Gödel, for example, secretly labored as a kind of Platonic and Kantian idealist.8 By the late 1970s, however, Sprigge says “the philosopher who steps forward as a speculative metaphysician need no longer feel that his attempt to reach a view of the nature of things by methods distinctively philosophical will be dismissed in advance by most fellow philosophers as an enterprise of its very nature doomed to vacuity”.9 As the anti-metaphysical methodologies exhausted discussion of the relevant topics, some philosophers sensed fatigue and atrophy. Moreover, the arrival of computers brought about a renewal of interest in such traditional metaphysical topics as the nature of consciousness, the mind-body

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problem, free will, and personal identity. On another front, the rise of modal logic created a whole new arena of legitimate metaphysical discussion regarding the status of possible worlds. For Sprigge, metaphysical inquiry begins with the situation of consciousness in its purely subjective features. In his inaugural lecture in connection to his appointment to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh, “The Importance of Subjectivity”, he calls his approach the eidetic investigation of consciousness.10 In knowing oneself as a center of consciousness, he says, one knows the inherent nature of a concrete reality. Consciousness, for Sprigge, includes the total phenomenon of present, lived experience—felt bodily sensations, cognitive, perceptual and emotional elements, memory and intentions, and the dim background of thoughts and feelings that forms what it is like to be us at any one moment. This kind of knowledge is contrasted with our knowledge of physical reality as an appearance to observers or as known in terms of highly abstract structural characteristics. Whereas science and mathematics will provide knowledge of the latter, it is only introspection and one’s ability to engage in a type of empathy with sentient creation that gives us knowledge of the former. One is a world of description, the other a world of direct acquaintance. In a striking analogy, Sprigge compares our scientific understanding of nature to a deaf person’s understanding of a musical score: So the structural way of taking science is surely that which renders it most truthful. But thus understood, scientific theories are for us akin to musical scores for the deaf. Those who are congenitally deaf, it would seem, could learn quite a lot about musical structures. They could surely learn to look at a score, most simply a piano score, and realise that the work inscribed there is a fugue, or that it changes from the major to the minor at a certain point, and so on. So they might learn an indefinite amount about the structure of various sorts of music, or individual pieces, but have no idea of heard sound as the concrete way in which the structure is realised.11

Much of philosophy in the twentieth century has downplayed or ignored our knowledge of subjectivity, but Sprigge argues that this has distorted not only philosophy but also our approach to a wide range of ethical and practical problems. Sprigge’s emphasis on subjectivity is not intended as an attack on objectivity or on the importance of evidence and reasoning in the development and testing of scientific hypotheses or, for that matter, of metaphysical claims. Rather, his point is that our attempt to know reality merely as structural features of matter or phenomenal appearances fails to grasp the inherent reality of the world, or what is it like being an entity in its full concreteness. This approach was pioneered by Sprigge early on in his article, “Final Causes”, in 1971, but it has been made famous by Thomas Nagel in his 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”.12 Unlike Nagel’s rather limited application of this point, Sprigge is concerned to

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draw a much wider conclusion for metaphysics. In “The Distinctiveness of American Philosophy”, he says: if a philosopher would grasp reality in its concreteness, and arrive at a philosophic position adequate to such grasp, he must take the flow of his own experience as his paradigm example of the true pulse of existence, and continually check the results of his reasoning by reference back to it. Not that there is any hint of solipsism; it is only that here one hears the pulse of Being beat most directly, and gets one’s sense of what one believes when one believes that anything is really going on, in the minds of others or in the physical world.13

This methodological strategy is clear in James’s attempt to generalize the main points of his psychology for his philosophy of radical empiricism and Whitehead’s method in Process and Reality, described by Sprigge as “metaphysical generalization of this initially psychological concept”.14 Sprigge has identified the move from the private experience of consciousness to the realization of its implications for our general understanding of reality as a distinctive mark of the classical American philosophers. Following Royce, this point of departure leads him to panpsychism and the doctrine of the Absolute. Sprigge systematically weaves together panpsychism and Absolute Idealism by a chain of arguments in The Vindication of Absolute Idealism. The very title of this book was a challenge to contemporary philosophy, since the British mainstream regarded Absolute Idealism as an antiquated relic of nineteenthcentury philosophy thoroughly destroyed by Russell, Moore and Ayer. Sprigge indicates that he is well aware that the consensus of opinion will regard his conclusion as wildly far-fetched or absurd, but he is determined to demonstrate that the likes of Spinoza, Bradley and Royce had it right. Sprigge’s fundamental question in the Vindication of Absolute Idealism is couched in Kantian terms: What is the noumenal backing or “in itself” of the phenomena that are perceived as physical reality? After considering and rejecting various common but unsatisfactory answers to this question, he arrives at the view that concrete reality in its true nature is consciousness manifested in various forms. More specifically, reality is composed of innumerable mutually interacting momentary centers of experience related to form enduring centers of experience or consciousness such as one finds in oneself. Each momentary center is a unity of sentience or a pulse of experience that comes together with the other momentary centers in its stream and creates a “space-time worm” or the continuity of the enduring center across time. These cumulate in one final Whole—the Absolute, which occurs as one grand epochal moment of the universe. In opposition to the Kantian tradition, according to which the noumenal reality lying beyond appearances is completely unknowable, Sprigge argues that we have in ourselves knowledge of a noumenal reality and by empathy, the noumenal reality of other beings. This means that our usual distinctions between

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organic and inorganic, living and nonliving, and humans and animals fail to have ultimate significance for a panpsychist metaphysics. As Royce made the point in The World and the Individual, “Where we see inorganic Nature seemingly dead, there is, in fact, conscious life, just as surely as there is any Being present in Nature at all”.15 In Sprigge’s view, each “in itself” or momentary center of experience feels itself as a whole at each moment, but the aggregates may or may not be sentient themselves. Thus, a pebble on the beach, a mountain or an artifact such as a computer consists of an aggregate of individually experiencing centers but there is nothing that is the sentience of such a thing as a whole. Although Sprigge does not undertake any exact classification of the sentience of wholes and parts, he contends this would be a valuable sort of inquiry by a panpsychist philosopher of science.16 For Sprigge, the terms “consciousness” and “sentience” are generally synonymous even though he distinguishes between high-grade centers of experience as found in human consciousness and low-grade centers of experience constituting the greater part of nature. When the low-grade centers of experience stand in particularly close relations of mutual influence, there will be a structured totality and a new center of experience is generated functioning as the consciousness of the system as a whole. In the case of human beings, the stream of consciousness emerges as the totality of the interacting momentary centers. Obviously in other animals, the stream will vary in degree of consciousness depending on the type of organism, but there will always be some basic experience of what it is like to be that animal organism. In the greater part of socalled inanimate nature, there will be nothing more to the experience than a dull throb of existence or a sense of emergence from a previous state. Sprigge’s panpsychism must be seen as a radical departure from the view of evolutionary cosmology provided by modern science, i.e., emergentism—the view that consciousness emerges out of matter when sufficient complexity of material structure is attained. The underlying assumption is that matter is in every respect devoid of any property—including feelings—that characterizes mind. Also, according to this view, sentience and consciousness are merely local phenomena arising on planet Earth in just the right astronomical conditions. As William van Orman Quine asserts in Theories and Things: “The propositions of biology and psychology are local generalizations about some terrestrial growths of our acquaintance”.17 This view runs into difficulties that a panpsychist seeks to overcome by positing sentience at the beginning. Sprigge in particular argues that it makes the mind-body relationship more intelligible. James and Whitehead, on the other hand, saw the enormous benefits for explaining the evolution of organic and conscious life. The great mystery for the physicalistic view is the two abrupt changes in the evolutionary process. One involves the appearance of organic matter from inanimate and lifeless matter. The other involves the emergence of consciousness from organic life processes. But as a metaphysical lens

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through which to view the plausible chain of events, panpsychism has the general advantage of providing a smooth and continuous interpretation of nature in terms of the same ontological type. As James found, it does not slip in some entirely new nature that was not already there from the beginning.18 The introduction of consciousness from inert matter represents a radical discontinuity in evolution. In Sprigge’s view, since the universe or the Absolute itself is conscious, there is no need to explain its emergence, at least not in the same problematic way of physicalism. Despite the long history of philosophers and scientists who have espoused panpsychism or panexperientialism, it is a bitter pill to swallow for contemporary orthodoxy since it threatens the reigning physicalist paradigm. Until very recently, it wasn’t even a topic of serious consideration. But it has now entered the analytical mainstream by a suggestion from within the mind/body debate.19

3. The Unreality of Time One of Sprigge’s most dramatic yet central theses regards the ontological status of the momentary centers as eternally there in the Absolute. This theory brings together principles of Absolute Idealism as developed by Bradley and Royce, with Santayana’s views on time. Sprigge’s most important writings on this topic include his “Ideal Immortality”, his Presidential address to the Aristotelian Society, “The Unreality of Time”, and various chapters in The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality and Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy.20 The ontological view about the whole of time as eternally present is what Sprigge calls “determinationism”. According to this view, past, present and future are all intrinsically present. What we call “past” or “future” is simply events that happen to be relative to our present, but there is nothing special about the moment that is illuminated as “now”. All events are “now” in and of themselves. This view is not to be confused with determinism, according to which one could, in principle, predict future events from knowledge of the present and basic laws of nature. The determinist, that is, believes that future events will be causally determined by present events and are, therefore, inevitable, but they do not as yet exist. The determinationist, on the other hand, holds that future events, like those of the past and present, exist eternally. The basis of the determinationist view is Santayana’s argument that all propositions about events in time must refer to a reality that makes them true or false.21 If some proposition about the past is true—for example, a proposition about the numbness in the feet that Socrates felt after he drank the hemlock—it must be because there is some reality that makes it true. Sprigge, however, thinks it is inadequate to say simply that there was such a reality because the

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problem remains as to what “was” means. If there is no sense in which that which was is, then it is sheer nothing, and cannot provide the role of such an objective correlative for our judgments. Clearly we do recognize the determinate character of the past. There is no changing what has happened. But it is problematic still, he thinks, to claim that a past event still exists but is in some sense deprived of its character of being present. If an event has changed in becoming past, then what is to prevent it from changing in other ways as well? He says: Surely a past which might change does not supply that anchoring for historical truth we were seeking. Yet an untransformed past cannot have any quality of pastness; it must eternally be a realm of events each as much a fleeting present from its own point of view as is the feeling you have now, and only past as viewed from a perspective belonging to a different time.22

In other words, the referent of all propositions about the past is an object that still is a reality in itself. Now Sprigge argues that if one sees the point about the intrinsic reality of the past, then one must also accept the same holds for all subsequent events to the one recognized as “now”, for one cannot consistently hold that the past is determinate in character without recognizing the same for the future.23 From the perspective of the Absolute, all events are present sub specie aeternitatis, even though from our humble perspective sub specie temporis, it appears that the future is ours to create. Metaphysically, then, time is unreal—or, at the very least, our experience of time as perpetually perishing is an illusion. Nothing perishes from reality. Rather, all events are simply “eternally there” and experienced as present in the Absolute consciousness. Santayana saw that this view of time implied certain consequences for our ordinary sentiments of nostalgia, fear and hope and for our conception of immortality.24 A Stoic or Spinozistic rationalism results from recognizing the metaphysical necessity of the eternal presence of each moment of time. The moment of one’s death in the future, for example, is just as fixed in time as one’s birth in the past, and nothing can alter this fact. But if this realization is disturbing to our common sense notion of free will, there is some consolation in the recognition that one’s life does not pass into nothingness at death. While there is no afterlife conceived as continued postmortem existence, one’s life is eternally preserved in every detail. Sprigge argues that this is not to be understood merely as some kind of cosmic memory in deity, but rather immortality conceived as an actual, eternal presence in the Absolute itself. Consciousness absorbed in the eternal overcomes the ordinary dread of death. Metaphysical monism, pantheism and Absolute Idealism are all terms that equally describe Sprigge’s conclusion that the momentary centers of experience all belong to a single concrete Whole. Although each center feels itself a passing moment in time, it is also qualified by characteristics that it could have only as a component within the Whole. The very intense unity it possesses is the unity of

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what is felt together. Like Bradley and Royce, Sprigge bases his view on a detailed analysis of relations. He argues that all relations are “holistic”, that is, two (or more) terms can only be related in virtue of being united with each other, usually together with other things to constitute a whole that is more of a genuine individual than are any of them singly.25 Following this line of argument to its ultimate end, one arrives at the Absolute—a final Whole that is as concrete as the elements of experience within. Sprigge contends that the experience of the Absolute must be conceived as a kind of frozen specious present. From the point of view of the final Whole, all of the noumenal essences are interdependent in such a way that the whole of time is experienced as happening at once. He says: “the best image of the unitary totality of things is that of a vast symphony which experiences itself in one single specious present of colossal extent and complexity”.26 Spinoza thought that a philosopher who arrived at this point of rapturous unity in all things experienced the “intellectual love of God”. Ordinary dualisms—God and nature, mental and physical, thought and emotion, time and eternity—lose ultimate significance because God and the universe are one. Sprigge’s view is virtually identical with Spinoza’s at this point.

4. Ethics and Animal Rights That Sprigge’s metaphysics is closely associated with an ethics, both theoretical and practical, is fairly clear given his emphasis on sentient experience. A whole chapter is devoted to this topic in The Rational Foundations of Ethics, and, as early as 1979, he was attempting to demonstrate the potential damage to our moral sense from purely physicalistic accounts of mind.27 In so far as any metaphysical construction is taken seriously, the dominant movement is towards materialism or physicalism, but there has not been much of an attempt to relate it to ethics. The unconscious implications, however, deserve close scrutiny, and especially when the results lead to cruel and callous behavior of human beings towards one another and towards animals and nature more generally. Sprigge’s general view on consciousness leads him to take the consciousness of animals to be essentially the same sort of reality as that of humans and he concludes that the practice of vivisection is in principle as objectionable as the similar treatment of human beings would be. Originally, vivisection was understood as dissection on live, unanaesthetized animals, but today the term has wider meaning to cover any sort of seriously painful experiments on conscious laboratory animals. Sprigge thus entirely rejects Descartes’ view that animals do not possess souls or consciousness and that the appearance of pain and suffering in such beings is to be regarded as the behavior of a stimulus-response mechanism. Although modern physicalism is far from dualistic, the result in our way

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of thinking about the world appears to provide a similar justification for vivisection. Sprigge argues that the physicalist or behaviorist provides theoretical backing to the most usual state of mind in which we regard one another merely as objects in the phenomenal world and treat such objects as means to our own ends. In his essay, “Metaphysics, Physicalism, and Animal Rights”, he says: To equate consciousness with processes in the brain or alternatively with functional features or computer-type programmes currently guiding behaviour, or anything at all of that kind, however subtle its description, is necessarily to forget what consciousness is, and to treat it as merely a postulated detail in the world of presentation as extended by theory.28

In his view, such accounts are apt descriptions of our common views of other beings but only in so far as egoism is our common mode of being. This, however, is ultimately an erroneous view of the world because it is a failure to realize the most fundamental truth of others’ reality and the recognition of moral obligation that results from it. Sprigge claims that much of the cruelty in factory farming and laboratory experiments can be traced to this blindness about the reality of animal consciousness. In The Rational Foundations of Ethics, Sprigge advanced a kind of utilitarianism as a guide to conduct. He calls his position “way-of-life utilitarianism”.29 This is understood as a normative ethics in that desirable action is action in the spirit of that way of life that is hedonically the best available for all those engaged in it, or affected by it; and what one is morally obligated to do is that which is part of the goodness of that way of life that one should be blamed for not doing. In accordance with Bentham’s criterion, Sprigge makes a case for the role of pleasure and pain in the determination of value but rejects the problematic “hedonistic calculus”, according to which one could perform a quantitative weighing of pleasures and pains. He also rejects the utilitarian cost/benefit analysis by which certain intrinsically bad actions might turn out to be morally permissible because they promote the interest of the greater number. Intrinsic value is realized by taking the consciousness of others as a reality on a par with our own. Now that we have examined the basic principles of Sprigge’s metaphysics and ethics, there appears to be a problem that he has not addressed. The question that is most troubling for Sprigge’s ethical view is whether one can act in the manner prescribed given the central role of determinationism in his metaphysics. Put concisely, the problem is: how does one get an ought from a can’t? That is, if all moments of time are just eternally there in the Absolute, then how can he suggest that one should change one’s behavior towards one’s fellow human beings and non-human animals for the better? A normative ethics implies freedom to act or forbear, but such freedom is ruled out by determinationism. The idea that human beings are morally blameworthy for their actions would make sense

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only if the Absolute were incomplete or evolving, but Sprigge’s view explicitly denies this. Spinoza, it seems to me, had the same problem. Although it is unclear whether Spinoza was a determinationist, he certainly was a determinist in that he believed that the future is fixed, and that one could not have acted in any other way than he or she did. In Proposition XXIX of his Ethics, he writes: “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way”.30 Human beings, like everything else in nature, are completely necessitated in all that they think and do. We abandon the notion of freedom of choice as our knowledge and understanding of nature increases. This, for Spinoza, is the path to blessedness, but whether one is blessed or not is, of course, entirely determined. If one’s path happens to be set on the life of reason as opposed to following passions and remaining in what Spinoza calls “human bondage”, it is simply a matter of moral luck. One might, for example, be set on the path of rational thought by having stumbled upon the right books, personal contacts or the right genes that produced intellect. But if this is so, one cannot be blamed for failing to achieve the rational and moral life. The idea that one chooses to adopt this life necessarily diminishes as one comes to understand all the causal factors in God/Nature. One might argue that Spinoza was not engaged in a normative ethics and so never intended any sort of view that places blame and praise on human behavior. He should rather be understood as advancing an analytical ethics. In this way, he is understood as articulating the way things are rather than the way things should be. Spinoza then escapes the difficulty of how we get an ought from a can’t simply because there isn’t an ought to be had in his work. As Stuart Hampshire makes the point, “exhortation and appeals to emotion and desire are as useless and as irrelevant in moral as in natural philosophy”.31 Spinoza is not suggesting that one can do anything against fate. A person’s actions follow with absolute necessity from his or her nature in connection with circumstances. All are excused in the sense that moral blame is pointless, but it does not follow that all are blessed. Blessedness or the state of rational, ethical thought that Spinoza equates with the knowledge of the union of mind with the rest of the universe or God will not be available by sheer choice. If it was meant to happen, then it will, but there is nothing one can do about it if it was not meant to be. But Spinoza’s solution to our problem, if indeed it is his actual position, doesn’t appear to be available to Sprigge because he is clearly advancing a normative ethics that takes common notions of moral praise and blame seriously. According to his determinationism, all of my future acts are intrinsically present in themselves and occur at once within the unity of Absolute consciousness. This does not imply that one should be completely passive about making decisions or do things with reckless abandon (these, of course, are decisions that are eternally present as well), for even if determinationism is true, one is bound to

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regard one’s decisions as free at some pragmatic level and live by stubborn common sense. One’s decisions will be as real and efficacious as ever. But if it is not already part of the future, then one cannot act on Sprigge’s exhortation to respect sentient creation or treat human and non-human animals as intrinsically valuable. If I decide not to take the job as a vivisectionist in a biological laboratory or if I become a vegetarian, my actions appear to have no moral worth sub specie aeternitatis. The past and the future look exactly the same. Temporal events are on a par with spatial points, each present in itself. So, telling me what I should do to create a better world in the future is exactly the same as telling me what I should do to create a better world in the past. But since I can’t change anything about the past or the future, the suggestion that I can is empty. Others may value my ethical decisions, but only because their ignorance of metaphysical truth leads them to see the future as genuinely open. They will mistakenly see my decisions as freely chosen and motivated by good principles that I freely adopted. At a deeper level the source of the problem can be traced to Sprigge’s view of holistic relations. Charles Hartshorne has been the most vigorous critic of the assumption of symmetry at the basis of many philosophical problems, particularly, time and relations. He says: “For two thousand years, at least, philosophers have in certain crucial cases proceeded as though symmetry were basic, not oneway connectedness”.32 Typically philosophers have assumed symmetry in claiming all relations are internal or all relations are external. But Hartshorne thinks the true principle that describes the dynamics of process and time is asymmetry. The present is dependent on the past, but the past is not dependent on the present. This means the present is internally related to the past, but the past is externally related to the present. Even thinkers such as Whitehead, James and Bergson who emphasize the asymmetrical case or one-way connectedness as basic often fall into a language that implies interdependence or symmetry. Sprigge defines a holistic relation as “one the holding of which between existences is a matter of their jointly forming, or along with other existences helping to form, a more comprehensive existence in which they are each components, and to the over-all character of which each makes a distinctive contribution”.33 He does not merely assume symmetry; rather it is an essential part of the view of holistic relations he advances. This does not mean, however, that Sprigge thinks time’s arrow is an illusion or merely a subjective phenomenon and not a real feature of the universe. He finds the process view objectionable on the basis that he can make no sense of a later experience containing an earlier one as opposed to echoing it, yet he concedes the point that our experience of direction in time and causal influence is real. Time’s arrow is explained by the fact that while “things are affected to different degrees by a whole to which they belong, it is not ruled out that the strength of the holisticness be greater at one end than the other, so that the one term indicates their togetherness much more fully than the

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other”.34 But from the perspective of eternity, the symmetrical case appears basic because ultimately all moments of time are present at once. What we experience as the process of one moment flowing into another is, for him, really the shifting of already determinate events, each with a feeling of transitoriness but eternally present. For philosophers who embrace the asymmetrical principle, what we experience as the becoming of events, direction in time and causal influence is a fundamental aspect of reality. This is typically what is meant by “taking time seriously” rather than explaining it away. This principle is the basis of a metaphysical view that recognizes a future open to our present free choices and, in accordance with Kant, provides for genuine autonomy necessary for moral responsibility. While Sprigge’s ethics can be judged independent of his metaphysics, he is most interested to challenge those philosophers who advocate the dissociation of ethics from metaphysics. He says, for example, “How is it best that we, or how ought we, to act in the world?, lies as much in deciding what we really are, what action really is, and what the world really is as in deciding what ought and best are. Even these last problems have a metaphysical dimension, but the first simply are metaphysical problems”.35 The crucial concept that connects metaphysics and ethics is empathy; for the realization of value and aspiration in other forms of consciousness creates the foundation of moral obligation. Sprigge, of course, has in mind panpsychism as the remedy to bad metaphysical foundations for ethics and not the problem of free will and determinism.

5. Conclusion Sprigge’s philosophical idealism presents a novel system that synthesizes some of the great ideas of the past yet addresses pressing issues of the present such as the nature of consciousness, animal rights and environmental ethics. The ontology of experience owes much to James, Bradley, Schopenhauer and Whitehead; his view on time he learned from Santayana and, to a lesser degree, McTaggart; the central core of his ethics was formulated from Bentham; and the monistic view of the Absolute as the final unity of experience brings together aspects of Bradley, Royce and Spinoza. Not surprisingly Sprigge has had a mixed reception from his British contemporaries, but his views have won him much more attention from philosophers who have identified their thinking with a more pluralistic and unorthodox vein, especially among followers of the classic American philosophers in the United States. Moreover, some nowwidespread ideas on such matters as counterfactuals, universals and consciousness originated in his Facts, Words and Beliefs and some of his other early works.

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The metaphysical foundation of Sprigge’s ethics appears to be well grounded with regard to his panpsychism and the rejection of any purely physicalist or materialist view of the universe. This plays a pivotal role in the final chapter of The Rational Foundations of Ethics.36 The understanding of consciousness manifest throughout the universe involves us in a moral sensitivity well beyond the imperatives of traditional, anthropocentric ethics. His eternalistic view of time, however, presents a problem with regard to the ability of moral agents to act on the obligations they have to sentient creation. This, I have argued, is a perplexing problem for both Spinoza and Sprigge.

Notes 1. This essay was published in Bradley Studies, 9. 2, 2003, pp. 109-125; it developed from a biographical essay, “Timothy L. S. Sprigge”, that originally appeared in British Philosophers: 1800-2000, Vol. 262, in the series Dictionary of Literary Biography, eds. P. B. Dematteis, P. S. Fosl and L. B. McHenry (Detroit and London: Gale, 2002), pp. 266-274. It is reprinted for this volume with permission by the editors of Bradley Studies. 2. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), p. vii. 3. G. Stock, “Review of Sprigge’s James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality”, Philosophical Quarterly, 45. 181, 1995, p. 537. 4. Sprigge, Facts, Words and Beliefs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 5. Sprigge, Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). 6. Sprigge, “Consciousness”, in The Ontological Turn, eds. M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974), p. 116. 7. Sprigge, “The Privacy of Experience”, Mind, 78, 1969, pp. 512-521, and “Consciousness”, op. cit., pp. 114-147. 8. In this connection, see esp. P. Yourgrau, The Disappearance of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. ix. 10. Sprigge, “The Importance of Subjectivity: An Inaugural Lecture”, Inquiry, 24, 1981, pp. 143-163. Also see “Absolute Idealism”, Philosophical Writings, 2, 1996, esp. pp. 82-86. 11. Sprigge, “The World of Description and the World of Acquaintance”, in Beyond Conflict and Reduction: Between Philosophy, Science and Religion, eds. W. Desmond, J. Steffen and K. Decoster (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), p. 23. 12. Sprigge, “Final Causes”, Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XLV, 1971, pp. 149-170; T. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, Philosophical Review, 83, 1974, pp. 435-450. 13. Sprigge, “The Distinctiveness of American Philosophy”, in Two Centuries of Philosophy in America, ed. P. Caws (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 205.

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14. Ibid., p. 202. Also see W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912) and A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929). 15. J. Royce, The World and the Individual, second series (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 240. 16. Something of this sort has been worked out in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. See Process and Reality, op. cit., Part II, Chaps. III and IV. Biologists such as C. H. Waddington, W. E. Agar, S. Wright and more recently, C. Birch, have also attempted to work out the details of a panpsychist conception of organism. 17. Quine’s remark is made in connection with his exposition of J. J. C. Smart’s scientific realism; Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 93. 18. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I. (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 148. 19. D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), see esp. pp. 297-299. 20. See Sprigge, “Ideal Immortality”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 20, 1972, pp. 219-235; “The Unreality of Time”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XCII, 1991-92, pp. 1-19; Vindication, op. cit., pp. 30-33, 225-232; James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993), pp. 458-500; Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 176-187. 21. G. Santayana, The Realm of Matter (New York: Scribner’s, 1930) and The Realm of Truth (New York: Scribner’s, 1937). 22. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 31. 23. I have argued against Sprigge’s view in my Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 144-153. Cf. my “The Ontology of the Past: Whitehead and Santayana”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 14. 3, 2000, pp. 226-229. Sprigge replies to me in James and Bradley, op. cit., pp. 481-482n. 24. G. Santayana, The Life of Reason (New York: Scribner’s, 1933), Part III, Chaps. 13 and 14. 25. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., pp. 187-224 and “Bradley’s Doctrine of the Absolute”, in Appearance versus Reality: New Essays on Bradley’s Metaphysics, ed. G. Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 117-134. 26. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 253. 27. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), Part II, Chap. X; “Metaphysics, Physicalism and Animal Rights”, Inquiry, 20, 1977, pp. 101-143; “Vivisection, Morals, Medicine: Commentary from an Anti-Vivisectionist Philosopher”, Journal of Medical Ethics, 9, 1982, pp. 98-101. 28. Sprigge, “Metaphysics, Physicalism, and Animal Rights”, op. cit., p. 115. 29. Sprigge, “Is the esse of intrinsic value percipi?: pleasure, pain and value”, Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 47, 2000, p. 134. 30. Spinoza, Ethics, Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, ed. and tr. E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 433. 31. S. Hampshire, Spinoza (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1962), p. 121.

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32. C. Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), p. 211. 33. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 187. 34. Ibid., p. 241. 35. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, op. cit., p. 247. 36. Ibid., Part II, Chap. X, “Ethics and Metaphysics”, pp. 247-271.

Timothy Sprigge: The Grinch that Stole Time Richard M. Gale

I cannot read Timothy Sprigge without hearing, as a kind of background Muzak, Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It My Way”. For if ever a philosopher did it his way, it is Sprigge. He does philosophy like someone who has just arrived in a time machine from Cambridge of the 1890s. It takes considerable courage and conviction to do philosophy in a manner that is totally out of whack with the fashionable, almost official, Oxbridge way of doing it, so strong is the pressure on academic philosophers to conform. This conformism is the very antithesis of philosophy, which should be an honest, first-personal attempt to make sense of things. I salute Sprigge as a true philosopher who has significantly enriched the present state of philosophy by his courageous odd-ballism. His writings have been a source of enlightenment and stimulation for all of us, especially myself. The topic of this essay is Sprigge’s argument for the unreality of time.1 That time is unreal means that nothing is earlier or later than anything else nor is anything past, present, or future. In arguing for this negative conclusion, Sprigge also attempts to prove that every event is “eternally present” in the sense of being present without ever being past or future. This noncontrastive sense of “present” is the mystical one, the sense in which God exists within an eternal present or now. To avoid confusion this eternal present sense of “eternity” must be distinguished from two other prevalent senses. There is the sense of not being subject to any temporal determinations or distinctions, as are Platonic forms for example. Sprigge makes it clear that he is not concerned with this temporal indifference sense when he writes that “we are not concerned with the eternal being possessed by abstractions”.2 And, third, there is the sense of omnitemporality, enduring throughout a time that is infinitely extended in the past and future, such as is enjoyed by the Biblical God. Sprigge’s argument is a priori, being based solely on an analysis of the concept of truth, in particular, propositions about the past. If successful, it shows not just that time is unreal but that it is necessary that time is unreal. Since the conclusion of his argument is that it is impossible in the broadly logical or conceptual sense that anything is in time, it cannot contain any contingent premise, such as that there is a relativity of simultaneity due to the finite velocity of signals. He presents his argument in a rambling, dialectical manner, arguing for each premise and responding to objections to it as he proceeds. It takes some digging to give an explicit formulation of his argument, especially since his two

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summaries of it3 are too summary, omitting crucial premises. The following is an attempt at an explicit formulation: Sprigge’s Argument (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Past and present events are determinate (premise) Past and present events are eternally present (from 1) Future events are like past and present events (premise) Future events are eternally present (from 3) Past, present, and future events are eternally present (from 2 and 4) Time is unreal (from 5)

Sprigge gives arguments for premises 1 and 3, as well as for the claim that step 2 follows from 1. Each will now be considered. The Argument for Premise 1—Before presenting this argument an account must be given of what it is for an event to be determinate. The account begins with the law of excluded middle or bivalence. The former holds that for every proposition, p, either p or not-p, the latter that for every proposition, p, either p is true or p is false. The law of bivalence can be deduced from that of excluded middle if use is made of this quite plausible additional premise, that for every proposition, p, if p then it is true that p. That an event is determinate means that every proposition that reports its occurrence obeys the law of excluded middle or bivalence.4 Sprigge argues convincingly that an event can be determinate without being causally determined no less fated. Sprigge assumes without argument that everyone would grant that present events are determinate. Herein he shows an insensitivity to the reasons why philosophers of a warranted assertibility persuasion, such as Dewey and Dummett, do not accept bivalence, namely, they want their ontology to keep pace with their epistemology. Being committed empiricists, they refuse to countenance an empirically vacuous correspondence or truth relation between propositions and their worldly truth-makers. Thus, they would deny that propositions about past and future events that are beyond the possibility of being confirmed or verified have a truth-value. But the same considerations would hold for propositions about spatially remote present events that defy confirmation. Their warranted assertibility analyses of truth are revisionary but supposedly are well motivated and justified by their empiricism. Thus, they are not crushed by the fact that their analyses depart from common sense or ordinary language. Sprigge’s argument for the determinateness of past events employs a thoughtexperiment in which a person has a certain experience just before dying that no one else is ever privy to. It seems intuitively obvious, he claims, that it is forever true that this person had this experience, even though there is no way to find out that this is true. This shows that past events are determinate, even when they are

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beyond the possibility of any person subsequently knowing about them. I happen to share Sprigge’s gut intuition. The Argument that Step 2 Follows from 1—This argument assumes panexperientialism—that everything is an experience—and attempts to show that the truth-conditions for propositions about the past entail that past events are eternally present.5 A proposition’s truth-condition is its worldly correspondent, that which makes it true. The worldly truth-maker for a proposition, p, cannot be the fact that p. For, if this were so, p’s truth-maker would be itself, given that p is logically equivalent to that it is true that p, which, in turn, is logically equivalent to that it is a fact that p. The worldly correspondent for a proposition that reports an event, say that S is F, will be the event of S’s being F or S’s Fing, which is something locatable in time and/or space. Given the assumption of panexperientialism, this past event will be an experience that has presentness or vivacity when it happens, and that it has presentness is one of its essential properties. “It is of the essence of an experience to be vividly present as an element in some consciousness”.6 Since being present is an essential property of this event, it cannot serve as the truth-maker unless it has this property. And thus it has presentness right now and thus isn’t really past. It thereby is eternally present, given that it is present and cannot become past nor have been future. There is an equivocation on “present”, but that’s for later, since I do not want to break the flow of my exposition of Sprigge’s overall argument. The Argument for Premise 3—This is an argument for future events being determinate in just the way that past and present events are. The argument to show that 2 follows from premise 1 claimed that the only way in which the past can be “is as something which is, from its own point of view, present, from which it follows that we now are the future of something which is in itself as present as we are now. So we are as genuinely future as anything can be, namely the future of something intrinsically present, from which it follows that our future is just as determinate as our present”.7 This argument equivocates on “future”, using it nonindexically in the premises and indexically in the conclusion. An indexical use of “is now future (past, present)” denotes the time at which the token occurs. The premises speak of what is the “future of something”, which is synonymous with what is “future at something” or “later than something”. That the phrases “is future at” and “is the future of” are nonindexical is borne out by the fact that a sentence containing them is freely repeatable in time in that successive tokenings of the sentence, assuming that it is used with the same meaning or according to the same rules of use on each occasion, could not express propositions that differ in truth-value. If the use at some time of the sentence “Event E is future at (of) E1” expresses a true proposition, its use at any time does. Not so for a sentence containing “our

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future”. It is possible to truly token the sentence, “A 50th wedding anniversary is in our future”, but falsely token it at a later time.8 Fortunately, Sprigge’s spurious argument for premise 3 is an act of supererogation, for that time is unreal follows from 2 alone. That past and present events are eternally present entails that there is no time prior to the future, but this is impossible since the future must be the future of some prior time. If one is not convinced by this demonstration and thinks that an argument must be given for 3, Sprigge could have given one that is based on the same realist intuition that he appealed to in his thought-experiment argument for 1. Imagine that you now have some experience. Wasn’t it always true that you would have this experience at this time, just as it always will be true that you did, as the argument for premise 1 contended? The reason why Sprigge did not give this straightforward, intuitively-based argument for 3 is that he forgot about his well-founded argument for the possibility of an event being determinate without being causally determined, no less fated. He claimed that the application of the law of excluded middle or bivalence to future events precluded our being free with respect to them. “It is not surprising that we are reluctant to think of the future as determinate, for we can hardly help thinking of it as indeterminate while we are wondering how to act, and are in the process of settling what the future will be”.9 What Sprigge failed to see is that our reluctance is based on confounding being determinate with being causally determined. For “settling” is a causal term, and the prior truth that some event will occur does not settle the matter with respect to this event: it only logically entails that it will occur. It is now time for the decisive objection to Sprigge’s argument, the one that accuses him of equivocating on “present” in his argument to show that step 2 follows from premise 1. The first premise in the argument is that “it is the essence of an experience (a toothache, for example) to be vividly present as an element in some consciousness, and that an event which lost this quality of presentness would not be an experience”.10 From this Sprigge deduces that this experience is a “present reality… I conclude that the toothache can only be there as a part of reality if, somehow from its own point of view, of that of the consciousness which contains it, it is still there as a present reality”.11 It now will be argued that “present” is used indexically in the conclusion but nonindexically in the premise, thereby establishing that Sprigge’s argument fails through equivocation. The conclusion—that the toothache is a present reality—is expressed by a sentence that is not freely repeatable in time, since the toothache in question could occur at one time but not another, thus showing the “present” is used indexically. Sprigge might think that his “from its own point of view” qualification renders “present” nonindexical, since it expresses the point of view of the toothache experience. But, as Hector Castenada has so ably shown, an indexical word that is used, not mentioned, in a sentence, even when occurring

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within an oratio oblique construction, always takes the widest scope, being expressive of the indexical perspective of the user of the entire sentence. Thus, when I use the sentence, “Jones said that I am up to bat”, the use of “I” does not refer to Jones but to me, the user of the sentence. Sprigge does not seem to appreciate this point; for, if he did, he would not have made the blatantly false claim that “it is of the essence [of every experience] to experience itself as something which is occurring here and now”;12 for this makes the obviously false claim that every experience experiences itself as occurring here, at this very place, and now, at this very time, given that “here” and “now” in the quoted sentence takes the widest scope, being expressive of the speaker’s own indexical perspectives. This failure to see that indexical terms take the widest scope is only one of several confusions about indexical terms that infect Sprigge’s treatment of time. Another example is his claim that “there is a definite truth about the past requires that it still be true that the past in some sense is. The sense of ‘be’ or ‘is’ must be a timeless sense, since certainly the past is not there at the time I ‘now’ call now”.13 Sprigge mistakenly places mentioning quotes around the penultimate rather than the final tokening of “now”, for it is only the final token that gets mentioned, given that a word that is called is mentioned and thus should be placed within inverted commas. Another example of confusion about indexicality concerns his account of token-reflexive words. He considers the token-reflexive analysis of “now”, according to which the sentence, “Thank goodness that experience is now over”, means “Thank goodness that experience eternally belongs to a time before this utterance”, and claims that the latter, “if true, were always or equally true”, failing to realize that the latter sentence, because it contains the token reflexive phrase, “this utterance”, no two successive tokenings of which refer to the same token of “this utterance”, is not freely repeatable.14 He is right to charge this analysis with being absurd but gave the wrong reason. It is not because it is always true—it isn’t—but rather because it wrongly introduces a reference to the token produced by the speaker. The speaker is happy that the painful experience is past, not that it is earlier than the token he produces on that occasion, for he would be happy about its being past even if he were not to have produced a token on that occasion. It remains to be shown that “present” and its cognates are used nonindexically in the premise of Sprigge’s argument. Sprigge’s claim that a past experience “feels present to itself” and is “present from its own point of view” makes it appear as if being present is a phenomenological quality, namely that of vivacity, liveliness, self-consciousness, or presentedness.15 This interpretation finds support in his characterization of presentness as “the throbbing presentness of an actual experience” and an experience being “vividly present as an element in some consciousness”.16 This phenomenological quality involves self-

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consciousness, being aware of what one experiences. An experience can have this quality of presentedness without being temporally present in the indexical sense of “present”. A painful experience, for example, can have this phenomenological quality and yet be past. Because of this shift from the phenomenological sense of “present” in the premise to the indexical sense in the conclusion, his argument fails through equivocation. It will be recalled that Sprigge’s argument assumed panexperientialism. Sprigge realizes that this is a highly controversial assumption and claims, after he has presented his argument, that it works equally well without this assumption, that even unexperienced events can be shown to be eternally present. “But essentially the same point would apply to unexperienced events, even if its application to them is less easy to state”.17 The reason it is less easy to state is that his equivocal use of “present” cannot even get formulated!! Sprigge shrewdly refrains from attempting to show how his argument can apply to such events. One dramatic difference between the phenomenological and indexical sense of “present” concerns their essentiality. Sprigge repeatedly asserts that being present is an essential property of every event, a property in the absence of which the event doesn’t exist or happen. It will be argued that being indexically present is a trivial essential property of every event in the way in which being existent is a trivial essential property of every object but that being phenomenologically present is not essential to events that have it. It is a triviality that an object that ceases to have the property of existing ceases to exist, and thus its having existence is an essential property of it. But it is equally trivially true that an event that is happening now, at present, ceases to be happening when it becomes past. But can an event that has the phenomenological property of presentness go on happening after it loses this quality? It would seem, and I use this qualification advisedly for reasons that soon will emerge, that it can. I am taking my usual four mile morning walk. For the first quarter mile my walking has vivacity, liveliness, presentedness due to the fact that it is causing me pain: I had pulled a muscle the previous day. Subsequently, my walking ceases to have this phenomenological quality because my muscle loosens up, but the walking event does not thereby cease to happen. I continue to walk intentionally even though my walking has lost the property of presentedness in that I can answer the questions “What are you doing?” and “Why are you doing it?”. The reason for my “seem” qualification is that, with the exception of trivial tautological cases, such as the above, we do not have any hold over the essential properties of events whereas we do have for enduring objects, at least those that are natural kinds. The problem is that we do not have any basis for distinguishing between the phasal and nonphasal, that is, nonessential and essential, properties of events. A phasal property of an event is one that it could lose and still go on happening or occurring. Are being a dinner party, a dance, a crap

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game, an orgy phasal or nonphasal properties? At first blush you might be inclined to say that they are nonphasal or essential. For doesn’t a dinner party, etc. that ceases to be a dinner party cease to go on happening once it ceases to be a dinner party? It all depends upon how you choose to sortally characterize the event in question. You can always find a higher-order, more inclusive sortal under which these properties are phasal. Consider the party in Lil’s apartment. It begins as a dinner party and then turns into a dance, a crap game and finally an orgy. The event that initially is a dinner party, namely the party in Lil’s apartment, goes on happening after it ceases to be a dinner party, etc. In contrast with events, the distinction between phasal and nonphasal properties does have a clear-cut, agreed upon application to objects of a natural kind, such as biological species. (Yes, there are “unnatural acts”, but they are not the event analogue to natural kinds.) Herein we think that there is a fact of the matter, to be discovered through scientific inquiry, as to which properties of natural kinds are only phasal, such as being a teenager is for human beings. These natural kinds cannot include or be a proper part of another individual of the same kind. (A doggy door is not a counter-example, since a door is an artifact.) In contrast an event can have another event of the same sort as a proper part. There could be a race between ten boats, but it could include another boat race as a proper part if two of the boats in the race should have a private wager as to which one will finish before the other. There is another strategy for attacking Sprigge’s argument that charges it with being logically inconsistent because its conclusion entails that some of its premises are false. Sprigge holds that the law of bivalence applies to propositions about the past and thus there are true propositions about the past. He then argues that only a past event can serve as the truth-condition or truth-maker for a true proposition about the past. He rightly rejects, in the name of common sense, the accounts of the classical American pragmatists and some of the logical positivists for making this truth-condition consist in the present and/or future events by which we indirectly verify the proposition. But the conclusion of Sprigge’s argument, that time is unreal, entails that there are no past events and, therefore, no truth-conditions for propositions about the past, pace what he insists upon in the premises of his argument. It should not surprise us that someone who appeals to what is vouchsafed by common sense will run into trouble in mounting an argument for the unreality of time, for the belief in the reality of time is as deeply entrenched in our common sense network of beliefs as any proposition could be. It is this entrenchment that underlies G. E. Moore’s rebuttal of any argument for the unreality of time—that I am more certain that time is real than I am about the premises in your argument for its unreality. There are hints in the text that Sprigge has additional arguments for the unreality of time, and I would rather find an argument in the text that isn’t there than miss one that is. One of these arguments for the unreality of time is not based on

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an argument for all events being eternally present but for all events being eternal in the temporal indifference sense. Sprigge remarks that the past events which must be so that propositions can have truth-makers “can only be, so far as I can see, the eternal being possessed by reality as a whole… [They] eternally belong to a whole which contains all times without itself being in time”.18 Reality as a whole seems to be the temporal series of events, running from earlier to later, that is comprised of all events, the so-called “B-series”. He claims that philosophers who hold that time consists only in a B-series are committed to a “position [that] is essentially an eternalist one”.19 The following argument is suggested by these remarks. The B-series is eternal in the temporal indifference sense, since it cannot be said to endure, stand in a temporal relation, or be temporally locatable. The member events of the B-series enjoy the same sort of existence as does the B-series. Therefore, all events are eternal in the temporal indifference sense. One’s immediate reaction to this whole-part argument is to charge it with committing the fallacy of division. This dismissal might be too quick, since sometimes inferences from whole to part are okay, for example, if a whole is spatially (temporally) locatable then so is each of its parts. Why shouldn’t the inference work equally well for not being spatially (temporally) locatable? But there is a good reason to think that the inference from the B-series to one of its event parts or members is illegitimate. The B-series, in virtue of containing all times and changes, cannot itself be in time or change without generating a vicious infinite regress of higher-order temporal series. But its member events are in time, thereby showing the absurdity of attempting to infer that they are not from the fact that the B-series of which they are parts is not in time. There is another argument for the timeless being of events that is hinted at in the text. This argument also is based on the past being determinate and thus there being true propositions about the past. That there is a truth about the past does not mean “merely that there was one. But what is the force of this is?… But whatever the temporal status of the is in ‘There is a definite truth about the past’, surely the past must be in a sense with the same temporal status”.20 This argument assumes that there is an agreement in tense between the copula in the truth-ascription and the tense of the proposition that truth is ascribed to. But this is patently false. Consider this ascription of truth to a proposition that reports a past event: “It is true that event E occurred”. It is clear that the tense of the proposition that E occurred is past tense and the tense of “It is true” is not. Another type of counter-example to this agreement-in-tense assumption involves quasi-indicators, for example that it was true that Jones is running. Whereas the truth-ascribing copula is in the past tense, the “is” copula in the enscribed sentence makes an anaphoric reference within the scope of the “It was true” operator, meaning “is then”. The perspicuous rendering of this truthascribing proposition is: it was true at some past time, that Jones is then (at that time) running. Yet another type of counter-example to Sprigge’s assumption is

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that it is timelessly true that S is F at t1. Because the truth-ascribing “is” is in the timeless present tense, it does not follow that S is timelessly F at t1. The eternality of truth does not require the eternal existence of its truth-maker. Thus, a tenseless proposition reporting an event’s position in the B-series can be timelessly true, that is, freely repeatable, without the reported event having a timeless existence. Sprigge has yet another argument for the unreality of time, which is suggested by his claim that “Our argument, on behalf of Bradley, against the reality of time has essentially been an argument for the unreality of the A-series”.21 This argument for the unreality of time has the same overall structure as McTaggart’s. (1) The A-series of events running from the past through the present to the future is essential to the reality of time (premise) (2) The A-series is unreal (premise) (3) Time is unreal (from 1 and 2) For each premise there is an argument. Premise 1 has been denied by a host of prominent philosophers, among whom are Russell, Santayana, Williams, Grünbaum, Smart, Goodman, and Quine, and thus stands in need of argumentative support. Sprigge’s argument for 1 is based on the alleged definitional reducibility of the B-series to the A-series. In apparent agreement with McTaggart, Sprigge claims that “the earlier-later relation [which is the generating relation of the B-series] if it is to be a genuinely temporal relation, must be defined by way of the predicates of the A-series, not conversely. ‘Event A is earlier than event B’ means ‘A is past when B is present’”.22 Again, we find Sprigge confounding indexical with nonindexical uses of “past” and “future”. That the sentence in the definiens of this definition is freely repeatable shows that the occurrence of “is past when” and “is present” are used nonindexically. The reason why a definitional reduction of the B-series to the A-series must employ temporal indexical expressions is that the A-series is determined by the indexical phrases “is now past”, “is now present”, and “is now future”; and, since there are degrees of pastness and presentness there is a need to use as well “is now more past than” and “is more future than”. The following gives this needed reduction of the generating relation of the B-series, “earlier than”, to these five indexical determiners of the A-series: R. Event X is (tenselessly) earlier than event Y if and only if either (X is now past and Y is now present) or (X is now past and Y is now future) or (X is now present and Y is now future) or X is now more past than Y or Y is now more future than X.

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It might be objected that the definiens, what is on the right side of the “if and only if”, illicitly smuggles in a nonindexical temporal expression, since that X is now more past than Y is to be analyzed as X and Y are both now past and X is (tenselessly) earlier than Y, and likewise mutatis mutandis for that Y is more future than X. But even if this objection to R as a reductive definition succeeds, R still shows that there cannot be a B-series unless there is an A-series since what is to the left of “if and only if” entails what is to the right. And this is all that is required to establish premise 1. We have already criticized Sprigge’s truth-condition based argument for premise 2, but he seems to have another one that is a close cousin of McTaggart’s subsidiary argument for the unreality of the A-series. This argument, in contrast with McTaggart’s main argument, the one that attempts to deduce a contradiction from the fact that every member of the A-series has pastness, presentness, and futurity, only attempts to show that any purported analysis of temporal becoming—the change of members of the A-series with respect to their indexical A-determinations—winds up in absurdity. He considers one such analysis according to which events in the A-series change with respect to their being past, present, or future in relation to some transcendent entity X that mysteriously shifts along the A-series. But what is this entity X and what sort of a changing relation does it have to events in the A-series? Supposedly, there are no answers to these questions. And that should make us suspicious of the reality of the A-series. Some friends of temporal becoming would have this transcendent entity X be the present or now. This account of temporal becoming can be quickly reduced to absurdity. Indexical terms, such as “the present” and “now”, are rigid designators in that the proposition that now (the present) might not be now (the present) is necessarily false. In other words, we cannot tell any counter-factual story in which now, this very moment, is not identical with itself. But if the present or now shifts from one time in the A-series to a later one, then now will cease to be now. This violates the necessity of identity propositions that have rigid designators flanking “is identical with”. The analysis of temporal becoming that Sprigge attempts to discredit, and it is the only one, is that of C. D. Broad in his Scientific Thought. According to this analysis, There is no such thing as ceasing to exist; what has become exists for ever. When we say that something has ceased to exist we only mean that it has ceased to be present… Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world.23

This analysis of becoming is one of the all-time philosophical abortions. If nothing has happened to a present event by becoming past, since it continues to exist, it hasn’t become past! Furthermore, what is the relation that a formerly present

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event has to one of these fresh slices of existence that have been added to existence? It cannot be that of being earlier than since that would entail that the former does not exist or happen when the latter does. This is because if X is earlier than Y, then X does not exist or happen when Y does. Nor can the relation be a spatial one; for this would result in a spatialized account of becoming, making it a line that grows longer. This generates a vicious infinite regress of higherorder times since there must be a second-order time in which this growing longer occurs. Again, we are left with a mysterious, troubling relation that we can make no sense of. Surprisingly, Sprigge’s objections to Broad’s account of temporal becoming are rather mild. In opposing Charles Hartshorne’s experientialist version of Broad’s account, Sprigge writes: As an attempt to analyse time it seems to beg the question. First, an experience occurs as part of no larger totality. Then, it becomes part of a larger totality, and then of a still larger one as the one becomes part of a larger one in turn. If we do not rely on the independent intelligibility of the “first” and the “then” we can make no sense of this. But perhaps we are not supposed to get our whole understanding of time from this notion of inclusion, only to recognize that this is what happens in time. But surely that shows that the concept of the past is not explicated.24

Herein Sprigge is not charging the Broad account with being conceptually incoherent, as did the above objection, but only with failing to succeed as an “analysis” or “explication” of the concept of time due to the employment of temporal concepts in its analysans. But that Broad’s account fails to be an adequate analysis of time, due to vicious circularity, is not alone sufficient to support premise 2—that the A-series is unreal. It is not sufficient for two reasons. First, the vicious circularity that infects Broad’s analysis of time infects every analysis or definition of time. This does not show the conceptual absurdity of the concept of time, only its fundamentality. There are many concepts that have this kind of fundamentality in the order of analysis, such as simple, unanalyzable sensible qualities. Does Sprigge want to charge them, say the concept of yellow, with being conceptually absurd and therefore necessarily going without instantiation? Second, it is a wildly hasty generalization to infer from the conceptual absurdity of one account of temporal becoming that every account is and thus that the A-series is unreal. One possible account of temporal becoming that escapes Sprigge’s notice, which fits with the view that time is too fundamental to admit of definition or analysis, is that temporal becoming is sui generis and cannot be analyzed, only experienced. In fact, this is the very view that Broad subsequently embraced in his most mature treatment of time, which is in his book, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy. One who accepts the primitiveness of

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the A-series and the indexical concepts of past, present, and future that partially determine it will answer Sprigge’s demand to produce the truth-condition for a proposition about the past by saying that it is the-reported-event-being-past that plays this role. At one place Sprigge considers this response and replies that “Say by all means that it is sufficient that it [the past event that is the truthmaker for the proposition that reports it as past] was something. The problem remains what ‘was’ means. If there is no sense in which that which was is, then it is sheer nothing, and cannot provide the role of such an objective correlative [truth-maker]”.25 But if one takes “past” and other temporal indexical terms as primitive, there is no remaining problem of what “was” means, for there is nothing that can be further analyzed. This completes my critique of Sprigge’s several arguments for the unreality of time. It will be noticed that my objections were based primarily on Sprigge making an illegitimate use of ordinary temporal indexical words, especially his equivocating on “past”, “present”, and “future”. Sprigge says things that indicate that he would not be crushed by this departure for ordinary usage. For he writes that “what has been presented here is, not an analysis of the ordinary meanings of ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’, but an account of the real status of the realities to which these predicates are applied”.26 Another example of this cavalier attitude to ordinary language is his concluding remark that “the whole question of the nature of time, of the status of past, present, and future, is one of the most difficult in metaphysics, one which philosophers hardly come in sight of who expect to deal with it at the level of mere analysis of temporal language”.27 There is certainly this much truth in Sprigge’s belittling of the legislativeness of ordinary language. How we ordinarily use a word “X” is a conversation opener, not a conversation ender, with respect to determining what X really is. For we can have good reasons for revising ordinary language. For example, it might have commitments that do not square with contemporary science or it turns out upon further analysis to contain absurdities. There also could be moral reasons, such as Nietzsche had, for his revising our ordinary ways of speaking about morality. But appeal to ordinary language is essential in this respect: We must initially locate the concept that we are discussing, but this can be accomplished only locating some word in our language and indicating some of the salient features of its ordinary usage. Thus, if Sprigge is going to give us a metaphysical account of the true nature of time, of the past, present, and future, he must begin by looking at how we use temporal language. If his metaphysical account of the concept of presentness is to have any relevance, it must successfully locate some temporal expression in our language, namely “present”, that expresses this concept. And he can successfully locate this word only if what he tells us about its use squares with our ordinary, accepted ways of using it. If he were to tell us that “present” is used to refer to an ocean, his metaphysical analysis of presentness would have no relevance to what we mean or ought to mean

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by “present”. It has been my contention throughout this paper that what Sprigge tells us about “present” and other temporal expressions fails to square with how we ordinarily use them and thus his metaphysical analysis of them has no relevance to what we mean or ought to mean by them.

Notes 1. He presents this argument in several publications, the most recent of which is in his monumental book, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993). I shall also avail myself of his presentation in “Hartshorne and the Past”, in The Philosophy of Hartshorne, ed. L. Hahn (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991). Also to be consulted are his “The Unreality of Time”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1991-1992, and Santayana: An Examination of His Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). 2. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 489. 3. Ibid., pp. 492 and 493. 4. I differ from Sprigge in taking propositions to be the bearer of truth-values whereas he takes judgments to be. “In saying that there is a definite truth about something I shall mean that various possible acts of judgement or thought would be true if made” (ibid., p. 482). I don’t see the point of introducing judgments, especially since there are many propositions that would not be a suitable accusative for an act of judgment. I would be in pretty bad shape if I judged that I have a wife and three children, for one judges only when there is a need for calculation or estimation. Furthermore, introducing possible judgments as the bearers of truthvalues does not avoid commitment to abstract propositions; for that it would be true to judge that p entails p. 5. It is necessary that Sprigge restrict propositions about the past to those that do not make any demands on what does or does not occur in the present or future, such as that yesterday Jones began the first day of a three day dance or that yesterday Jones danced the last waltz ever danced. 6. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 488. 7. Sprigge, “Hartshorne and the Past”, op. cit., p. 403; my italics. 8. For a full account of all the gory details concerning indexical sentences see my The Language of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968). 9. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 402; my italics. 10. Ibid., p. 488; my italics. 11. Ibid.; my italics. 12. Sprigge, “Hartshorne and the Past”, op. cit., p. 404; my italics. 13. Ibid.; my italics. 14. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 491. 15. Ibid., p. 489.

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40 16. Ibid., p. 488; my italics. 17. Ibid., p. 490. 18. Ibid., p. 489; my italics. 19. Ibid., p. 498.

20. Sprigge, “Hartshorne and the Past”, op. cit., pp. 402-403; Sprigge’s italics. 21. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 498. 22. Ibid., p. 499. 23. Ibid., pp. 494-495. 24. Sprigge, “Hartshorne and the Past”, op. cit., p. 414. 25. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 488; Sprigge’s italics. 26. Ibid., p. 491. 27. Sprigge, “Hartshorne and the Past”, op. cit., p. 414.

Timothy Sprigge and Panpsychism Geoffrey Madell

1. Introduction I begin with some points on which I am sure Timothy Sprigge and myself agree. The first is that no version of materialism or physicalism can possibly succeed, whether reductive or non-reductive. I don’t think it is necessary to rehearse the arguments for this conclusion, which seem to both of us to be overwhelming.1 The second point of agreement is that substance dualism also faces major problems, problems which for many people also rule it out as a solution to the mind-body problem. One major problem is the posited causal interaction between the mental and the physical. For, even if one takes a Humean view of the nature of causation, dualism is forced to posit connections between mind and body which seem to be utterly miraculous. That mind should appear at a certain stage in the course of evolution is quite inexplicable, though everything that had happened until that stage is explicable by reference to the laws of the physical sciences. That consciousness should appear at a certain stage in the development of the embryo is again something utterly inexplicable by reference to the physical processes which have taken place in the embryo prior to that point. And that this magical connection between the material and the immaterial should occur in the brain and in the brain only is again something utterly mysterious. Even if one presses a Humean conception of causality, and insists that ultimately what causes what is a brute ultimately inexplicable fact, the causal connections which the dualist has to posit still seem utterly bizarre. For a number of reasons I am less favourably disposed to what is normally taken to be a Humean conception of causality than I used to be, but even the most full-blooded Humean must feel uneasy at what substance dualism is committed to. Given the nature of this problem, we have all the motivation that we could require to look at the basic claim of panpsychism, the claim that there is a sense in which the brute distinction between the material and the immaterial is false. One version of panpsychism claims that the physical, right from the start, has mental or experiential properties. Another version, that argued for by Timothy Sprigge, argues that we cannot conceive of the physical except as something experiential. The considerations which are taken to support this conclusion arise from reflection on the nature of our perceptual experience, and are set out in chapter 3 of

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Sprigge’s The Vindication of Absolute Idealism.2 I am sceptical about the way this position is argued for in this chapter, and I want to explain why.

2. Perspectivalism as a Ground for Panpsychism The argument proceeds by way of a rejection of naïve or direct realism. The essential claim is that “The given shape of what lies within experience is essentially perspectival, whereas we all think that the actual shape of the thing does not depend on the position of the observer”.3 Although the direct realist thinks that the shape of an object does not depend on the position of the observer, what lies within experience is essentially perspectival, and it is in fact impossible to conceive of objects as lacking this perspectival aspect. That is to say, it is impossible to conceive of objects in the way that the naïve realist supposes. I cannot conceive of an object except as something experiential. And what goes for the shape of an object also applies to other properties such as taste and colour. The notion that objects exist independently of consciousness therefore has to be rejected.4 Mind and body, therefore, do not belong to radically different categories of being, and this renders the apparent gulf between them less puzzling. One initial response to this line of argument may well be that we do indeed think of objects existing independently of consciousness in acknowledging that the world existed long before any form of sentient being appeared in the course of evolution, or, to take Timothy Sprigge’s own example, in conceiving of there being an amount of oil under the North Sea which is not the object of anyone’s awareness. Sprigge’s response is to say that “It is far from following from this that such propositions could be literally true. They may only be pragmatically true…”.5 I have to say that I find this puzzling. We frequently make inferences about the behaviour of objects which are not actually seen. Thus, I infer that the large dent in the roof of my car was probably caused by something that was caused to fall on it by the gale last night, and that the same gale uprooted some of the trees along the road; and so on. It is far from clear how the claim that we are dealing here only with pragmatic truth could be sustained. The central issue, however, is the question of what we can infer from the fact that objects are necessarily experienced from some particular perspective. I want to begin my reflections on this issue by contrasting Timothy Sprigge’s treatment of this point with that of Thomas Reid. Reid’s target is the argument, expressed by Hume, that the view that we perceive external objects immediately, a “universal and primary opinion of all men”, is “destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception... The table, which we see, seems to diminish as we remove further from it; but the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers

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no alteration. It was, therefore, nothing but its image which was present to the mind”.6 This is precisely the consideration which Timothy Sprigge also takes to refute naïve realism. But while Sprigge sees this claimed refutation of naïve realism to support a panpsychist view of the physical world, Reid’s immediate target is the use of this point to support a representationalist conception of perception, that is, the view that the immediate object of perception cannot be the object itself, but at best some image that represents it. Reid’s rejoinder is, however, of central relevance. This is his response to the claimed refutation of naïve realism: Let us suppose, for a moment, that it is the real table we see: Must not this real table seem to diminish as we move further from it? It is demonstrable that it must. How then can this apparent diminution be an argument that it is not the real table? When that which must happen to the real table, as we remove further from it, does actually happen to the table we see, it is absurd to conclude from this, that it is not the real table we see.7

In other words, precisely on the assumption that we do directly perceive objects, changing appearances are entailed. The claim that just the fact of perspective shows that the direct realist view of perception is mistaken seems to imply that if we could perceive objects directly they would appear unchanging no matter how we changed our position in relation to them. And that imagined experiential world would clearly be one in which we could not build up a conception of a physical world at all. It would be a world in which objects always presented the same appearance whether viewed face-on or at an angle, from two yards away or half a mile away. And that, as I say, would be a world in which we could not construct a conception of ourselves as agents moving around a physical world at all. I confess this point of Reid’s has always seemed to me to be a complete refutation of an argument which nevertheless continued to be influential long after Reid wrote.8 I suspect, nevertheless, that Sprigge will feel that Reid has missed the crucial point. For Reid, the truth that our experience of objects is necessarily perspectival is something actually entailed by a naïve or direct realist conception of perception: the view that we directly perceive a world of objects which exist independently of our consciousness, through which we are able to move as agents. For Reid, changing perspectives are a matter of the laws of geometry and perspective, and these describe features, not just of this world, but of any imaginable physical world. For Sprigge, on the other hand, the fact that we cannot imagine an object free from this essential perspectival aspect means that we cannot make sense of an object which exists independent of experience. To suppose that the aspect of perspective can be accommodated within a naïve or direct realist view of perception would be to suppose that objects in themselves have perspectival, and therefore necessarily changing, properties. We can certainly think of an object without thinking of its perspectival qualities, but that is beside

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the point; for, Sprigge writes, “we are not saying that [the object] cannot be imagined without imagining its qualities of this sort, but that we cannot imagine it as without qualities of this sort. It is because we cannot imagine it without qualities of this sort that we cannot imagine it as not being an element of experience”.9 We may, that is, think of an object without thinking of its perspectival qualities, but we cannot imagine an object to be without such qualities, and that means we cannot imagine it to exist except as an element of experience. The contrast between Sprigge and Reid could not be starker. I am still inclined to think that Reid is wholly right on this issue, and that therefore a central part of Sprigge’s main argument for a panpsychist view cannot stand. Let me attempt to defend this claim by first reflecting on the way perspective impinges on certain objects which we can surely agree are wholly physical. I am thinking, of course, of cameras of all sorts. A camera must record the object it is pointed at from a certain angle. It does no more than represent certain features of the physical world, a world in which it itself has a position. It cannot represent an object except from a certain perspective, but that does not mean that the object it thus represents cannot be thought of as having an existence independent of experience. The camera, we can agree, experiences nothing, though in representing an object in the world it represents its own perspectival relation to that object. What goes for cameras goes for objects in general. Any building lies in certain relations to the other buildings in that environment. The front of one house directly faces the front of the house on the opposite side of the street, but lies at an angle to the house on the corner. Objects necessarily stand in certain spatial relations to the other objects in their environment. The house opposite cannot present both its front aspect and its back aspect to any other house, and the house standing at an angle to this one cannot be in the position it is without presenting the corner of its front and side to this house. These relational properties are properties which objects in a physical world necessarily have; they are also properties which necessarily change if the spatial distribution of objects in the environment is changed. These relations, both static and changing, are what “the laws of geometry” describe, as Reid claimed. The central mistake, as it seems to me, lies in the claim that “the actual shape of the thing does not depend on the position of the observer”, and what is made of it. The inference that is drawn is that perspectival properties belong, not to the objective world of physical objects, but to the world of experience itself. Timothy Sprigge’s particular development of the basic claim is that the notion of an object existing independently of experience, and thus having an actual and unchanging shape, is an incoherent one. But the mistake which lies in the claim just mentioned is to suppose that when we move from a consideration of an actual object with its unchanging shape to a consideration of the spatial relations which hold between that object and other objects in its environment we move

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from the objective to the subjective world. What is unchanging belongs to the objective world, but, it is argued, the world of changing perspectives is the experiential world. But it is not. The spatial, geometrical relations between objects, relations that are subject to change, belong to the objective world. And that means that the changing appearances we get as we move around an object are not some sort of entity which intervenes between the actual object and ourselves, which is the implication of the argument in Hume to which Reid addresses himself, nor are they properties which make it impossible for us to think of objects existing independently of experience, as Sprigge argues, but the way in which we register a wholly objective feature of the world, namely, the spatial relations between the object we perceive and ourselves. This is just as much an objective feature of the world as are the spatial relations between a camera and the object it is trained on, or the spatial relations between one house and another. When Timothy Sprigge argues that it is impossible to imagine an object which lacks such perspectival properties, my response is to agree that it is indeed impossible to do this, but the correct inference from this is, not that it is impossible to imagine an object which is not an element of experience, but that it is impossible to imagine an object which is not related to the other objects in its environment by certain spatial and geometrical relations, relations which are often subject to change. And one of the objects in that environment may well be a perceiver. Timothy Sprigge actually considers the sort of objection I have developed, but I find his attempt to discount it puzzling. The objection to be addressed is that “even if it is true that objects can only be imagined as existing perspectivally, this does not show that they can only be imagined existing within experience. For there may be a way in which the inherence of qualities in objects is ‘multiple’, so that in talking of their precise properties one should say not only where they have them but from where. But this possession of quality only both and from a place, it may be claimed, does not imply their being experienced”. Sprigge’s response is that, although the perspectival character of an object is not the mere fact of its standing in a certain relation to a subject, it is “hard to conceive of a thus qualified object existing except as one element of a whole which is set over against another, which other is either a subject, or something pretty like one”.10 I do not know whether Sprigge would regard a camera, to revert to my example, as something pretty like a subject. The notion of something which is not a subject but pretty like one is quite obscure. What the example of the camera does is to help one see that having a certain perspective is a matter of registering the spatial and geometrical relations between objects, and that these are features of the world which there is no reason to suppose cannot exist independently of experience.

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Timothy Sprigge makes one or two further points which also leave me unconvinced. He says, for example, that we all think that an object “has a wealth of granulated detail” which is not given in our perception of the object.11 However, I find it difficult to see why the fact that such detail might be revealed through a microscope but not to the naked eye should in any way threaten a naïve realist conception of perception. Similarly, I do not feel that a direct realist conception of perception is threatened by the fact that those who have impaired eyesight are not able to see the sort of detail that the normal sighted can. The other point is about what Sprigge calls the object’s aesthetic properties, and I take it that what is at issue here is the status of what is generally called the object’s secondary qualities. Here I must be brief. First, it is obvious to me that to talk of an object’s smell or taste is to talk of the effect the object has on our consciousness, and that in the absence of beings capable of sensation there would be no such properties. But I am not inclined because of this to suppose that the object cannot exist independently of consciousness. I can, of course, easily conceive of objects without any smell or taste. But to admit that certain properties which we ascribe to objects do not literally inhere in objects, but are more strictly ways in which objects affect our sensibility, is not to offer any support to the view that objects can exist only as an element in consciousness. Nor, I think, is this point threatened by the acknowledgement that our experience of such secondary qualities is often dependent on our changing relation to the object. Colour differs from properties such as taste and smell in one respect. While it is, of course, easy to imagine an object which is completely colourless, it is impossible to imagine having anything like our perceptual apparatus and looking out on a world which is colourless. One looks through objects which lack colour to the coloured objects beyond. There is, however, no difficulty in imagining a world of objects which lack taste and smell entirely. However, one cannot infer from this that it is after all impossible to imagine objects having an existence except as elements of consciousness. The conclusion may be that colour, unlike taste and smell, is a property which obtains independently of consciousness. This is a contentious issue on which there is much more that could be said, but my overall conclusion is that nothing in Timothy Sprigge’s treatment of our perceptual experience leads me to think that his version of panpsychism is plausible.

3. Panpsychism and the Relation between Mind and Body I turn now to Timothy Sprigge’s claim that a panpsychist position such as his own makes it easier to conceive of the relation between mind and body, and in particular to avoid the central problem for the substance dualist of making sense

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of the causal relation between them. Here I want to compare Sprigge’s panpsychism with the very different position developed by David Chalmers, one which he also describes as panpsychist.12 Chalmers’ central notion is that of information, a feature which he takes to be mental or experiential, but which he also sees as something universal in the natural world. Everything, that is to say, is, or is part of, some sort of informational system. In the course of developing this idea, Chalmers is led to argue for the intelligibility of the notion of a zombie, that is, of a being which is physically and behaviourally identical to oneself, but which lacks consciousness. I am unclear how this latter claim can be reconciled with the earlier claim that everything is informational and therefore mental or experiential. If “wherever there is causal interaction, there is information, and wherever there is information, there is experience”,13 it is difficult to see how Chalmers could accept the notion of a being which is physically and functionally identical to oneself but which lacks experience.14 However, I must let that pass. The point I want to draw attention to is that in accepting the notion of zombies, Chalmers has committed himself to epiphenomenalism, and this is something which he rather reluctantly admits. Epiphenomenalism, in spite of Chalmers’ attempts to defend it, seems to me almost self-evidently unacceptable. It is incredible to suggest that people would have, say, devised appalling ways of torturing others, have debated the rights and wrongs of experimentation on animals, have blessed the day when anaesthetics were developed, and so on, if no one had ever felt pain. It is equally incredible to suggest that when one acts out of gratitude or remorse or indignation, one’s behaviour would have been the same even if one was incapable of experiencing the relevant thoughts and emotions. The suggestion that a complete explanation of a stretch of one’s behaviour in terms of one’s thoughts and emotions and of the logical connections between them could be paralleled by an equally sufficient explanation of the same stretch of behaviour in purely physical terms, an explanation which makes no reference at all to conscious thoughts, emotions and reasonings, is a suggestion that posits a coincidence of a simply miraculous sort. One acts as one does because one has, for example, become aware of something which one thinks is morally indefensible, is indignant about it, and decides to make as effective a protest about this as is possible. That is the sole explanation of one’s behaviour. What has prevented people from grasping this point is the example of such things as chess-playing computers. In relation to these, we can adopt the intentional stance, interpreting the operations of the computer in terms of intentions and reasons, or the physical stance, describing the physical processes of the computer. Both stances offer a complete explanation of the relevant stretch of behaviour. But the fact that a symbol-crunching machine like a chess-playing computer can be described in two different ways lends no credence to the view that the behaviour of someone acting from jealousy or gratitude can be ex-

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plained in a way which makes no reference to jealousy or gratitude, or to any thought or emotion. To put the point another way, there is a pattern to be discerned in, say, a number of chess-games played to a conclusion, one which we might possibly discern without reference to the notion of intention, a pattern to do with the way pieces of one colour become grouped round a piece of the other colour-checkmate. There is no such purely physical pattern to be discerned in the various ways in which people can express jealousy or gratitude or indignation, a pattern which we might discern without taking the intentional stance. What is common to the various ways people can express gratitude or indignation, say, is just that they can all be seen to be expressions of those states of consciousness. The mind-body problem would be so much simpler if, as the example of the chess-playing computer might suggest, we could hold on to the principle of causal closure yet still acknowledge the reality of the mental, even if that means relegating it to the status of the epiphenomenal, but we cannot. Timothy Sprigge is much more equivocal on this issue. On p. 150 he talks of the possibility of brain cells entering into close relations of the sort required for them to subtend conscious thought, and adds that this process “may or may not involve suspension of standard physical laws, or determination with a teleological drift of what they leave open”. The issue of whether we can hang on to the principle of causal closure thus looks to be undecided at this point. Then on p. 152 the suggestion is that “when the centres which correspond to the physical ultimates are arranged to form the noumenal basis of a brain in a wakeful state, a new centre emerges from this aggregate which reacts upon them so as to produce physically unpredictable effects. These might either be exceptions to the physical laws which apply outside the brain, or determinations of a purposive sort of what these laws leave indeterminate”. Here there is the same uncertainty as to whether a real breach in the physical causal system is envisaged. But in this same passage, at pp. 152153, there is the suggestion that a new type of physical reality might emerge whose interaction with the brain is governed by special emergent, yet physical laws, though of a character with some kind of teleological drift. And (p. 154) when brain cells interact in certain ways, and certain things start to happen predictably, but not on the basis of laws of nature which apply in other situations, then they either fall under fresh laws or are interfered with lawfully by an entity brought into and out of play in specifiable conditions. However, Sprigge then returns to the question of what we should say if science confirms that every human movement is determined by standard physical laws. Then, Sprigge says, a Feigl-type identity theory beckons. There thus seems to be considerable uncertainty in Timothy Sprigge’s mind as to whether standard physical laws explain all our behaviour, and we can hold on to the principle of causal closure, or whether something new appears on the

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scene which rules this out. On balance, and in spite of some sympathy for epiphenomenalism, Sprigge is inclined to argue for some emergent entity which has genuine causal powers, in so far as it involves “determinations of a purposive sort which could not be predicted by the standard laws of the physical sciences”. Given this, what are we to make of the claim that the variety of panpsychism developed offers a view of the relation between mind and body which is less puzzling than that of substance dualism, simply in virtue of the fact that mind and body are seen not to belong to radically different kinds of being? First, unless we opt for a “Feigl-type identity theory” or epiphenomenalism, it is clear that the principle of causal closure must be abandoned. If the behaviour of brain cells falls under fresh laws, or produces “determinations of a purposive sort not predicted by the standard laws of the physical sciences”, then the unity of science, with the causal laws of physics at its base, is destroyed. We have genuine emergence, and genuine emergence is not compatible with the unity of science. If fresh laws emerge, then they govern physical elements whose behaviour is not determined by the laws of physics. If the behaviour of brain cells is determined by “fresh laws”, it is difficult to see how that position differs in any crucial respect from substance dualism, at least with regard to making the relation between mind and body less puzzling. Somewhere or other, causal transactions take place which are not explicable by reference to the basic laws of the physical sciences. We can say, as the substance dualist does, that the behaviour of the body is often determined by states of consciousness, and that this causal connection cannot be accommodated within a closed physical-causal system. Or we can say, as Timothy Sprigge is sometimes (but not always) inclined to, that the behaviour of brain cells is often not determined by the laws of the physical sciences, but by “fresh laws”, and this position also involved a rejection of the principle of causal closure. I cannot see that such a position offers a view of the relation between mind and body any whit less puzzling than that of substance dualism. I began by making the obvious point that one of the central objections to substance dualism is the apparent sheer inexplicability of the connection between mind and body and of the appearance of mind at a certain stage in the progress of evolution. Reflecting on the appearance, not merely of consciousness as such but of rational consciousness, Thomas Nagel allows that the line of the evolutionary naturalist—that this phenomenon, like all the other examples of life in the world, is the result of the blind operation of natural selection on the sequence of millions of random mutations—cannot be the complete answer. In particular, if our reasonings are simply the result of biologically determined processes, then we can have no reason to trust them. That is to say, the absolutely essential point that reason has a self-standing validity becomes impossible to hold on to. The question that now arises is this: if the story of evolutionary naturalism won’t do,

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what can account for the existence of rational consciousness? Should we posit fundamental laws linking consciousness and the physical world, laws which may possibly be accommodated within some broader conception of physics? Nagel is tempted by this line, but in a footnote he tellingly quotes the response of Mark Johnston. Johnston says that if we ask, “Why is the natural order such as to make the appearance of rational beings likely?” it is very difficult to come up with an answer which does not posit something genuinely teleological.15 This response gets us very near the religious hypothesis with which Nagel engages in debate in a chapter of The Last Word actually called “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion”. I think we do have to posit genuine purpose here. Certainly, the idea that rational consciousness, purpose, the search for meaning and value, could have emerged from the sheer, brute meaningless thereness of physical reality seems to me one which strains credulity, though it is one which the Darwinian hypothesis, as it is usually construed, is supposed to entail. This line of thinking brings me near to the positions of such thinkers as John Haldane and (in particular) Richard Swinburne. Swinburne is a substance dualist while Haldane, though he accepts a religious explanation for the emergence of consciousness, is not. The point I wish to emphasise, however, is that if we accept that the emergence of consciousness, and of rational consciousness in particular, betokens some deep necessity or purpose, then the suggestion with which I began, that such emergence must seem a sheer, brute inexplicable fact is one we no longer have to accept. The emergence of rational consciousness betokens some sort of genuine purpose or necessity, and I am inclined to agree with both the philosophers I have mentioned above that such genuine emergence, pointing to an underlying teleology, is evident not simply with regard to the emergence of rational consciousness, but of mind in general and also the emergence of life from the previously inanimate world.16 That is to say, the hope that biology will eventually show itself to be reducible to physics is one I do not expect to see realised. For this sort of reason I am tempted to conclude that one of the fundamental problems for which panpsychism is offered as an answer does not have the force that many have claimed that it does. In any case, as I have suggested, it is unclear to me that the panpsychist is able to avoid epiphenomenalism on the one hand, a position which Chalmers seems to accept and Timothy Sprigge seems tempted by on occasion, but which I think is fairly clearly untenable, and interactionist dualism on the other. More generally, I am not at all persuaded that any panpsychist has properly answered the fundamental point that Descartes makes that the ideas of thought on the one hand and body on the other are ideas of entities which can be understood completely or as complete things, needing no other thing for their existence. This fundamental intuition is far more powerful than many philoso-

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phers have seen, and I do not think the panpsychist approach shows how it can be undermined. But this is a large topic, which I cannot pursue further here. In a paper given to a conference in which both Timothy Sprigge and I participated, I said that I am often tempted to echo Churchill, when he claimed that democracy is the worst imaginable form of government apart from all the others, and say the same of substance dualism. Reflecting on it, I am sometimes inclined to think that it, like democracy, is the worst possible solution to a problem, in this case the mind-body problem, but reflection on other suggested solutions to this problem, including that of panpsychism, leads me to think that the problems with it may after all be less daunting than those which bedevil all other positions.

Notes 1. I have argued for the failure of materialism in a number of works, but particularly in my Mind and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988) and in my paper “Materialism and the First Person”, in Minds and Persons, ed. A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 123-139. 2. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983). 3. Ibid., p. 44. 4. Ibid., pp. 43-44. 5. Ibid., p. 112. 6. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 152. Although Hume seems here to be arguing for a representative theory of perception, and does indeed say in this passage that our perceptions are “fleeting copies and representations of other existences, which remain uniform and independent”, a reading of the chapter on “Scepticism with regard to the Senses” (Treatise, Part 4, Chap. 2) makes it clear that this cannot be his final position. 7. T. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. A. D. Woozley (London: Macmillan, 1941), p. 145. 8. We find it, for example, in Chap. 1 of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (London: William and Norgate, 1912). 9. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 118. 10. Ibid., pp. 131-132. 11. Ibid., p. 44. 12. It is fair to say, however, that there is some similarity between Sprigge’s position and what Chalmers has to say about the intrinsic nature of the physical in what Chalmers admits is a rather speculative passage. See D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 153-155. 13. Ibid., p. 297.

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16. See Haldane’s comments in J. Haldane and J. Smart, Theism and Atheism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 99-106.

Dialectical Ascent on a Spriggean Theme Alastair Hannay You can imagine [an object] in such a way that the whole question of its relation to an observing consciousness is left quite open. What, however, you cannot do is give yourself any positive idea in imagination of what an object which was not presented to consciousness would be like. (Timothy Sprigge, “Absolute Idealism”)

1. The View Why did you climb Mount Everest?, goes the old question expecting the answer, Because it’s there. “As it surely is.” Absolutely. But ask about the view from the top, is that there too? Imagine the perplexed climber’s reply: “Of course, go up and see for yourself.” But is it there now? “What do you mean? Unless the weather’s closed in…” Tell me about the view. “Well, over to the North Tibet, Kanchenjunga to the East, that sea of clouds with island peaks, the deep blue sky, down there… etc.” Exactly, on a clear day the things are there to be seen even if there is no one, panting, exhausted but elated at the summit, currently seeing them; just like Everest itself (for, from the privileged point of view of those who have reached the summit, it too forms part of the view, unusually as something that can be seen from above). But I am asking about the view itself. Anyone can list what they see from the sitting-room window, but the list can have them in any order. The view presents them in a special way that depends on where you are standing and the direction in which you are looking. Similarly on Everest, for there to be a view there has to be a pair of eyes directed from the summit at whatever is visible at just that moment. “Can’t we say the view is there to be seen in the way a travel brochure might? After all, everything, including Everest itself from afar, is part of a view, showing one of its familiar aspects, and what, after all, is an aspect in this sense but something there to be seen being seen from a certain angle?” Glad you said that, because now I can ask you whether you can imagine anything except from a certain angle or some point of view or other?

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“Well... let’s think; no, perhaps not, but surely that doesn’t mean that something exists only when someone has it in view? Mount Everest is there even when it’s dark or in the unlikely event these days of no one happening to be within sight of it. And anyway, the fact that I can’t help imagining something from some point of view or in a certain perspective has nothing to do with whether or not it exists; I can just as well imagine what doesn’t exist. How else can I make a distinction between just imagining something and imagining what exists unless what I imagine in the former case exists whether or not I or anyone imagines it?” That’s true. We do have that distinction between something existing apart from your bringing it to mind and its existing no more than in your bringing it to mind.1 But before letting that obvious fact take us further than need be, let me just ask you to try two things. First, fix on something familiar but not now in view and then try bringing it to mind. Don’t you find that whatever it is, however it is brought to mind, it presents itself as from a point of view? You agree? Now try to think of it without it being presented from a point of view. Yes? You can? Well, I agree that’s possible; you can think about one thing rather than another thing without having it in mind in just that way; but wouldn’t you agree, in turn, that it is a way in which whatever, or whoever, it is you are fixing your mind on doesn’t come to mind in any strong sense? It doesn’t present itself to you. Well, I see you hesitate and I don’t want to railroad you. Try this. Some things cannot be fixed in the strong sense, while others can, but only to those familiar with their looks. Take numbers. The number five, for instance. It can’t be present to you in a strong sense, and I mean the number, not the numeral, the figure “5”. You can turn that upside down, on thin paper see it from the other side, look at it inverted in a mirror. But the number itself cannot be present to mind, not in any sense, which is why it has to be there by proxy, and that’s what the numeral is. You object? What if I approach the number five from the number one and then from ten, isn’t that a matter of perspective too? Well done, you must be a philosopher, or a lawyer perhaps, sometimes there isn’t much difference. All right. There is perspectivity there. There always is when things are in relation to other things, which is just what they are in mathematics. But then that’s all they are. Numbers relate to each other, perhaps in many dimensions in their own space, but not to you and me, their space is one we have no part in. You can never bring a number to mind in the strong sense. Perspectivity proper is bound up with things we come across in the world around us. And what I am saying is that concerning these, even if we can know or believe or be told thousands of facts and things and relations about them, including relations to us, it is only to the extent that we can envisage them and therefore imagine or think of them from a certain point of view that they truly

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come to mind. You can think of the house that Jack built even if Jack only exists in a nursery rhyme, and you can think of the house your nephew is building even if you have no idea what it is going to look like and cannot bring it to mind. But houses are the kind of thing you can bring to mind, and when you do, it is from a point of view. “Is that all? I’d have thought there was more to it.” The reason why there isn’t is that the more is already there. If a view is how things look to someone, in the order of space in which they appear, it is as much about the viewer being positioned in a certain way as about the things. “But what about these things? How is it with them independently of their being presented or presentable to you or me in one way or another?” If what you mean by what they are, is what they are to you or me, then that’s just to treat them in the familiar ways in which they appear to us, the ways that make them recognizable. “That’s Everest”, I say on turning the corner and seeing the profile familiar to me from a hundred photographs or films. IT is that familiar profile, though I know there are others, including aerial photos that might show it in an unfamiliar way, at least unfamiliar to me. The fact that this IT becomes visible in many other ways, including those of satellite surveillance of the kind stored in Google Earth, means its gradual expansion beyond the circle of familiars. Just as my best friend’s face can be seen in ways in which it is no longer instantly recognizable, the world of familiar objects can present itself in aspects that take its furniture beyond, and well beyond, the familiar. The initial assumption that something is wholly present in its recognizable aspect gives way to a more liberal understanding in which familiar things acquire new and quite unfamiliar aspects, in which it is assumed they are still wholly present. If usually seen from well below and with a plume of cloud streaming from the summit, a satellite picture of Everest may show how it can present itself as a not-so-easily discernible point on a series of folds or creases on the Earth’s surface. Then we could say that the wide-focus view from above is in this case the more scientific. Freed from confinement to its role in the everyday human world as the world’s highest mountain and a testing ground for physical skill and endurance, Everest assumes a place in a wider scheme of things as just a slightly higher location in a terrain to which geologists and investigators into plate tectonics are drawn. That, over there, is IT, but IT can be familiar to so many differently concerned people in so many different ways. In some of them it isn’t even the famous mountain at all, just a sample mass of rock perched on the lithosphere. So what price now the thought that things come firmly to mind only from some point of view? We can go on talking of perspective even when the perspective isn’t yours. You might “see” Mount Everest as just a part of the Earth’s crust, and that as resting on the mantle that floats on the core. There’s still a perspective in that. “I see that, but what happens on the other side of perspectivity?”

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I’m not sure “other side” is the right expression. It could be this side. Taking something we can see or imagine as a case of something bigger than we can see or imagine is to enter another world, a world of generalization. It is a world where the focus on particulars becomes blurred; in their place we find ourselves thinking of something else, a concept, a theory. The concepts and theories are ours. It is just that to think such an abstraction we need no point of view, not below Everest nor on top of it. Some have talked mysteriously of the “view from nowhere”. “Surely a view has to be from somewhere!” Indeed. But when geologists mention perceptible things like crystals they are still in the land of views from somewhere; it’s just that once you have a crystal in your hand it doesn’t matter much where you stand; an example is not geographically confined. But when, asked about the nature of these, they mention molecules and their components, we are slipping out of the world of perspective. Or, we are slipping out of the world of perception, imperceptibly. For they still come up with illustrations of what they are talking about, pictures of small things circling what they describe as vast areas of space though to us so small as to be practically unimaginable. “Perhaps this just shows how very hard it is not to treat things we are interested in as visible or otherwise perceptible, as presenting themselves in or from some perspective.” Precisely so. Things both unimaginably small and unimaginably vast, things that can only appear to us in the form of numbers and measurements, are given an audience-friendly imaginability. Homely analogies colonize the submicroscopic and supra-telescopic worlds, transforming spaceless numbers into images. To our naturally habitat-minds a view that has nothing in view, and is therefore no view at all—not even from nowhere, becomes a sort of view none the less.

2. Where “But where now is Everest? For whether or not we see it, Everest is surely there. Otherwise why climb it? Or how?”2 Yes, of course you’re right, it must have been there to start with, before anyone came upon it and felt the urge to climb it. For just as the view is there when no one is looking or before anyone reached the top, so too must Everest have been there before anyone set eyes on it and before any climber felt the pull of gravity as they set off for the summit. “That must mean, before the mind began accumulating all those now familiar images of the mountain, and before all those microscopic and Google-eyed additions science has made available. Of course, having these images on hand, we

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can imagine the view and the mountain when not seeing either, so when asked, what is there when we are not there to see what is there, we simply recount what we can retrieve from this album of images. But that is cheating; it is simply saying, this is what you would see if you were standing at this or that place. If we are to be honest, then in asking ourselves what is there we must go back to a time when neither Everest or the view had been seen by anyone; we must answer as if we ourselves had forgotten those images; we have to leave them out of the account and ask, What was, and what still is, Everest if, at some particular moment, none of these perspective-bound images is occurring to anyone, that is, when no one is bringing Everest or the view from its summit to mind by seeing or imagining either under some aspect?” Yes, and whatever the answer may be, it cannot be one in which the mountain comes strongly to mind. For that to be the case we need to open the album again. And when we do, some viewpoint is there once more and with it the viewer, the viewing subject. But then, without the limits that in everyday experience allow us to identify one thing as that thing and not another, we lose a grip on the very notion of there being something that is IT altogether. To us what makes things the things that they are is the fact that they correspond to albums of all possible viewpoints upon them. Without these albums and their separate catalogue identities we are at a loss to know what we are talking about. Except, of course, by starting with the familiar object here before us and saying that this is WHERE the thing itself, the thing beyond all possible views of it, is found. But then, once we move from here to there even the WHERE and the THERE disappear, because they, too, are dependent on a viewpoint. Unless... “Unless what?” Unless we assign them to a space where things relate to each other but not to a subject, to an absolute space, that of a world in itself, logically as well as chronologically prior to all points of view. “This talk of a world as it is before we are conscious of it, and the suggestion that this is how bits of the world that meet the eye and the other senses must be when no cognitive systems are currently in a position to see them, isn’t this just a wild, affected, unnecessarily provocative way of speaking?” Well, it is true that philosophers who have suggested this sort of thing have been reprimanded by other philosophers who appeal to our more normal and settled way with words. But then, these ways are settled not because it has been commonly agreed that they mirror the way things are; they are settled by habit and convenience and useful elision. Our language takes viewpoints for granted. It enables us to cheat with a good conscience, it allows us to replace an absent climber at the top of Everest with what we can imagine such a climber would now be seeing, and without, as some philosophers forcefully claim, this implying that it is ourselves standing there;3 just as we may choose to imagine that it is ourselves but without having to include exhaustion, gasping for breath and

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nervously looking at a gathering storm. So the viewpoint factor, the subjective side, is not a problem. You don’t have to pretend there’s always a tourist at the top, even if nowadays they are practically standing in line—or at the foot, where there are even more. You can imagine a view without imagining yourself having it. What is there is how it would look to any human being with normal optical proficiency. As for non-humans, that would be up to them. “Wonderful how our ordinary ways of speaking can put us right where reflection so easily leads us astray.” Or drown a clear thought? Think of this. If whatever it takes in, or with, a brain to produce conscious life is removed, as with some drug or disaster it may, then what we call Everest is still there. But no one will be calling it that, and if conscious life returns, but only in the form of bats or birds, there will be nothing corresponding to our album of Everest perspectives. Yes, of course, when all consciousness fails and the dark of night falls on the world, the world still possesses all it needs to stimulate brains of conscious creatures, as much as it has the power to synthesize and to make vegetation grow. But if these brains are not there or not in order, there will be no light, no colour, no sound, no touch, no taste, no smell. Do not be put off by those who claim to speak for science and say that what is essential to these qualia is already to be found in what the world possesses. If you add functioning brains, as they usually do, then you beg some questions best left for later. Understanding what is needed for coming upon a view that is not currently being viewed is hard enough without muddying the issue. Yes, quite hard. For a start, it cannot be imagined; you cannot bring it strongly to mind. But besides that, the very thought is one that our brains have trained us not to have to think. Convenience is the brain’s business, not truth. If we want truth, what has to be thought is the confrontation of a switched-on neurobiological product of evolution, socialization and learning with what would be there even if no such product existed. “But if that’s the true situation it must be happening all the time.” Indeed it must. “That means, along with the oxygen flasks and backpack with tent and food, climbers of Everest have to carry a cognitive programme up there in their skulls so as to transform the unimaginable into the climber’s familiar world of footholds, ice, snow, sunshine and peaks?” Well yes and no, or rather no and yes. To get a yes you must think like this: to arrive at the real situation with regard to what is there when no mind is currently absorbing the data offered by the environment, you have to spool back evolution to before brains. Excepting whatever clutter having a brain has enabled the living world to add to it, what is there will be as it was then. Consequently, that is how the environment still is when no turned-on brain is turned in its direction. And just as consequently, how it is, is unimaginable. To produce the vista you need a turned on brain.

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3. A Natural Thought “I sniff a fallacy.” Tell me about it. “Well, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that among all the advantages we have acquired by coming along the evolutionary path and getting a brain on top of a spinal column is an ability to pick out what is really there? Backtracking doesn’t leave you with what’s there, it only erases our ability to know what is really and visibly the case.” Yes, at least at first glance that’s a reasonable enough idea. And of course that image of the climber having to take a programme with him just to see the view is just a piece of rhetoric. Let’s face it, you need the programme even to talk about him, just as he needs the programme even to think of climbing, or think at all, even just to stand up let alone see the view. If we are to talk of a programme it must be one that gives us our whole experiential world, all that it contains. “But then why not take it that this just is the world. Why talk of it as the product of a programme? What are our brains, intelligence and being conscious for if not to enable us to experience the world as it is, to perceive it in its infinitely many aspects, manage it, get around it, avoid its jagged edges, climb to its peaks, enjoy its magnificent vistas, and so on?” Hold on. Has no one told you that the way we apprehend the world is due to our brains and that the three-dimensional space that opens up to us when we look out on the world is done by neural computation and the subtle interaction of separate retinal images? It’s all in the head, colours, smells, feels, or at least that’s how some of the simpler minds express it, forgetting perhaps that the head is also something we first apprehend in this way. But at least we cannot deny that the view from the top of Everest is exclusively quale-tative. Which means that the answer to the question, What is there to see when no one is currently enjoying it?, cannot be given by describing the contents of a vista. “Yes, I’ve been told all that. But what about these disputes about direct seeing as against seeing mediated by representations in the head? Some scientists and most philosophers seem generally to prefer having us see the world as it is.”4 Well, we should not be led to exaggerate unduly or prematurely the role sub specie aeternitatis of the conscious mind. A light that blazes so brightly that we need shades to protect our eyes from it manages photosynthesis without the help of glare. Glaciers melt not because of the heat that we proprio-sensitive humans identify as warmth on our skin but due to the unfelt temperatures that give rise to that feeling. Sound can be transferred to grooves and digital patterns without being heard. And after all, in the vaster scheme of things light, sound and heat as they come to us in the form of qualia are a local matter, of interest and use only to a conscious species like ourselves, in the way that evil smells warn us away from things that endanger our health. There is nothing initially to prevent us

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choosing to view the panoply of conscious experience as a relatively minor thing, of interest only to ourselves, for enjoyment indeed, as well as survival, and, yes, let’s face it, for life itself as we know it. Life—that may be much, but in the larger world of living organisms our own lives may seem a small enough matter. Modesty may incline us to look at them self-denyingly, call it objectively if you will, as an ever-so thin end of a wedge the immensely greater part of which belongs to what would be there even if there were no conscious being for whom the sun rises, shines and sets. “That can be a salutory thought?” Yes, but it’s hardly enough to displace that other thought, the one that leads us simple-mindedly to say such things as that what we see, when we see it, is “all in the head” while the in-itself is unimaginable. “Are you sure? Suppose I am walking in the Black Forest on a pilgrimage to Heidegger’s cabin. Except on a photograph I have not seen the cabin before. I am not yet there but I know pretty well what it looks like, if I didn’t I wouldn’t know when I’d got there. For me what is there when I and no one else is looking at it is how the unimaginable will present itself to the kind of receptivity that our conscious minds, our brains if you will, make possible. Just as the cabin itself is in a clearing in the forest, so the forest itself and its trees, all it contains including its clearings, enter the clearing that is my conscious preparedness for it. It is ready, in the way I will see it, to be seen in that way. It is in that way that it exists when no one is there to see it. Similarly with Everest: if having secured from the climber his reason for climbing the mountain, namely that it exists, I now ask him, And how about the view, does it exist?, and he says, Of course, go up and see for yourself, then his rationale, and his reason for thinking me mad to ask, can be something of this kind. The world lies darkly there but in terms of our worldly engagements it presents itself to us in ways that our developed brains and bodies are prepared to greet. In these terms, in this world, that is how we talk about the things we are not currently seeing.” That’s right. And most people do not have a rationale; in the flurry of life it has not occurred to them to need one. After all, they are possessors, as we all are, of the Humean mind, that mind that works by association, the mind to which the thought of one thing is brought to it habitually by the thought of another thing. The thought of how an absent thing looks now brings to mind the way it would look if it were not absent. This is not only how we think but how we speak and if you look to the ways of our language to find out what is what and when, you will get an answer close enough to Heidegger’s but without the rationale. It is commonly called naïve realism. It is an answer that goes against reason but serves us very well all the same. “You said this thought about it all being in the head was simple-minded, the reason I suppose being, as you said, that the head is also part of it. Being known

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to us in the same way, it too is in the head. Not just simple-minded but nonsensical, I’d say.” So would I, but let’s look at this head and try to see what intuition lies behind the nonsense and whether there is a better way of putting it. Starting with Everest, what we know of Everest we know imaginably. This lets us describe what is always there as being what would be seen even when no one is there to see the familiar mountain. Similarly with my head, but as with Everest too, what is true of my head objectively (not inter-subjectively but trans-subjectively) is unimaginable. But like the mountain, its objective being can be thought of, talked about, theorized over. Models can be made according to the theories, models which appeal speciously but helpfully to the imagination. What is literally in our heads is not the world of our experience, nor even, to refocus the point, the world of our experiencing. Nor do our heads contain experience. All they contain in any literal way are our brains. As for what we can know of the brains in our heads, that too is something we can know in terms of a language of perception. We can pick brains apart to learn their structure and morphology, to theorize about them and experiment with them in ways that might confirm or disconfirm the theories. We can do the same with Everest. But there is a difference: unlike Everest, the unimaginable yet thinkable nature of the brain is the subject of theories about how it is responsible for our having experience at all, responsible for our having a world, for our having a sense of being one self among others, and also a physical object among others, sharing the same space.

4. False Steps “So what now about the world, about experiencing it, and about experience itself? No, let me rephrase that: What is it of reality that presents itself to one who enjoys the experience of sharing a world?” No, it’s too early to think about sharing a world. Think, first of all, of what of reality does not present itself. To see what that is, as clearly as what it is not, just observe the fallacy in two sorts of argument. One is a bottom-up argument, the other top-down. The fuel driving the former is evolution. A photon appears somewhere in the unimaginable, a light, a colour, though it might have been something else, for instance the photon equivalent of a smell, or a feel. It helps an organism in some way to survive and reproduce. The story then proceeds for an unimaginably long time and ends with upright creatures facing a world “out there”. Due to the insertion, somewhere along the line, of a set of abilities supporting what it takes to be self-conscious beings (such as the ability to see things as instances, to think of there being other selves and other locations, and whatever unifying functions have to be there to allow that), this upright creature surveys a world shared with other selves and objects. It is a gripping story and

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tends easily in the direction of the everyday notion that what we see out there is how it is even when no one is seeing it. For, as we said not so long ago, the evolutionary perspective gives a boost to the thought that what we see is what is there, for if it were not, where would be the advantage? The other argument begins from the top, with experience as we know it, or at least as normally constituted human beings suffering no serious mental disability know it. We look at its main features, which include those enabling functions just mentioned. We also note the fact that as two-legged creatures we stand up and can both catch sight of and take account of more than inherently more stooping creatures can. We compare our own distinctive ability with those of the latter, seeing what kinds of thing we can do which they cannot. We then conclude that in rising from the ground the human species has uniquely acquired what it takes to have a sense of sharing a world and to have fully fledged objectdirected sensory experience. This full blown, though therefore also in various pathological ways deflateable,5 experience of ours is a condition for there being anything to describe at all, that is, describe in ways that can be grasped in the language of perception. These complementary trains of thought, the one cognitivist the other phenomenological, urge us to a common but unwarranted conclusion. The cognitivist has it that the structured experience which the brain has given us reveals the world as it is prior to the advent of structured experience; the phenomenologist would have it that we are risen from the ground that we survey from our superior upright position. The fallacy in each case is that the identification of the ground from which either consciousness or we arise is made in a way that implies that consciousness and we ourselves have already arisen.6 But it is not so. Both risings give rise to a world for the first time. Not indeed a world in our heads, but a world including our heads. Due to an advanced neurological system contained there, it is also a world that lets us see that having the heads we do have is what allows us to have that world. Obviously, then, as far as the status of that world goes, it is not a representation of the pre-conscious and unimaginable, the “ground” from which it emerged. Rather, in metaphysical terms, or scientific terms where these two hardly differ, it is a new way of getting around the unimaginable, a way that introduces imaginability. For the first time it puts together a world of experience, a world of meanings, meanings based on the achievements and ability of this brain, though a brain able also to bring its own backroom operations within range of the familiar.

5. A Disconcerting Dualism Everything that meets the eye is seen from a certain point of view. But then there’s all that doesn’t meet the eye. The microscopic structures of that protrud-

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ing piece of a complex of creases on the Earth’s surface that we call Mount Everest. The empty spaces that we are told all matter ultimately consists of. We lose here a sense of perspective and begin to think of mere connections of particles, abstractly perhaps or, if imagined, then from some fairly indeterminate point of view that might be anywhere. It is in fact hard to lose a sense of perspective because even when we aim at a realism that takes account of what is really there in some absolute sense, we are stymied and misled by a brain that strives to bring everything within range of the imaginable, even the ultimate ingredients of matter. The view from the summit of Everest, standing there, all that sky, a lot of snow, white, cold, that wind, the jagged summits, the shadows below, over there to the North... What are their ultimate ingredients? Well, for a start, much of what you see is H2O, mostly in the form of ice and snow. The ingredients, whatever they are, are there even when no one is on the look-out. You can even say the cold is there even when no one is there to feel it, and so is the wind, just as Everest itself and all those other mountains, and for that matter Earth, the solar system and the entire universe. It’s all there. But notice what you are doing when you say such things. You are playing along with the world and its ways, our ways, the ways of our minds and language. What this Everest experiment does is help to reinstate a proper but disconcerting dualism that forces us to think further. Seeing the dualism requires us to lose our Humean minds, resolving it may require idealism. The challenging answer to, What is there to see when there is no one present to see it? is “Nothing”; or, to make the pill slightly more palatable, “Nothing that comes strongly to mind”. Or, to sour the pill just a little again: “Nothing to which there is an answer to the question ‘Where?’” This is a lesson for a breed of philosophers known as twin-Earthists.7 They say they show by a thought experiment that what we should say is there has nothing to do with “what is in the head”. Suppose exact counterparts of ourselves on what is in all respects a counterpart of Earth, except that the chemical content of what serves for us as water is something other than H2O (e.g., XYZ). Since everything in the head is the same on each Earth while what they mean by “water” differs, it follows that what they mean is not in the head. Apart from the crude Walt Disney metaphor “in the head”, which unhappily not all twin Earthists may find it in themselves to repudiate, the sin for which the perpetrators of this argument must answer is their cool acceptance of its conclusion. In the name of truth these hard thinkers assume that we should replace the ordinary ways of speaking with one that reflects a deeper and scientifically respectable grasp of the nature of things. They fail to see that to speak the language of their deeper realism we must leave our world altogether, the world that makes sense of water, and snow, and ice, and of summits and of climbing, and of views, and of what it is that lets us say what they are like when no one is looking.

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6. The World Shared “Well, has the time come now to ask what it means to share a world?” Yes. I think so. Try this. Naïvely we think of the world out there as ready made as we perceive it. It is a world innocent of conscious involvement, one that reveals itself to consciousness just as it is. Those “other minds” with whom we share it are placed “in the heads” of those walking and talking beings we see around us. Conscious experience works like a window and we simply take for granted that these beings that we see move about in the same world. That’s how it works in our experience, or how experience works for us. Less naïvely, and abstractly, we take the world we share to be an XYZ-world within which we have evolved in ways that allow us to take account of one another’s involvement in that world, to look out for dangers in it, identify our enemies, make friends, even love. But in literal fact this XYZ-world is one of which we can have no idea. We share a world by virtue of our complex, brain-assisted ability to see ourselves, others, and the world of things as examples, which means by virtue of language or of whatever makes that possible, for instance an ability to transpose experience into propositional form, or an experience that lends itself to that form. It is true that this world that we consciously share is that of a public space in which we know each other to be carrying a brain about in our skulls, a world in which we somehow partly are these brains, actively or passively engaged in their organizing and controlling of the carrying; what we call sharing a world has this outer form of a space we inhabit together. But although, as a very distinguished philosopher very topical here succinctly puts it, “The physical world of common sense is a useful construction”, in literal fact it “relates us to a real world consisting of innumerable interacting centres of experience”.8 The world we greet each other in is itself a representation.9 It is the product of a brain which as part of the physical world is impossible to view in itself, and which cannot be part of any world that we can form an idea of sharing. But now the catastrophic conclusion: neither can we form any idea of ourselves as a centre of experience interacting with other such centres. This, too, is something that cannot be brought to mind in a strong sense. Fortunately we have our naïve representation to fall back on, with its convenient display of this public space in which we move and have our common being. We also have that ability, mentioned earlier, to think of things in ways that do not bring them strongly to mind. We spoke of mathematics and science. But it is an ability that we can exercise also in metaphysics. True, with the commonsense notions view of “other minds” together with our generalizing ability we can indeed form some kinds of idea of the interaction of centres of experience. But they are specious ideas and need to be replaced, as they can at the level of abstract thinking. It is possible in a rational system to “abrogate” the initial sol-

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ipsism10 of the claim (or literal fact) that you and I are interacting centres of experience.11 Through its appeal to our sense of a rational order such a system of thought can elicit allegiance to the literal claim that it is at the level of consciousness that we must think of ourselves as together. That we are bound at that level, not least through language, is a thought that comes quite easily to mind in any case, but it is not a thought that we can bring strongly to mind in any literal way.12 In this, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Absolute Idealism offers help to common sense.

Notes 1. A point extensively thematized by J.-P. Sartre in L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénomenologique de l’imagination (Paris: Galimard, 1956, 29th edn.). 2. For more systematic remarks on the nature of imaginability in this context, see Sprigge’s The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), pp. 131-133. 3. See Z. Vendler, The Matter of Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 117-119, and A. Hannay, Human Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), pp. 68-70. Sprigge refers in a similar context to B. Williams, “Imagination and the Self”, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See Sprigge, “Absolute Idealism”, Philosophical Writings, 2, 1996, p. 89. 4. But not necessarily directly. See my discussion of A. Stroll and J. J. Gibson in “New Foundations and Philosophers”, in A. P. Martinich and M. J. White (eds.), Certainty and Surface in Epistemology and Philosophical Method (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellem Press, 1991), esp. pp. 33ff. 5. See three essays, by E. Straus, M. Natanson and H. Ey, on what might be called the pathology of the life-world, translated from a collection entitled Psychiatrie der Gegenwart and published as Psychiatry and Philosophy (New York: Springer Verlag, 1969). The authors discuss the conditions of there being a life-world and corresponding respects in which that world can be distorted or collapse. Cf. my discussion of this book in “Mental Illness and the Lebenswelt”, Inquiry, 15, 1972, pp. 208-230. 6. Cf. the section entitled “Difficulties about Getting Up in the World”, in my “Mental Illness and the Lebenswelt”, op. cit., pp. 218-223. 7. The twin-earth argument is due in the first instance to H. Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 8. Sprigge, “Absolute Idealism”, op. cit., p. 82. 9. Though the word “representation” must be used with caution here. The term “worldversion” is sometimes used in this context. The sense is something like “how the world is/appears to consciousness”. 10. The problem of solipsism here is not the epistemological one about our right to believe in the presence of other minds, a problem at which the impossibility of private languages, the paradigm-case argument, and verificationism (a principle behind logical behaviourism) have

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been variously directed. It is the problem of actually conceiving the co-presence of a diversity of centres of consciousness. 11. For Sprigge’s treatment of the relations of centres of experience (in the context of panpsychism), see, e.g., Vindication, op. cit., pp. 144-145 and The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), pp. 262ff. See also Chap. 3 (“Idealism”) in his Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). 12. See, e.g., Foundations, op. cit., pp. 262-266 and 270-271.

What Sort of Idealism is Viable Today?1 Nicholas Rescher

1. On Viability What sort of issue is this anyway—this question of whether or not a certain philosophical position is viable today? We are clearly not dealing here with the sociological question of what peoplein-general think in the manner of public opinion questionnaires—what they would agree to or disagree with if asked. We are not testing the popular pulse. Rather, what is at stake is related to William James’s distinction between what are live and dead issues in the context of contemporary tendencies of thought and opinion. Viability should here be construed in terms of consonance and compatibly with what the general run of relevantly well-informed people— professional philosophers in particular—might be prepared to think of as being at least a real option: a position to be reckoned with through being taken seriously enough to discuss and debate, even if only by way of rejection and refutation.

2. Idealism and its Modes Idealism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that reality is somehow mindcorrelative or mind-coordinated. Bertrand Russell said that “idealists tell us that what appears as matter is really something mental”.2 But that is rather stretching things. Idealism certainly need not go so far as to maintain a causal theory to the effect that mind somehow makes or constitutes matter. This over-simple view of idealism ignores such versions of the theory as, for example, the explanatory idealism which merely holds that an adequate explanation of the real always requires some recourse to the operations of mind. A genuine idealism will indeed center around the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the workings of mind. But it need not necessarily see mind as reality’s causal source. Traditional ontological idealism of the sort criticized by Russell did indeed center on the idea that thought creates reality. And in this regard such an idealism put the cart before the horse. For the situation is the very reverse: the fact of biological evolution means that natural reality creates thought. It seems best to take the line that thought has gained its key foothold on the world stage not so much by creating it as by virtue of the emergent saliency of its role in nature.

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In the historic past, disputes raged within the idealist camp over whether “the mind” at issue in the position’s definition was a mind emplaced outside of or behind nature (absolute idealism), or a nature-pervasive power of rationality of some sort (cosmic idealism), or the collective impersonal social mind of peoplein-general (social idealism), or simply the distributive collection of individual minds (personal idealism). But over the years, the more grandiose versions of the theory have dropped increasingly from favor, and in recent times virtually all idealists have construed “the minds” at issue in their theory as a matter of separate individual minds equipped with socially engendered resources, and thus forming part of the world rather than standing outside or behind it. The aim of the present discussion is thus to argue for a version of idealism that does not go too decidedly against the grain of such current philosophical sensibilities. What it seeks is a form of idealism that is modest—or, if you insist, minimalistic— enough to flourish in the intellectual climate of the present.

3. Problems of Idealism It is quite unjust to charge idealism with an antipathy to reality, with ontophobia, as Ortega y Gasset called it. For it is not the existence but the nature of reality upon which idealism sets its sights. Materialism is what classical idealism rejects—and even here the idealists speak with divided voice. (Berkeley’s “immaterialism” does not so much deny the existence of material objects as their unperceivedness.) There are certainly versions of the doctrine well short of the spiritualistic position of an ontological idealism that (as Kant puts it at Prolegomena, sect. 13, n. 2) holds that “there are none but thinking beings”. Few among the so-called idealists have held to panpsychism of the high-octane variety. To be sure Berkeley maintained an idealistic position on the basis of his thesis that “to be (real) is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). It seems more sensible, however, to adopt “to be is to be perceivable” (esse est percipile esse). For Berkeley, of course, this was a distinction without a difference: if it is perceivable at all, then God perceives it. But if we forego philosophical reliance on God, the matter looks different. We are then driven back to the question of what is an object of perception. On this basis, something really exists if it is, in principle, experientiable: “To be (physically) real is to be actually perceivable by a possible perceiver— one who is physically realizable in the world”. Physical existence is seen as tantamount to observability-in-principle for perceivers who are physically realizable in “the real world”. The basic idea is that one can only claim (legitimately or appropriately) that a particular physical object exists if there is potential experiential access to it—if something indeed exists in the world, then

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it must be observable-in-principle, detectable by a suitably endowed creature equipped with some suitably powerful technology. On such an approach, to exist (physically) is to be “observable” in principle— to be open to experiential confrontation by a cognition-capable creature of some sort. And such merely dispositional observability is clearly something objective, in contrast to actual observations, which are always personalized. Observability is a matter of what beings with mind-endowed capacities can encounter in experience, and not one of what any particular one or more of them actually does encounter in experience. The physical features of the real come to be seen as mind-correlative dispositions—conceivably dispositions in both the perceptual and the conceptual order. In this sense, detectability and discriminability in principle is an indispensable request for qualifying as part of the actual furniture of the world. And it is clear that such a weak—and cognitive rather than ontological—version of substantial idealism is altogether unproblematic. Over the years, many objections to idealism have been advanced. Samuel Johnson thought to refute Berkeley’s phenomenalism by kicking a stone. He conveniently forgot that Berkeley’s theory goes to great lengths to provide for stones—even to the point of invoking the aid of God on their behalf. G. E. Moore pointed to the human hand as an undeniably mind-external material object. He overlooked that, gesticulate as he would, he would do no more than induce people to accept the presence of a hand on the basis of the handorientation of their experience. C. S. Peirce’s “Harvard Experiment” of releasing a stone held aloft was supposed to establish scholastic realism because his audience could not control their expectation of the stone’s falling to earth. But an uncontrollable expectation is still an expectation, and the realism at issue is no more than a realistic thought-posture. Immanuel Kant’s famous “Refutation of Idealism” argued that our conception of ourselves as mind-endowed beings presupposes material objects because we view our mind-endowed selves as existing in an objective temporal order, which is something that indispensably requires the existence of periodic physical processes (clocks, pendula, planetary regularities) for its establishment. At most, however, this argumentation succeeds in showing that such physical processes have to be assumed by minds that insist upon a certain view of themselves—the issue of their actual mind-independent existence remaining unaddressed. (Kantian realism is an intra-experiential “empirical” realism.) In sum, each of the traditional objections to idealism has inherent limitations that allow a judiciously formulated version of idealism remain unscathed.

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4. Conceptual Idealism and its Merits The crux of the conceptual idealism here espoused is that the conceptual instruments we standardly and typically use in characterizing the things of the world we live in are conceptually mind invoking in pretty much the same way that our conception of a door-step or a hammer is. For such things are literally inconceivable under that description in a world that has never seen the presence of mind. Accordingly, the specifically conceptual idealism that will stand at the forefront of concern here maintains that any adequate descriptive characterization of even physical (“material”) reality must at some point involve an implicit reference to mental operations—that some commerce with mental characteristics and operations always occurs in any viable explanatory exposition of “the real world”.3 The central thesis of this position is that the mind is responsible for nature-as-we-understand-it, not, to be sure, by making nature itself, but rather through its formative role in providing the mode-and-manner determining categories in whose terms its conception is cast. On such an approach, the constitutive role of mind in nature is to be thought of neither in ontological nor in causal terms, but hermeneutically by way of concept-explication. It is not that mind produces nature, but rather that the way in which it effects its conceptualization of nature involves the analogy of mind; in sum, that we conceive of the real in mind-correlative terms of reference. Conceptual idealism’s central thesis is that the principal characterizing properties ascribed to physical things in our standard conceptual scheme are at bottom all relational properties, with some facet of “the mind”—or of minds-ingeneral—serving as one term of this relation. Specifically, it holds that the concept-scheme we standardly use to construe our experience itself ascribes to “material” objects properties and characteristics that involve some reference to mental operations within the very meaning of the terms at issue. Let us consider how this is so. Conceptual idealism is predicated upon the important distinction between conceptual mind-involvingness and explicit mind-invokingness, illustrated in the contrast between a book and a dream. To characterize an object of consideration as a dream or a worry is explicitly mind-invoking. For dreams and worries exist only where there is dreaming and worrying, which, by their very nature, typify the sorts of things at issue in the thought-processes of mind-endowed creatures: where there are dreams or worries, there must be mind-equipped beings to do the dreaming and worrying. A book, by contrast, seems at first sight entirely non-mental: books, after all, unlike dreams or worries, are physical objects. If mind-endowed beings were to vanish from the world, dreams and worries would vanish with them—but not books! Even if there were no mind-endowed beings, there could certainly be naturally evolved book-like objects, objects physically

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indistinguishable from books as we know them. Nevertheless there could not be books in a world where minds have no existence. For a book is, by definition, an artifact of a certain purposive (i.e., communicative) sort equipped with pages on which “reading material” is printed. Such purposive artifacts all invoke goal directed processes of a type that can exist only where there are minds. To be a book is to have writing in it, and not just marks. And writing is inherently the sort of thing produced and employed by mind-endowed beings. In sum, to explain adequately what a book is we must thus make reference to writing and thereby in turn ultimately to minds. The salient point here is not that the book is mentalesque as a physical object, but rather that to explicate the concept at issue in characterizing that object as “a book”—to explicate what it is to be a book—we must eventually refer to minds and their capabilities, seeing that, given our understanding of what is at issue, a book is by its very nature something for people to read. A world without minds can contain objects physically indistinguishable from our books and nails, but books and nails they could not be, since only artifacts created for a certain sort of intelligence-invoking purpose can correctly be so characterized. The status of those objects as books or nails is mind-conducted. And so, while books—unlike dreams—are not mental items, their conceptualization/characterization must nevertheless in the final analysis be cast in mind-involving terms of reference. Now the pivotal thesis of conceptual idealism is that we standardly think of reality—physical and material reality included—in implicitly mentalesque terms. The conceptual building blocks of our concept of physical reality— identificability, countability, measurability and the like—all involve an inherent reference to mentalesque, mind involving operations. Observing that our “standard conception” of the world we live in is that of a multitude of particulars endowed with empirical properties and positioned in space and time and interacting causally, conceptual idealism goes on to maintain that all of the salient conceptions operative here—particularity, spatio-temporal location, causal relatedness, and the possession of empirical (experientially accessible) properties— are (so conceptual idealism contends) mind-involving in exactly the sense explicated above. Within the present confines, there is not room enough to tell the whole story. So a vary part of it will have to do. Let us begin at the beginning—with particularity. Particularity is a matter of identification; causality a matter of bringing about, and Space-time a matter of locating—and all these are mind-involving processes. And similarly with the rest. But the fact is that careful analysis show that identification, causal explanation, and spatio-temporal positioning—are all implicitly mind-involving activities that envision the world’s operations in terms of characteristically mental processes. The world as we conceive it accordingly emerges throughout a mental artifact that is constructed (at least partly) in mindreferential terms—that the nature of the world as we conceive of it reflects the

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workings of mind. (Of course, in speaking of mind-involvement or mindinvocation, no reference to any particular mind is at issue. The mental aspect here operative is not private or personal: it is not a question of whose mind—of this or that mind rather than another. The dependence at issue is wholly generic and systematic in nature.) And so, conceptual idealism sees mind not as the causal source of the materials of nature, but as indispensably furnishing some of the interpretative mechanisms in whose terms we understand them. It is predicated on the view that reality as we standardly conceive it—in terms of material objects identifiable through discernible dispositional properties and causally interacting with one another in setting of space and time—is thereby unavoidably enmeshed with the operations of mind. The position rests squarely on the classical idealistic doctrine that mind contributes essentially to the constitution—as well as the constituting—of our knowledge of reality. It is sometimes said that idealism is predicated on a confusion of objects with our knowledge of them and conflates the real with our thought about it. But this charge misses the point when a conceptual idealism is at issue. Conceptual idealism’s thesis is not the trivial one that mind makes the idea of nature, it is not open to Santayana’s complaint against Schopenhauer that “he proclaimed that the world was his idea, but meant only (what is undeniable) that his idea of the world was his idea”. Rather, what is at issue is that mind-patterned conceptions are built into our idea of nature—that what this idea involves is itself limited to mental operation in that the way we standardly conceive of nature is in some crucial respects involved with the doings of minds. The conceptualistic idealist sees mind as an explicative resource for our understanding of the real, rather than as a productive source in the causal order of its genetic explanation. To say that we can only obtain a view of reality via its representations by mind is true but alas trivial—we can only obtain a mind-provided view of anything whatsoever. But to say that our view of reality (as standardly articulated) is one that represents reality by means of concepts and categories that are themselves mind-referring in their nature is something very different. For this idealism is one that sees our view of the world as to be such as to attribute to it features in whose conceptual make-up mind-coordinated conceptions play a pivotal and ineliminable role. And it is this position that is at stake in the conceptual idealism that is now at issue. Accordingly, while the thesis that our world picture is mind-provided is not a philosophical doctrine but a simple truism, nevertheless this thesis that an adequate world-picture is one that must be mind-patterned—that it will have to be painted in the coloration of mind, or (to put it less picturesquely) that will involve a recourse to the analogy of mind—is something at once far less obvious and far more interesting. For an idealism designed along these lines has it that while our minds neither make nor constitute nature, they nevertheless depict it in

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their own terms of reference. At this point, Santayana’s triviality charge falls apart.

5. What Conceptual Idealism Comes to The most common objection to idealism in general centers on the issue of the mind-independence of the real. “Surely”, so runs the objection, “things in nature would remain substantially unchanged if there were no minds. Had intelligent creatures never evolved on the earth, its mountains and valleys would nevertheless be much as they are, and the sun and moon remain substantially unaffected”. This contention is perfectly plausible in one aspect, namely the causal one—which is just why causal idealism has its problems. The crucial mind-independence of the real has to be granted in the causal mode. But not in the conceptual. For the objection’s exponent has to face the question of specifying just exactly what it is that would remain the same. “Surely roses would smell just as sweet in a mind-denuded world!” Well... yes and no. Agreed—the absence of minds would not change roses. But rose-fragrance and sweetness—and even the size and shape of roses—are all features whose character hinges on such mind-invoking operations as smelling, scanning, comparing, measuring, and the like. For something to be in a position to be called a rose it must, unavoidably, have various capacities to evoke mental responses—it must admit of identification, specification, classification, and property attribution, and these, by their very nature, are all mental operations. If we deprive things of all mindreferring referable features—all of their dispositions to elicit various sorts of responses in minds included—we have nothing left. A rose that is not conceptualized in mind-referential terms is—nothing at all. To be sure, the conceptual idealism envisioned here does not maintain that any and every logically possible way of conceiving nature must proceed in mind-invoking terms of reference (difficult though it is for us to imagine how things could be otherwise). Its purport, rather, is to stress the role of mindinvocation operative in the standard conceptual framework that we in fact (de facto) use to recognize and interpret our experience. It is geared to what has here been characterized as “our standard conception of reality”, and so its strictures need not and will not invariably apply to other possible conceptions of the real. (We do—and can—have no idea of how God conceives of things.) Is this concession damaging to the present position? Does it mean that conceptual idealism, with its focus in the ideational mechanisms in whose terms “we standardly think” about the real, is a position having no more than a sociological significance? The answer is clearly negative. For while how we act is simply a reflection of sociological matters, how we think of things is, clearly, something of deeper and more far-reaching significance—and inevitably so, see-

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ing that our only possible access to how things are is through the mediation of what we think them to be. There is, ultimately, no sensible way of limiting the consequences of “how we think of things” to appertain merely and wholly to facts about us rather than facts about them. Granted, the presently envisioned sort of idealism is not substantive but methodological. It is not a denial of real objects that exist independently of mind and as such are causally responsible for our objective experience. Quite the reverse, it is designed to facilitate their acceptance. But it insists that the hermeneutical-conceptual rationale for this acceptance lies in a framework of mind supplied purpose. For our mind-independent reality arises not from experience but for it—i.e., for the sake of our being in a position to exploit our experience to ground inquiry and communication with respect to the objectively real. In sum, paradoxical though it may seem, we obtain a realism the tenor of whose justificatory basis is thoroughly idealistic.

6. Is This Enough? Still, must not a genuine idealism ask for more? Must it not argue transcendentally that every possible conceptual scheme for exploiting experience to form a picture of objective reality must be mind-involving? Can it rest content with what is so relative to our standard concept-scheme rather than inevitably? As one critic has objected: Rescher tries to handle the problem by an appeal... to... the standard conceptual framework. But... the real and unavoidable problem is to determine the conditions of the possibility of any conceptual framework whatsoever.4

A splendid Kantian ambition, this—but very much misguided. For it makes little sense to demand that which one cannot realistically hope to obtain. Kant’s lesson holds good: for us, reality unavoidably has to be an empirical reality— reality as we can experience it. This sort of transcendentalism is quixotically unrealistic because we cannot use the mechanism of our conceptual scheme to project from within the confines of that very conceptual scheme what the essential lineaments of other, different conceptual schemes must of necessity be. No state of science, no genre of art, no style of life or framework of thought can possibly manage to encompass all the rest. This sort of thought-imperialism is just not in the cards. Our own cognitive position cannot at one and the same time be—as it inevitably must—just one position among others, and at the same time somehow encompass them by embracing their essential features. No state of knowledge, no doctrinal theory or position can ever find the holy grail of selftranscendence—can ever transmute itself into something that achieves more than the situational immanency of being just one particular alternative among

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others. The envisioned quest for a self-transcendingly transcendental basis of “conditions under which alone conceptualization is possible” must accordingly be seen as a futile endeavor that is destined to failure from the very outset. And the implications of this fact are, for us, innocuous rather than skeptically nihilistic. For that standard concept-scheme of ours has to be taken at face value. No doubt, it is—in theory—conceivably one alternative among others, without any inevitable foothold in the very structure of intellect, let alone in the nature of things at large. No doubt, its status is the product of natural and cultural evolution. Let all this be as it may. Still, for us the fact remains that this scheme is what we have and is all that we have. What matters in the end is that this alternative is our alternative. Our intellectual dependence on it is as absolute as our physical dependence on the air we breathe. For us there are no options. If this be “mere contingency”, we have little alternative but to make the most of it.5

7. Problems of Mind and Matter The following sort of objection against a conceptual idealism along the indicated lines may well be offered: how can one sensibly maintain the mind dependency of matter as ordinarily conceived, when all the world recognizes that the operations of mind are based on the machinations of matter? (As Mark Twain asked: “When the body is drunk does the mind stay sober?”) To be an idealist in the face of this recognition is surely to be involved in a vicious or at least vitiating circle. However, this objection simply gets things wrong. There just is no question of any real conflict once the proper distinctions have been drawn, because—as indicated above—altogether different sorts of dependencies or requirements are at issue in the two theses: (1) that mind is causally dependent upon (i.e., causally requires) matter, in that mental process demands causally or productively the physical workings of matter; (2) that matter (conceived of in the standard manner of material substance subject to physical law) is explicatively dependent upon (i.e., conceptually requires) mind, in that the conception of material processes involves hermeneutically or semantically the mentalistic working of mind. We return here to the crucial distinction between the conceptual order with its essentially hermeneutic or explicative perspective upon the intellectual exposition of meanings, and the causal order with its explanatory perspective upon the productive efficacy of physical processes. In the hermeneutic framework of consideration, our concern is not with any facets of the causal explanation of

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intellectual processes, but upon understanding them from within, on their own terms—in the conceptual order. The issue is not one of causal explanation at all, but one of the understanding to be achieved through an analysis of the internal meaning-content of concepts and of the semantical information conveyed by statements in which they are operative. Because of the fundamental difference between these two perspectives, any conflict in the dependency relations to which they give rise is altogether harmless from the standpoint of actual inconsistency. The circle breaks because different modes of dependency are involved: we move from mind to matter in the conceptual order of understanding (of rationes cognoscendi or rather concipiendi) and from matter to mind in the ontological dependency order of causation (rationes essendi). Once all the due distinctions are duly heeded, any semblance of vicious circularity disappears. No doubt, this calls for a certain amount of care and subtlety—but then so do many issues of intellectual life, and why should things be easier in philosophy than elsewhere? And so, while the conceptual idealist’s thesis that one specific direction of dependence (viz., that of the physical upon that of the mental) is built into the view of reality at issue in our standard conceptual scheme, this must not be seen as conflicting with the debatable (but by no means thereby negligible) prospect that the scientific explanation of causal relationships might envision a reversal in the direction of dependence. Where different perspectives are involved, seemingly conflicting theses are perfectly compatible. (I can say without conflict that my car is economical in point of gas mileage and uneconomical in point of maintenance costs.) But even if no vicious circle arises, do we not arrive at an equally vicious infinite regress that altogether precludes understanding? For is understandability not precluded from the outset if an adequate overall understanding of mind requires reference to its causal origins in matter and an adequate overall understanding of matter requires reference to its functional presuppositions of a mind-invoking sort? The answer is negative. A problematic regress would arise here only if one adopted an essentially linear model of understanding. But this is quite inappropriate in the case of coordinated concepts such as the present instance of mind/matter or the simpler case of cause/effect. To say that we cannot fully understand the cause until we understand its effect, and that we cannot fully understand the effect until we understand the cause, is not to show that there is a vitiating regress with the result that we cannot understand either one. All it shows is that two such coordinated and interrelated concepts cannot be set out through a sequential explanation but must be grasped together in their systematic unity. A somewhat crude analogy may be helpful at this point. Take a knife and its blade. If that object yonder is to count as a knife, then that shiny thing attached to the handle must be a blade, but this thing cannot count as a blade unless the

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whole it comprises together with that handle is a knife. The two items stand in conceptually symbiotic apposition: X cannot be properly characterized as X unless it is duly related to Y and Y cannot be properly characterized as such unless it is duly related to X. We cannot pick up either end of the stick without avoiding the other, but must grasp the whole in one fell swoop. Just such a cognitive coordination of mentalistic and materialistic concepts holds with respect to our present analysis of their mutual interdependencies. But interdependency does not annihilate difference, and by maintaining due distinctions, any collapse into vicious circularity or vitiating regress can be avoided. Conceptual or hermeneutical idealism is thus even compatible with a causal materialism that maintains matter to be basic to mind in the causal order. On the causal issues of the origins of mind, conceptualistic idealism is silent and so compatible with various theories—materialism itself not excluded. Conceptual idealism just is not an explanatory theory regarding the causal mechanisms of the mind’s processes or mode of origination; it is an analytical or hermeneutic theory regarding the nature of the conceptual mechanisms of the categories of understanding. It can thus coexist with any theory of mind that is articulated along strictly causal lines, be it a materialistic view that sees the causal origin of mind in matter of a Cartesian-style dualism of reciprocal influence or even an epiphenomenalism. The conceptual idealist accordingly has no vested interest in denying a “scientistic” view that mind and its functioning may ultimately prove to be somehow causally emergent from the processes of matter and that mental operations cannot function in disembodied detachment from the causal functioning of a material substrate. The position does not need to be argued through an attack upon causal materialism: it is quite compatible with the idea that mental functioning has its material basis and causal origin in the realm of physical process. The doctrine’s point is simply that our standard conception of the world—its material sector specifically included—is forthcoming in terms of reference that are at bottom mind-involving. It is the analytical issue of how we actually think of the world—those physical processes themselves included!—not the operational issue of the mechanics of its causal goings-on, that constitutes the focus of concern. And this point is crucially connected to the issue of idealism’s contemporary viability as mastered in our title. For our present-day intellectual outlook is committed to a scientifically naturalistic understanding of nature far more deeply and pervasively than was the case with the cognitive ethos of the earlier eras in which idealism took root. But what of an “identity theory of mind” that flatly identifies mental processes with the operations of certain material configurations—namely our brains? Is our conceptual idealism not incompatible with such a theory? Not necessarily. It depends upon whether the identity at issue is seen as being a factual one (like the identity of the morning star with the evening star or that of the tallest man in

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the room with the poorest man in the room), or as a conceptually necessary one (like that of Smith’s only brother with Smith’s only male sibling). Our idealism will encounter no difficulties with a thesis of contingent identity. An incompatibility will arise only if the identity theory of the mental with the material is taken to obtain in conceptual terms, as holding the essentially concept-relative thesis that mentalistic talk is eliminable, in that it can be translated without conceptually viable residue into talk about the behavior of matter. Such a conceptually eliminative reductionism is indeed incompatible with a conceptual idealism. For if “mentalese” were analytically altogether reducible to materialistic discourse, then mind could not be conceptually basic to matter in the sense of our theory. But, of course, since our theory is based on an analysis of the standard conceptual scheme, this goes no further than to show that this ordinary scheme is incompatible with a conceptually reductive materialism, and this upshot is perhaps not surprising. (If we point out to the reductive materialist that he violates the standard conceptual scheme, he may well reply that he is only too ready to do so. Now in taking this stance he is, to be sure, not inconsistent. But he does cut himself off from participation in those discussions that take place within the thought-framework of our standard conceptual scheme which is, after all, the frame of reference in which the whole issue is posed in the first place.)

Notes 1. This paper originally appeared in Idealistic Studies, 27, 1998, pp. 239-250; it is here reprinted with permission by the editors of this journal. 2. B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 58. 3. The author’s involvement with the defense of this version of idealism goes back to his Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973). 4. R. E. Innes, “Review of Conceptual Idealism”, Foundations of Language, 14, 1976, pp. 287-295, see p. 294. 5. This issue is also treated from another point of departure in the author’s The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).

Sprigge’s Vindication of Concrete Universals1 James W. Allard

1. Introduction G. E. Moore’s role in deposing idealism from its reigning position in British philosophy is well known. “It was towards the end of 1898”—Bertrand Russell writes—“that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps”.2 Together Russell and Moore reconceptualized philosophy as the study of a group of long standing intellectual problems. Yet even though Russell initially followed Moore, his contribution to the revolution rapidly became much larger. It was Russell rather than Moore who pioneered a new approach to these long standing problems. He did so by helping to create mathematical logic and by treating logic as the essence of philosophy. This enabled him to argue that philosophical problems could be solved by constructive uses of technical results in mathematical logic. He thereby provided philosophy with something like a scientific basis. Philosophy in the twentieth century has sometimes been described as “the Age of Russell”, but never, to my knowledge, “the Age of Moore”. But while Moore did not play a role in the development and use of mathematical logic, he introduced a new emphasis in philosophy, an emphasis on meaning. Moore used his question, “What exactly do you mean by...?” to devastating effect in various controversies with idealists. Closely examining the meanings of words, particularly words favored by idealists and often apart from the contexts in which they had used them, allowed Moore to maintain that the claims idealists formulated by means of their words were hopelessly confused. A good example of this is found in his essay, “Identity”. Moore’s aim in this essay is to demarcate the different senses of the term “identity” and the resulting different kinds of claims that can be expressed by identity statements. Moore prefaces his statement of this aim, however, by stressing that he does not regard his results as having “merely departmental interest”. “The characteristic doctrines of most philosophers”—he writes—“are chiefly due to their failure to trace the consequences of admitted principles”.3 As his subsequent remarks indicate, the philosophers in question are idealists. They express certain of their doctrines using the phrase “identity in difference” and this phrase, Moore claims, is ambiguous and therefore in need of clarification. In the first part of his essay, Moore argues that the identity of indiscernibles holds for universals but not for particulars. As a result, he claims, there is “such

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a thing as numerical difference, different from conceptual difference”.4 In the second part of his essay, Moore traces the consequences of recognizing the existence of conceptually identical but numerically different particulars. He does this by distinguishing the different meanings of “identity”. This investigation yields two significant conclusions. One is a further development of Moore’s philosophical realism, his alternative to idealism. It is that material objects do not persist through change. “The ‘material’ identity of a thing”, Moore asserts, “may be said to consist in the continuous existence of conceptually identical particulars, which have at different times the same relation to different particulars”.5 Moore’s stated argument for this conclusion is difficult to follow, but it seems to depend on his taking conceptually identical but numerically different particulars to be individuated by their positions in space and time.6 Moore thus in effect argues that because the occupants of different positions in space and time are different particulars, no particular can persist through time. Moore’s other significant conclusion is a criticism of one of the distinctive concepts used by philosophical idealists, the concept of a concrete universal. This concept, Moore claims, results from the idealists’ conflation of two different senses of the phrase “identity in difference”. In the first sense, Moore claims, two numerically different but conceptually identical particulars, say two reds of the same tint, are asserted to be conceptually identical. But in the second sense, Moore continues, two numerically and conceptually different members of the same class, say the numbers two and three, are said to be identical in the sense that they are both numbers. Moore then comments, Yet it must be insisted that 2 and 3 are not conceptually identical. Their relation to number is quite different from that of two [conceptually identical] particulars to their universal. Though this, therefore, is a case in which identity is predicated, I think the usage is one which might well be given up. The confusion caused by it is largely responsible for that conception of “concrete” or “self-differentiating” “universal”...7

Moore follows this with a one page account of how the main conclusions of absolute idealism can be derived by means of some additional confusions from this “confused” conception of a concrete universal. In his account Moore provides no references whatsoever to any works by idealists and he gives no evidence that the concept of a concrete universal is a result of this confusion. Without even examining the use to which his opponents put the term “concrete universal”, Moore supplies its use with a rationale, diagnoses a confusion in the rationale, attributes the confusion to his opponents, and thereby rejects both their conclusions and their use of the term “concrete universal”. Despite the fact that Moore’s influence has not been lasting in the same way as Russell’s, his critique of idealism, of which the above passage is a specimen, has left a legacy. Philosophical idealism has about it an air of paradox. This is one reason why idealists, rather than their realistic opponents, have often laid

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more stress on arguments. Yet the force of these arguments can be undermined by showing that the concepts employed in them are not carefully defined. This was the case with the concept of a concrete universal. Some British idealists made excessive claims for the importance of the concept of a concrete universal. To take the most notable example, Bernard Bosanquet referred to it as “the key to all sound philosophy”.8 Yet as his critics pointed out, he seems to have had three different conceptions of a concrete universal.9 For those not already committed to idealism, this lack of clear definition of a central concept posed problems. Moore took advantage of this. Rather than challenging the arguments of his idealistic opponents, Moore questioned the intelligibility of the concepts they employed in those arguments. This allowed him to suggest that the arguments themselves were thoroughly confused. Despite the difficulty of understanding Moore’s own arguments, especially in his early essays, his criticisms of idealism have been influential. They have made it difficult not only to reconstruct the arguments of idealists but even to understand their premises. Any serious defense of philosophical idealism thus not only has to argue for idealistic claims, but to rehabilitate the vocabulary with which to state them. This is part of the task that Timothy Sprigge has set for himself: to argue for philosophical idealism and to make it plausible by rehabilitating key idealistic concepts like that of a concrete universal. In what follows I will examine Sprigge’s rehabilitation of the concept of a concrete universal and its place in his version of absolute idealism. I will begin by describing Sprigge’s method of pursuing metaphysics. Next, I will describe his use of this method by sketching his overall argument for absolute idealism and the role of concrete universals in it. I will conclude by explaining how he defines and employs the concept of a concrete universal in giving an idealistic account of the reality of perceptual objects.

2. Sprigge’s Method in Metaphysics Sprigge’s principal account of his metaphysical method is found in his Vindication of Absolute Idealism. Metaphysics, he writes, can no longer begin from “epistemological scratch”.10 We have no choice, he thinks, but to take common, firmly held beliefs about the world as a starting point for metaphysics. Once these common, firmly held beliefs have been identified, Sprigge proposes a procedure for discarding some of them, at least for metaphysical purposes, and replacing them with others. This procedure depends on a distinction Sprigge draws between two different kinds of beliefs or, as he prefers to say in his later work, judgments.11 Sprigge draws this distinction in the course of developing an imagist theory of belief.12 Such a theory takes occurrent belief as the primary object of analysis.

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One of its goals is to specify what it is for something in one’s consciousness to constitute an awareness of something outside of one’s consciousness.13 An imagist theory tries to explain this in terms of the images in one’s consciousness. In order to do this Sprigge distinguishes two different sorts of judgments, real judgments and notional judgments. He provides an imagist theory of real judgments and then explains how it can be modified and extended to cover notional judgments. An example of a real judgment will perhaps be useful here. Suppose that I judge that there is a red apple on the tree in my backyard. If this is a real judgment, then what enables me to make it, Sprigge thinks, is that my conscious state includes mental imagery and that this imagery includes some quality, e.g., the quality of being red, that I am judging something outside my consciousness, in this case a particular apple, to have. In order to use the quality of being red in this way, I perform the act of mentally removing features from my conscious state, so that the only remaining feature is the quality of being red. This color, so abstracted, is a quality that may be found in many experiences and hence it is a universal. If I combine this universal with a mental act directed to an apple on the apple tree in my backyard, then I form a real judgment. In such a judgment, Sprigge writes, “a characteristic which qualifies some component within experience is taken not as such a characteristic but as a characteristic of some reality beyond experience”.14 In a real judgment, then, I am in a suitably broad sense imagining something that I am taking to be real.15 Real judgments, understood in this way, have a significant distinguishing feature. They “present us with some aspect of the character of the object we are thinking about so that it is actualized not only in the object but in our consciousness (not only formally in the scholastic sense but also objectively)”.16 In other words, in making a real judgment I attribute to the judgment’s object of reference a characteristic that is present in my consciousness when making the judgment. Sprigge describes this feature of real judgments by saying that real judgments have the property of being intuitively fulfilled. He emphasizes that intuitive fulfillment is a matter of degree and that the degree of fulfillment may be very slight. Even so, real judgments, insofar as they are intuitively fulfilled, enable us to imagine what reality is literally like. Accordingly, real judgments, when completely fulfilled, would enable us to imagine reality exactly as it is. In this possibly ideal case real judgments would be literally true.17 Sprigge contrasts real judgments with notional judgments. Like real judgments, notional judgments fuse “the experience of some universal realised in consciousness with a mental directedness upon reality beyond”.18 They differ from real judgments in that when we make them, we do not take the universal realized in consciousness to be literally a characteristic of the object of our judgment, the “reality beyond”. An example of such a judgment is one in which the universals that determine the content of the judgment are present in consciousness as words or other symbols. For example, if I judge that there is a red

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apple on the tree in my backyard and the only imagery in my consciousness when I make the judgment is verbal imagery, then my judgment is notional. Notional judgments, so understood, are not intuitively fulfilled. They do not envision reality as it is. They are, therefore, never literally true, even to a slight degree. As this example illustrates, however, they may be replaced by real judgments that are capable of being literally true. This will occur if I replace the verbal imagery with sensory images capable of exemplifying universals that are exemplified by the object of my judgment, the apple. Moreover, while not capable of being literally true, notional judgments are capable of being pragmatically true. They are so when they prompt satisfactory emotional and behavioral responses to reality. Pragmatic truth, understood in this way, is a matter of degree. Sprigge distinguishes between two kinds of pragmatic truth, which he contrasts as useful devices and useful fictions. A judgment is pragmatically true as a useful device when it offers no way of literally envisioning reality and is not replaceable by a judgment that does, but nevertheless provides a way of adjusting emotionally and behaviorally to reality. Sprigge suggests that a judgment asserting that an abstract model describes a physical particle might be pragmatically true in this sense.19 A judgment is true as a useful fiction when it does offer a way of literally envisioning reality, but the way it does so is literally false. Such judgments may nevertheless provide a way of satisfactorily adjusting to reality. When they do, they are pragmatically true, but as pragmatic fictions. For reasons I will mention below, Sprigge thinks that judgments about physical objects are pragmatic fictions in this sense. They are useful ways of envisioning reality for practical purposes, but they may be replaced by literally true real judgments. According to Sprigge’s classification of judgments, notional judgments are only capable of pragmatic truth. They are not intuitively fulfilled, although they may serve as substitutes for intuitively fulfillable real judgments that replace them. True real judgments, by contrast, are intuitively fulfilled, at least to a degree. This does not, however, mean that they are capable of becoming literally true to their full extent. For it may be the case that real judgments envision their objects as having incompatible characteristics. In such cases these judgments may be fulfillable as far as particular characteristics are concerned, but not fulfillable on the whole. Sprigge thinks this is the case with real judgments about physical objects because the concept of a physical object combines incompatible characteristics. In such cases real judgments may still be pragmatically true by virtue of prompting appropriate adjustments to reality, even though they are literally false. Sprigge’s imagist theory of judgment is important for his metaphysics because he takes metaphysics to be an attempt to find very general, literal truths about reality. This allows him to employ his classification of judgments in identifying these truths. To do so, he takes as his starting point common firmly held beliefs about reality. These beliefs may be either real or notional depending on

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whether or not they purport to envision reality as it literally is. Sprigge then proposes to select from this set those beliefs that are intuitively fulfillable and that we have reason to think do not attribute incompatible characteristics to their objects. Barring further difficulties, he accepts this class of beliefs as true in the sense of literally envisioning reality as it is. Next, he proposes to identify beliefs that while to some extent intuitively fulfilled show themselves to be incapable of full intuitive fulfillment. He accepts this class of beliefs as pragmatically true. He attempts to replace these pragmatically true judgments with real judgments that are fulfilled by the fulfilled content of their pragmatically true counterparts and to use these real judgments to explain why their pragmatically true counterparts have worked so well. Real judgments that meet these conditions he also accepts as true. Having thus identified a group of literally true beliefs, Sprigge proposes to accept as true additional judgments that cohere with the true real judgments already identified and that coherently fill out the picture of the world contained in those judgments.

3. Concrete Universals and Absolute Idealism Sprigge employs this method in his argument for absolute idealism. He does not, however, employ it in a linear, step by step fashion. Instead, he begins the first part of his argument with common, firmly held beliefs about the physical world as embodied in different philosophical conceptions or theories of physical objects. There are seven specific conceptions that concern him: naive realism, subjective idealism, naive scientism, critical scientism, phenomenalism, phenomenalist instrumentalism, and the conception that takes physical objects to be concrete universals. Sprigge distinguishes these conceptions by means of the way in which they conceive the relation between a perceiver’s perceptual experience and the object perceived. He believes that each of them emphasizes some important common and firmly held beliefs.20 Sprigge then examines each conception to see whether it judges physical objects to have a phenomenal as well as a noumenal character.21 If the conception in question does, Sprigge passes on to the next conception. If the conception does not, then Sprigge argues that the conception reveals itself as in some way incoherent as it becomes increasingly fulfilled. Sprigge further argues that the incoherence he has identified can be removed by attributing to that conception a belief in the phenomenal or noumenal nature of a physical object. What this in effect does is to accept certain beliefs defining that conception as pragmatically true, and to replace those beliefs with beliefs that capture the fulfilled contents of the original beliefs without their incoherence. By examining each conception in this way, Sprigge concludes that physical objects are best conceived as having phenomenal and noumenal components.22 Having established this conclusion, Sprigge then pro-

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vides four arguments for taking the noumenal component as psychical. The last of these arguments is the strongest. Its conclusion is that experience is the only conceivable form of reality that can be literally envisioned. In this part of the argument, Sprigge employs the last part of his metaphysical method. He argues that taking noumenal reality to be sentient is consistent with the propositions he has already accepted and fills out the view of the world contained in them. This part of Sprigge’s argument is a vindication of panpsychism.23 The next part of Sprigge’s argument is a vindication of absolute idealism. This part of the argument depends on the nature of relations. Sprigge identifies three kinds of relations, ideal relations, real relations, and holistic relations. An ideal relation is one that holds between two things as a result of their nonrelational properties. For example, suppose that one color patch is brighter than another. This is a result of the fact that patch 1 is of color A and patch 2 is of color B, where color A is brighter than color B. Here the relation holds as a result of non-relational properties of the two patches.24 A real relation is simply one that is not ideal in this sense.25 At this point Sprigge introduces the concept of a holistic relation. Such a relation holds between two or more things when they form a whole including all of the related things to which each makes a contribution. The relation between the lines forming the sides of a triangle is a holistic relation in this sense.26 Sprigge then argues that all real relations are holistic. Given the premise that everything in the universe is really related to everything else, and the panpsychist conclusion that reality is experience, it follows that all experiences form a whole in which every related thing is a component. Following the idealistic tradition, Sprigge calls this whole “the universe” or “the absolute”. He concludes that the universe is one thing, the absolute, and with this his vindication of absolute idealism is complete.27 Contrary to what Moore suggests, this argument for absolute idealism does not depend on any notion of concrete universals, confused or otherwise. Sprigge does introduce his concept of a concrete universal as one of his seven conceptions of physical reality. As his discussion makes clear, he regards it as the most satisfactory way of conceiving of physical objects because it removes a significant incoherence from other conceptions while successfully capturing the experiential content that fulfills them. But while he uses this conception as a working conception of the physical in his argument, the argument in no way depends on this conception of the physical. Sprigge makes this explicit when he writes, “Since my most essential claim is that the noumenal must be recognized on any theory of the physical, I shall not stick pedantically to forms of expression suited only to one of them, but shall put things sometimes with a looseness somewhat pleasanter”.28 The concept of a concrete universal, then, is not an essential component in Sprigge’s vindication of absolute idealism. Instead, the role of the concrete universal is to be found in giving an idealistic account of the objects of perception. If as idealists claim, reality is in some way

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dependent on consciousness, then physical objects, objects independent of mind that are perceived only in virtue of already being there, are pragmatic fictions. The reality that lies behind these fictions must be “some vast system of realities which are not thus physical within which conscious subjects somehow really have their being”.29 In order to defend their position convincingly, idealists must explain how conscious subjects can be aware of what they take to be physical objects where their belief that there are such objects is a pragmatic fiction. This is where Sprigge employs the concept of a concrete universal. Its use, he writes, lies “in the elucidation... of notions such as that of a continuant, and its relation to its phases, or a physical thing, and its relation to its appearances”.30 Using the concept of a concrete universal to elucidate the nature of continuants allows Sprigge to show how his idealistic metaphysics conforms to perceptual experience.

4. Perceptual Objects as Concrete Universals Continuants are objects that remain the same over a period of time. Ordinary physical objects but also persons with bodies are examples of continuants. Sprigge begins his discussion of continuants by noting that certain philosophers have been suspicious of their very existence. As previously indicated, a good example of such a philosopher is Moore, at least in his early work. Taking space and time as principles of individuation leads him to conclude that material things that exist at different times or in different places at the same time are not identical. As a consequence, he thinks there are no genuine material continuants. What passes for the material identity of a thing consists in the existence of a temporal sequence of conceptually identical particulars, a kind of space-time worm. Moore advances this as an argument against the reality of material continuants, but as Sprigge notes, this sort of argument can be employed against the existence of other sorts of continuants as well.31 Sprigge accepts one important part of this argument. He agrees with Moore that different temporal parts of the universe are different in just the same way that different spatial parts of the universe are different. As a consequence, the momentary parts of a continuant, however similar in other respects, are temporally distinct. Sprigge refers to the temporally distinct parts of a continuant as “momentary particulars”.32 Now it might be thought that accepting the existence of momentary particulars entails that there are no true continuants but merely distinct, temporally contiguous particulars that form space-time worms. The entire worm is present throughout a period of time only in the sense that one or another of its parts is present at each moment during that period. The worm itself, however, is not wholly present in any of these parts.33 But Sprigge denies that this follows. He thinks that where the momentary particulars in a continuant

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actualize a concrete universal, that universal will be fully present in all of its distinct momentary particulars. Pace Moore, however, the concept of a concrete universal is not the result of a confusion between two different senses of identity. Instead, it provides a distinctive way of conceiving the relation between the temporal parts of a continuant. Sprigge develops his account of concrete universals by considering a specific set of abstract universals, those that group their instances into genera and species. Aristotle referred to these universals as “secondary substances”. Like other universals they may be instantiated in spatially and temporally distinct instances. But they may also be instantiated in momentary particulars that in addition to being instances of the same abstract universal also have certain kinds of relations between them. The relations of particular interest for Sprigge occur where the instances form a dynamically linked sequence. In this context the term “dynamic” indicates that the reactualization of the universal in each instance is somehow generated by the previous instance.34 A particularly important example of such a sequence is found in the relations between the successive momentary states of consciousness of one person, the states Sprigge calls “momentary centres of experience”.35 Sprigge identifies two dynamic relations between these states: (1) “the felt flow of one state into another” and (2) “the recollection in one state of its predecessors”.36 Suppose now that there is a universal that is only instantiated in the members of such a sequence and that it is instantiated in all of them. This universal is the nature common to all of its instances. Like other abstract universals, it is fully present in its temporally separate instances. It is not partially present in them in the way in which a spacetime worm is partially present in each of its parts. In such a case, the instances of this universal form a concrete universal, “an abstract universal qua actualised in a set of instances related to each other in some concrete manner, i.e., not a matter of identity or affinity in their character”.37 Conceptualizing continuants as concrete universals allows Sprigge to accept the existence of momentary particulars, while denying that there are no true continuants. For the universal actualized in the momentary particulars of a dynamically linked sequence is fully present in each particular. This provides a sense in which the momentary particulars are identical. They are identical in being actualizations of an abstract universal present in all and only members of the same dynamically linked sequence. Because continuants are reactualizing universals, they endure through time. Having thus vindicated the concept of a concrete universal, Sprigge proceeds to employ it in providing an idealistic account of the objects of perception. Here again Sprigge proceeds in accordance with his metaphysical method. He begins by identifying three common sense beliefs about perceptual objects. The first is that perceptual objects are physical objects, objects existing independently of consciousness over periods of time. The second is that perceptual experiences of

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physical objects are not experiences of representations but of the objects themselves. The third is that different people can have different experiences of an object, particularly experiences involving perceptual relativity, where the differences are in the perceivers rather than in the objects perceived. As Sprigge emphasizes, these all seem to be part of a common sense core of beliefs about perceptual objects. The first presents the problem of explaining how there can be continuing physical objects. As Sprigge showed in the case of the identity of a continuing consciousnesses, this sort of problem can be solved by treating the continuant in question as a concrete universal. This can be done with physical objects by specifying the appropriate universal actualized in the momentary instances and by specifying the generating relation between the instances. Such a solution does not, however, seem required to explain how physical objects can be continuants. But common sense beliefs about perceptual objects present another difficulty as well. This difficulty is that it is hard to see how the second and third beliefs can be consistent. If both are true, then different people perceive the same object differently where this difference is a difference in their experiences, even though each person perceives the object itself. If we assume that perceptions are generally veridical, surely a reliable assumption, then the same object will be one and the same as itself but different for different perceivers. Sprigge thinks that conceiving physical objects as concrete universals solves this problem as well. It does so by treating the whole set of perspectival versions of the object present at one moment as generated by the previous set of perspectival variations. The present set’s characteristics are determined by those in the previous set, while the following set’s characteristics are determined by those of the present set. The fully concretized universal actualized in all of these instances can then be conceived as one present to an ideal observer who would be in a position to see how all of the variations of the universal could be actualized in its instances. Sprigge leaves the exact details required of such universals vague, but that is in keeping with his overall project of showing how it is possible to give an idealistic account of perceptual objects. Conceiving of them as physical objects and conceiving physical objects as concrete universals is the first step in this process.38 I will only describe the second step briefly since it does not depend on his conception of a concrete universal. It is that physical objects, even when conceived by enlightened common sense as concrete universals, are pragmatic fictions. His strongest argument here is the last of the arguments he later employs in defense of panpsychism. In it Sprigge argues for the conclusion that “there is no conceivable sort of concrete actuality but sentience”.39 If follows from this that the conception of a physical object as something independent of experience is inconceivable and this is Sprigge’s ground for denying the existence of such objects. This allows him to conceptualize the objects of perception

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as concrete universals whose underlying noumenal realities are in some way sentient. This is to treat them as streams of experience.40 Judgments about objects of perception conceived in this way are suitable replacements for incoherent common sense judgments about physical objects and they retain all of the intuitive fulfillment of their common sense counterparts. This explains why common sense beliefs about physical objects are pragmatically true. It retains the intuitively fulfilled content of common sense judgments about physical objects, while treating these objects as pragmatic fictions. By so doing it provides an idealistic account of perceptual objects. It does so by explaining the common sense physical world as “a construction of which the only parts with literal existence are those present as actual constituents of someone’s consciousness”.41 Sprigge thus rehabilitates the concept of a concrete universal and employs it in defense of absolute idealism. Much of Sprigge’s work is speculative metaphysics and his employment of the concept of a concrete universal is of a piece with it. But his aims are certainly not exhausted by speculative metaphysics. In Theories of Existence he says that the main message of absolute idealism is that we are each aspects of a larger whole which has its own larger life, and that if we follow the leadings which come as from the deeper levels of our being, which are dimly continuous with the whole to which we belong, we will gain the sense that our strivings to fulfill our own potentialities play a part in some deep, if largely hidden, significance possessed by the universe as a whole. Those leadings are more particularly to be trusted which bring us into union with our fellows, human and perhaps even animal. Our separation from these is an illusion... and we are nearer to the core of things when we partly transcend it in cooperative ethical, cultural, and intellectual endeavours and in mutual aid.42

This is the message of absolute idealism and it is a message Sprigge has himself magnificently championed.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Gordon Brittan for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 2. B. Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975), p. 42. 3. G. E. Moore, “Identity”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1, 1900-1901, p. 103. This essay is reprinted, with original pagination, in G. E. Moore, The Early Essays, ed. T. Regan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 121-145. 4. Ibid., p. 110. 5. Ibid., p. 127.

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6. Ibid., p. 109; T. Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 49. 7. G. E. Moore, “Identity”, op. cit., p. 125. 8. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1927), p. 40. 9. For a discussion of these three conceptions, see W. J. Mander, “Bosanquet and the Concrete Universal”, The Modern Schoolman, 77, 2000, pp. 293-308. 10. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), p. 34. 11. In what follows I will use the terms “belief” and “judgment” interchangeably. 12. Sprigge takes image-mentalism to be the most viable imagist theory. According to image mentalism, “A fully realized belief experience in a certain kind of fact will be an experience of images which exemplify universals similar to those which would occur in a fact of that kind, together with an experience in response to this experience which would have been a standard response to an experience of a fact of this kind said to be believed in”. See his Facts, Words and Beliefs (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 231. 13. This is the feature Sprigge emphasizes in setting out his metaphysical method; see Vindication, op. cit., p. 21. The other main goal of an imagist theory is to specify what it is to believe something as opposed to merely supposing it, or considering it, or wishing that it were the case. Cf. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993), p. 297. 14. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 22. 15. It must be suitably broad to cover non-visual imagination. 16. Sprigge, James and Bradley, op. cit., p. 64. 17. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., pp. 22-23. 18. Ibid., p. 22. 19. Ibid., p. 24. He adds the caveat that examples of pragmatic devices and pragmatic fictions will all be controversial. 20. Ibid., p. 67. 21. Sprigge takes the noumenal character to be the thing in itself that backs the phenomenal character. He does not follow Kant, however, in taking the thing in itself to be inaccessible to consciousness. Ibid., p. 40. 22. Ibid., pp. 39-84. 23. Ibid., pp. 85-140. 24. Sprigge notes that relations of this kind are internal in Russell’s sense in that they are grounded in the natures of the related terms. “Russell and Bradley on Relations”, in Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume, ed. G. W. Roberts (New York: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 160161. 25. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 183. 26. Ibid., pp. 187-188. 27. Ibid., pp. 207-224.

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28. Ibid., p. 87. 29. Ibid., p. 81. 30. Ibid., p. 277. 31. Ibid., pp. 9-10. 32. Ibid., p. 165. 33. Sprigge, “Personal and Impersonal Identity”, Mind, 97, 1988, p. 33. 34. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 35. Sprigge, Vindication, p. 12. 36. Ibid., p. 14. 37. Ibid., p. 69. 38. Ibid., pp. 68-73. 39. Ibid., pp. 110-131. 40. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 311. 41. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 252. 42. Sprigge, Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 75-76.

The Compounding of Consciousness1 Pierfrancesco Basile The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally… But if instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor… we analyze more carefully the notion suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising. (William James, A Pluralistic Universe)

1. Untimely Meditations At the beginning of Chapter V of his A Pluralistic Universe, entitled “The Compounding of Consciousness”, William James writes: “In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner’s shade an apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more about the particulars of his works”.2 Only a few pages later, having explained that the problem he is going to discuss is whether the absolute idealist has a way of giving some empirical content to the idea that finite minds are aspects of a larger absolute Mind, he makes the following confession: “I have to admit, now that I propose to you to scrutinize this assumption rather closely, that trepidation seizes me. The subject is a subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to delve into subtleties by one’s self with pen in hand, or to study out abstruse points in books, but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them”.3 The same sort of apologies and explanations are needed at the beginning of a paper such as this one. On the one hand, its shortness prevents it from rendering the richness of philosophical imagination everywhere displayed in Timothy Sprigge’s works. On the other hand, it deals with a topic that, rightly or wrongly, is likely to appear more “abstruse” than “subtle” to most contemporary philosophers. Indeed, there is no doubt that absolute idealism is for most of today’s thinkers little more than an object for historical consideration, although this is more the consequence of a general disregard for speculative metaphysics rather than the outcome of a serious examination of the doctrine and of the arguments that can be advanced in its support. In The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, Sprigge reaches the conclusion that reality is an all-embracing experience by means of a two step-argument. In the

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first place, Sprigge argues, the best account of physical existence is the one that views it as a system of interrelated centers of experience, each of which should be conceived on analogy with our own self. Secondly, he appeals to the thesis that all real relations (as opposed to mere “ideal” relations such as relations of similarity and contrast) are holistic, i.e., conceivable only on the ground of a larger underlying whole, to conclude that at an ultimate metaphysical level all finite centers of experience must come together into a larger “Experience”—the Absolute. Although it differs from Bradley’s in some important respects, this view owes much to his metaphysics: “The way of taking the universe which I have found most tenable”—Bradley wrote—“is to regard it as a single Experience, superior to relations and containing in the fullest sense everything which is”.4 Sprigge is also at one with Bradley (and with other idealist philosophers such as Josiah Royce and John Ellis McTaggart) in denying the reality of time, a conclusion which leads him to a view he refers to as “eternalism” and according to which the Absolute embraces “at a single glance” the entire course of cosmic history: “there is”, he says, “a total reality which does not change and in which all moments of time are eternally present as ‘nows’”.5 The main differences between the two philosophers concern the way they reach their conclusions and, most significantly perhaps, the fact that Bradley toyed with panpsychism without ever adopting it. In the Vindication as well as in many of his other essays and books—such as Theories of Existence, James and Bradley and the recent The God of Metaphysics—Sprigge has supported this view by providing careful criticisms of alternative theories as to the nature of reality.

2. Panpsychism and Metaphysics Somewhat surprisingly, the last decades have witnessed a qualified revival of the panpsychist view that experience is a pervasive feature of reality. Even though they are not committed to panpsychism, philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, William Seager and David Chalmers have taken it seriously enough as to hold that it is at least an interesting hypothesis as to how the mind relates to the physical world.6 These philosophers do not seem to be indebted to Sprigge’s writings for their conclusions, yet at times a view of reality emerges in their works that bears close similarities with the one advocated by Sprigge. In The Conscious Mind, for example, Chalmers argues that panpsychism and science need not be seen as standing in contradiction to each other, but rather as complementary. Whereas science can be interpreted as providing an account of the general structure of the natural world, he says, panpsychism could be seen as providing an account of

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the intrinsic nature of the realities that support that structure by suggesting that they should be conceived as having phenomenal properties. “After all”, Chalmers writes, “we really have no idea about the intrinsic properties of the physical. Their nature is up for grabs, and phenomenal properties seem as likely a candidate as any other”.7 Apart from the fact that for Sprigge phenomenal properties would count as more than likely candidates (for him phenomenal properties are the only possible candidates), Chalmers does indeed come here very close to Sprigge’s contention that “the inner essence of what we call physical reality is psychical in character”.8 Despite the recent revival, however, panpsychism still strikes many as a highly implausible position; in order to dispel the air of paradox which surrounds the theory, it may be appropriate to begin the present discussion by considering a critical but very significant remark about panpsychism made by Thomas Nagel in The View from Nowhere. After having discussed the dualaspect theory according to which brain-processes have “physical” as well as “mental” properties, Nagel observes that the theory “has the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”; in particular, he says, the theory has the “unsettling consequence” of leading to “a form of panpsychism”.9 It is surprising that Nagel should make this sort of claim, for in other places he does provide an insightful and to some extent even sympathetic presentation of panpsychism. The reason for quoting him is that his remark nicely illustrates a point worth remembering when addressing panpsychism, or for that matter when addressing any “exotic” sounding philosophical theory. How are we to distinguish a theory “put together in the metaphysical laboratory” from one that has not been constructed as such? This question, which is really an issue for a specification and a defense of the criteria for philosophical acceptability, is as simple to raise as it is difficult to answer. Like other rational enterprises, philosophy does not take place in a vacuum but presupposes that the inquirers share a common framework of assumptions. Since these are seldom explicitly investigated, the reasons why they are held need not be all rational in nature. Certainly, socialization plays a crucial role in determining what we regard as acceptable in ordinary life as much as it does in philosophy. The teachers we happened to have, the universities we happened to attend, the books we chanced to read, the professional pressures to which we must conform—these are just some of the factors that influence our way of reacting to what would seem to be alien philosophical points of view. It is widely believed today that some form of physicalism must be true. There is a tendency to think that respect for science imposes upon philosophers an obligation to regard mental phenomena—if not straightaway as non-existent as in Dennett’s eliminative materialism—at least as identical with, or in some sense

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of this ambiguous word as “reducible” to, processes that are purely physical. Obviously enough, panpsychism might turn out to be false, as any philosophical hypothesis is always likely to be. What is puzzling is that it should strike so many contemporary philosophers as an implausible position from which to start. In view of the fact that we not only have thoughts, sensations and emotions but also that these are what in practice most matter to us, it is all but clear that materialist theories are not themselves generated in a “metaphysical laboratory”. Otherwise put, what is there about panpsychism that should make it a position in itself more paradoxical that any form of materialism? It is probably not by chance that a former student of James, Charles A. Strong, entitled his defense of panpsychism Why the Mind has a Body:10 Since this is exactly the opposite of what the materialist tries to explain, he thereby emphasized that both perspectives are equally legitimate. Judging by the loose standards of intuitive plausibility, Cartesian dualism would probably have to be regarded as the most “obvious” position. Here is my Self, the sort of thing that can call itself an “I” (as Sprigge put it once); here is my “body”, with which I am somehow directly and intimately connected and with which I even sometimes identify (although according to the Cartesian philosopher in a sense different from that in which I can be said to be identical with my thoughts, feelings or dreams); and here is the rest of the physical world, with which I indirectly connect by means of my body. Even with a theory as simple as Cartesian dualism, however, the question arises as to how we are to distinguish what is the result of philosophical or prephilosophical conceptualization from what is a mere report of immediate facts. As Sprigge points out in Theories of Existence, although common sense would seem to contain an element of Cartesian dualism in it, most people would reject some of Cartesianism’s implications if they were spelt out clearly for them. Certainly, persons whose judgment has not been exposed to philosophical speculation would not easily accept the conclusion that they are not in the room in which their bodies are or that they do not have any weight, reasoning as Cartesians must do that concepts such as “being in a room” or “having a weight” are not applicable to the minds or streams of experiences that constitute their real selves.11 It is also difficult to know to what extent dualism’s alleged intuitive plausibility is really culturally determined. How much of the theory’s appeal has to be explained by reference to the historical fact that, whether we like it or not, we are the heirs of Descartes and of the traditional Christian belief in a deep ontological distinction between the soul and the body? We can’t tell, and the reason we can’t is that there is no way of accessing reality apart from some amount of conceptualization. Criticizing Francis Bacon’s contention that speculative knowledge is idle because all there is to knowledge is generalization based upon accurate and undistorted observation of facts,

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panpsychist philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked: “there are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system”.12 As he put the point only a few lines later: “If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography”13—we should not ask a human being, a creature endowed with rationality, living within a society of fellow human beings. The experiences of such a creature will always be permeated with the conceptual apparatus that form the “mentality” of his society; they will be shaped by the structures of the inherited language, filtered by expectations and purposes. Nagel’s remark notwithstanding, we can’t philosophize outside of any “metaphysical laboratory”. If this is true, then panpsychism does not differ from any other view that can be put forward concerning the mind’s relation to the physical world. That panpsychism should sound “exotic” is thus not an intrinsic feature of the doctrine (and must therefore not be allowed to count as an objection against it)—it is just a measure of our unfamiliarity with it.

3. Mind-Stuff Theory and Monadism This is not, of course, to say that panpsychism is true. Although there are wholly cogent lines of argument conducive to it (Nagel himself develops one of these in a paper entitled “Panpsychism”14), it might not be easy to formulate a sufficiently detailed and intelligible version of the theory. Although a minority position today, panpsychism acquired momentum in the second half of the nineteenth and in the first decades of the twentieth century as a spiritual and religious reaction against scientific materialism, which in the eyes of many deprived human life of significance and value. The theory was, however, the outcome of a serious philosophical attempt to solve theoretical problems in the foundations of the natural sciences. The emerging quantum physics suggested that the traditional conception of the atom as an inert substance, a thing-like entity existing in its own right, was to be substituted with a conception of the ultimate constituents of reality as internally related events. At the same time, a consistent application of evolutionary theory made it inevitable to ask how life could have emerged out of lifeless matter. The impetus towards panpsychism was further strengthened by biological observations, which showed that small organisms invisible to the human eye, for example an amoeba or a paramecium, display a surprising variety of behavior.15 Cumulatively, these factors conferred credibility on metaphysical views that depicted reality as dynamic and organic, as an animated living whole. In A Pluralistic Universe, James refers to the metaphysical convolutions of his age by speaking of “the great empirical movement toward a pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe, into which our generation has been drawn”.16

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Of all the factors that have been mentioned, the strongest drive behind panpsychism has been evolutionary theory. If we take evolution seriously, it would seem that we will have to postulate the existence of a minimum of experience at the very bottom of things, for how could mind have emerged out of wholly insentient bits of matter? There are two great problems in the story of cosmic evolution—the jump from inert matter to organic matter, and the jump from organic matter to consciousness. “In a general theory of evolution—James remarked in the Principles of Psychology—the inorganic comes first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, then forms that possess mentality, and finally those like ourselves that possess it in a high degree”.17 Speculative biology may have made some progress in answering the first, but the second, which is just the mind-body problem in time, remains a puzzling one.18 As James concisely made the point, as evolutionists we are committed to the principle of continuity, yet “with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos”.19 In a paper entitled “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves”, a very influential version of evolutionary panpsychism was put forward by William K. Clifford, who postulated that each atom of matter was associated with a quantum of experience, a small piece of “mind-stuff”. This piece of mind-stuff was conceived as an “atom” of experience amounting to something less than a complete thought or feeling and was held to be capable of constituting thoughts and feelings by way of combination. “When molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous system of a vertebrate”, Clifford wrote, “the corresponding elements of mind-stuff are so combined as to form some kind of consciousness”. Analogously, Clifford argued, “When matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition”.20 In this way, Clifford believed, it would be possible to explain why the genesis of complex material structures in the course of evolution was accompanied by the parallel emergence of higher forms of sentience and of mental activity. Clifford’s theory is a dual aspect theory: the “mental” and the “physical” are regarded as the opposite sides of the same natural event. Now, Clifford’s theory raises problems of different sorts. One first difficulty is that the theory assumes the possibility of there being experiences that are not owned by any subject, such as the smallest pieces of mind-stuff will have to be. Secondly, it is doubtful that anything is explained by arguing that the mind is “the other side” of matter or that “mind” and “matter” are aspects of the same event; after all, these are just metaphors waiting to be cashed out in terms of clear-cut concepts. Thirdly, it can be questioned whether the notion of “unconscious experiences”, which would seem to be implicit in the idea of small quanta of experience not owned by any subject, is really an intelligible one.

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In the Principles of Psychology, James raised against Clifford a fourth, powerful objection: Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the “spirit of the age”, and the “sentiment of the people”, and in various ways we hypostatize “public opinion”. But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words “age”, “people”, or “public” denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind.21

Replace “men” with “neurons” in this passage by James and you have the problem: how could the experiences of the neurons coalesce so as to form the unified experience that constitutes the human mind at any one moment? Interestingly enough, this same objection is raised by Nagel in the View from Nowhere; as Nagel has it, “we lack the concept of a mental part-whole relation” that would enable us to see how distinct experiences could fuse into one.22 Although this objection (sometimes referred to as “the composition problem”) is strong as against Clifford’s position, many philosophers mistakenly believe that it also amounts to a conclusive refutation of panpsychism per se. An example is provided by John Searle in a recent introduction to the philosophy of mind. After having mentioned panpsychism alleged “inherent implausibility”, he says: “I do not see any way that it can cope with the problem of the unity of consciousness”.23 In view of the fact that the composition problem is widely taken to be panpsychism’s demise, it is important to note that James himself did not think that it proved that all versions of panpsychism are false and he urged the objection only as a critique of Clifford’s mind-stuff theory. “All the ‘combinations’ which we actually know”—James wrote—“are effects wrought by the units said to be ‘combined’, upon some entity other than themselves”.24 James’s idea in this passage would seem to be that it is possible to make a positive use of the notion of “combination” as the conjunct effect of many causes by thinking of the mind as numerically distinct from the cells in the brain and at the same time as capable of collecting their experiences by being causally affected by them. Otherwise put: it is not necessary to think of the mind as a N+1 experience which somehow “emerges” out of the N experiences in the neurons, nor is it possible to reduce it to the mere aggregation of the N original experiences; however, it is possible to conceive of the mind as being one of the N experiences in causal interaction with the others. James fails to discuss this alternative version of panpsychism in the Principles of Psychology, for in that book he wished to avoid metaphysics as far as possible.25 If he discusses Clifford’s theory, this is not in order to provide a solution

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to the mind-body problem, but solely to deny that a moment of human experience could be thought of as being constituted piecemeal. For James, the mind at any one moment is an holistic whole whose contents have no independent existence apart from the whole to which they belong. Nevertheless, James is aware of the existence of alternative versions of panpsychism, which he refers to as forms of “Leibnitzian [sic] monadism” or “spiritualism”.26 As a matter of fact, attempts to solve the mind-body problem by postulating the existence of a “soul” or “dominant monad” standing in causal interaction with the lesser “souls” or “monads” in the brain cells or in the body at large were not uncommon in the second half of the nineteenth century. The problem these theories attempted to solve was the Leibnizian one of providing an explanation of monadic interaction. In the context of a theory of monads, the problem of explaining the relation between the mind and the body is indeed just a special form of the larger metaphysical issue of monadic causation. With regard to such theories, James goes even so far as to say that “to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance”.27 In Germany, it was especially Lotze who turned to Leibniz in the hope to solve the riddle of the universe. Since he found himself incapable of explaining how two monads could affect each other directly, however, he abandoned the idea that monads have an independent existence. His conclusion was that the apparent interaction between them could be understood only by conceiving the monads as aspects of a larger embracing whole; in this way, Lotze renounced his original monadism in favor of a version of Spinozism.28 In Britain, Ward tried to preserve the ontological independency of the monads by interpreting monadic interaction as a form of “sympathetic rapport”. On this view, the mind sympathetically grasps the experiences of the monads constituting our brains, which in turn put our minds in contact with the monads constituting our external environment by a chain of sympathetic transference. Ward was not able to flesh out his intuitions as to the nature of monadic interaction, however, nor was he capable of answering other puzzles raised by his view. If the mind stands in causal interaction with the monads in the brain cells, and if causal interaction is a form of sympathy, then we should expect the mind to be consciously aware of the brain cells; plainly, this is not what happens.29 Sprigge does not engage in a critique of any of these forms of monadism, but he does provide a critique of Whitehead’s process metaphysics, which is yet another attempt at revising Leibniz’s theory of monads. As Sprigge points out, Whitehead tries to solve the problem of monadic interaction by means of the notion of “prehension”. According to Whitehead, each of the moments of experience that constitute the stream of a person psychic life “grasps” or “prehends” aspects of the former moment. On this theory, each moment of

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experience exists first as a “subject” and then as an “object” for later occasions of experience. There is here a certain ambiguity in Whitehead as to whether he wants to say that (a) a moment of experience exists as objectified only insofar as aspects of it are prehended by a later occasion of experience or (b) objectified moments of experience remain in existence and are then re-duplicated as ingredients in later occasions. There is a stark contrast between these two views, because on the first the world would exist, so to say, only as in passing. On the second interpretation, on the contrary, the whole past history of the cosmos would sediment into a sort of “block universe” on the edge of which the actual world would be incessantly growing. In the Vindication of Absolute Idealism Sprigge does not distinguish between these two interpretations, but it is clear that he takes Whitehead to be advancing (a) rather than (b). On this interpretation, Whitehead is trying to solve the problem of monadic interaction by providing a revised version of the theory of physical influx criticized by Leibniz in the Monadology. Leibniz denied that direct causation between substances could be understood as the transference of a quality from one substance to another, for what status would the quality have when in passage? The idea of a quality that fails to inhere to any substances would not seem to make sense. Whitehead tries to save the basic intuition that causation involves real transference of content by arguing that causal influx is the objectification of a moment of experience that occurs when it is prehended by a later one. What Sprigge finds problematic in Whitehead’s metaphysics on the interpretation he is considering is the idea that a moment of experience might exist as objectified within a later one and still be the same experience. “I can make no sense of a later experience containing an earlier as opposed to in some manner echoing it… I don’t see how an experience which has lost subjective immediacy can be the same particular as an element in a later experience. Indeed, the very notion of a loss of subjective immediacy seems unintelligible”.30 The objection may perhaps be put as follows. If the “identity” between the subjectively felt occasion of experience and its objectified aspects is “numerical”, then we have to admit that an experience that is lived through can be one and the same individual with an experience that is later re-enacted or remembered, which would seem to be wrong. If the identity is only “qualitative”, then the prehended aspects are only similar to the lived experience; there is therefore no transference of content from an earlier to a later moment and causation cannot be understood as a real influx from one moment to the next. Since no other sense of identity is available, Whitehead’s version of panpsychism fails to account for monadic interaction. Interestingly, this objection also applies to (b), the block-universe interpretation. On this reading, Whitehead would be suggesting that there is a cosmic stock or repository of past experiences that are no more immediately felt but are nevertheless available as possible objects of prehensions. As Sprigge rightly

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points out, the notion of an experience that is first subjectively felt and then topples into objectivity while remaining the same particular is difficult to grasp. What kind of “objectivity” could pertain to the several experiences I had when, say, having lunch today? And what sort of “objects” are our experiences supposed to become when they are no more immediately felt? There is indeed some analogy between the block universe interpretation and Sprigge’s eternalism, for Sprigge does indeed believe that past moments of experience are component parts of reality. Besides the fact that for Sprigge future moments are as actual as past ones, however, the really crucial point is that for him even past experiences belong to reality as eternally enjoying subjective immediacy. A deeper examination of Whitehead’s position cannot be accomplished within the limits of the present paper, but the force of Sprigge’s objection cannot be cast into doubt. Here it is worth stressing that the critique of Whitehead’s metaphysics plays an important role in Sprigge’s argument for the Absolute. If panpsychism is true and the most promising version of it fails to account for causal interaction, then we have indirect evidence that panpsychism needs to be supplemented by a theory of the Absolute. The problem with this contention is that in so arguing Sprigge would seem to undermine one of his main arguments in support of panpsychism. In Chapter 3 of his Vindication he contends that panpsychism “makes the mind-body relationship more intelligible”.31 His critique of process philosophy now suggests that it doesn’t and that only Absolute idealism can somehow account for it.

4. The Infinite Mind Insofar as it conceives the many finite centers that constitute the noumenal side of the natural world as partaking of a larger Experience, Sprigge’s metaphysics shares an important feature with Lotze’s. In both cases, the “monads”, “selves” or “centers of experience” are capable of entering into any sort of real relationships only through the mediation of the larger Mind. The question at this point is whether the composition problem, or a difficulty analogous to it, also arises with regard to Sprigge’s panpsychistic idealism. On a first sight, the answer to this question will have to be negative. The mind-stuff theory criticized by James conceives the mind as being constituted in a “bottom-up” fashion by combination of smaller experiential atoms. On Sprigge’s view that finite selves are aspects of a larger embracing whole, there are no mental atoms to be combined at all. In The View from Nowhere, however, Nagel phrases his criticism in a way that challenges the intelligibility of Sprigge’s absolute idealism too. In a passage that has already been mentioned, Nagel says that “we lack the concept of a mental part-whole relation”. Although Nagel does not have absolute idealism in

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view, his remark suggests a question as to what is meant by saying that human minds exist “within” a larger Mind. Making a free use of another statement by Nagel, if the conception of lesser minds existing within a larger Mind is to be intelligible, “there must be a mental analogue of spatial volume and spatial complexity”.32 The question whether Sprigge solves the composition problem thus translates into the question of whether his absolute idealism provides an intelligible conception of “mental complexity”. Sprigge discusses this problem at some length in the last chapter of his The Vindication of Absolute Idealism; in his recent book The God of Metaphysics, he summarizes his views as to the relation of our finite minds to the infinite Mind with the following words: “it seems to me that the only genuine wholes to which experiences can belong are wholes which are themselves experiences. An individual’s sensations relate to his conscious thought processes in virtue of the fact that they help to constitute together a single state of consciousness. Since our states of consciousness are themselves experiences, it seems inconceivable that there should be any whole within which they belong together, and which is at least as individual as they are, other than a ‘vaster’ experience, or state of consciousness”.33 In order for Sprigge’s argument in this passage to be fully intelligible, some clarification is needed. First, it must be noted that the words “consciousness” and “experience” are here used as synonymous. Sprigge rejects the notion of an “unconscious experience”, i.e., the idea of an experience wholly devoid of some sort of subjective self-appreciation. It might sound strange that, after Freud, a philosopher should put forward this sort of claim. Nevertheless, and despite prima facie appearance, the rejection of “unconscious experiences” in this sense does not rule out the possibility that there is some real phenomenon the psychoanalyst is referring to when he talks of the “Unconscious”. Elaborating on a suggestion advanced by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, Sprigge argues that the stream of experience that constitutes our own personal psychic life might be influenced by other personal streams running parallel to it in the brain. Such parallel streams might be called our “Unconscious”, although they are themselves constituted by consciously felt experiences. Second, the expression “help to constitute” as applied to an individual’s sensations contributing to that individual’s larger state of consciousness cannot be understood as meaning that there are independent existing quanta of experience, since the existence of such items is ruled out by Sprigge’s absolute idealism. On this view, all finite realities are aspects of the all-embracing whole, so there is nothing that can claim ontological independence except the Absolute. Quite simply, the verb “to constitute” should be understood as indicating the wellknown phenomenological fact that any ordinary moment of wakeful conscious experience unifies various contents without effacing their differences. The mind

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of the reader at this very moment exemplifies a unity containing a plurality of visual sensations, such as the white of the page and the black of the ink in which the letters are printed, the impressions produced by the paper on the fingers, unpleasant bodily sensations caused by the fact that one has been seated for some time, the ideas and images entertained while reading, and many others. There is nothing strange in Sprigge’s recognition of the unitary nature of our consciousness. What is more difficult to understand is his further contention that the Absolute must be “experience” because our only example of “unity-indifference” or of a “many-being-held-in-one” is provided by our own mentality. If we take this suggestion literally, we have to conclude that our own minds stand to the Absolute in the same relation in which our particular experiences— the scent of a rose, a suddenly felt tooth-ache, a mentally played melody— stands to the larger state of consciousness that includes them. Strange as it might appear, this is precisely what Sprigge holds. On the theory of absolute idealism, he writes in the God of Metaphysics, “The universe is supposed to be what may be called an infinitely comprehensive experience which includes all finite states of consciousness in something like the same sense as one of our states of consciousness includes individual sensations”.34 This same thesis is put forward in the Vindication, where Sprigge writes: “Our only familiar examples of really concrete wholes, consisting of elements in holistic relations one to another, are momentary centres of experience. The universe, or Absolute… somehow stands to the various momentary centres in it as they do to their contents”.35 This conclusion strikes me as scarcely intelligible. As a matter of fact, Sprigge himself recognizes that it is problematic, and that we have a sense of ourselves as independent beings that is difficult to reconcile with the idea that we are aspects of a larger Mind. Moreover, it would be odd to ascribe a sense of independence to our sensations (or any other “sense” whatever, for this would imply conceiving of our sensations as being quite similar to persons); yet, this is precisely what is required if the analogy has to convey any definite meaning. Thus the following dilemma arises: either the analogy has a precise meaning, in which case it is false; or it is only a vague suggestion devoid of any real empirical content, in which case it does not convey any real information. The analogy would hold, and be philosophically significant, only if Sprigge could provide illustrations of our own consciousness being divided into multiple personal consciousnesses while remaining one. Such cases, however, and provided they can really be so described, might perhaps be found solely in the domain of psychical disease. On the one hand, I am not aware that Sprigge has pursued this line of inquiry. On the other hand, since psychical dissociations are usually very painful for the person suffering them, it is doubtful that any results that can be achieved on this path could be made consistent with another main tenet of absolute idealism, namely that reality is, in some sense requiring further

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specification, “perfect” and “harmonious”. Sprigge would then have little justification for referring to his theory as a form of “pantheistic” idealism. The same sort of difficulty arises with Sprigge’s thesis that Reality is a nunc stans which comprehends the many moments of experience that constitute an individual’s life—past, present and future—in an eternal standing “now”. The problem of the composite nature of consciousness arises here in the form of understanding how successive moments of experience could be copresent within the absolute Experience. Like Josiah Royce before him, Sprigge appeals in his explanation to James’s concept of the “specious present”. James argued that the flow of experiences that constitutes what we most really are comes in “pulses” or “total moments” of experience, each of which has a sense of the past out of which it emerges as well as of an incoming future. The aspects of the notion of the “specious present” that recommend it as an analogical term for the conception of an eternal Consciousness are its “temporal thickness”, the fact that it occupies a certain temporal span, and the associated circumstance that in such an extended present the mind would seem to possess a sort of temporal ubiquity upon its contents. According to Sprigge, “the best image of the unitary totality of things is that of a vast symphony which experiences itself in one single specious present of colossal extent and complexity”.36 This analogy not solely fails to dispel the strangeness involved in conceiving of a finite personal consciousness on the guise of an individual sensation, however, it also suggests what might be a serious objection to the doctrine of the eternal Consciousness. If all moments of experience that constitute an individual’s life are already “there” in the Absolute, why am I able to remember the past and not the future? Since “pastness” and “futureness” are not intrinsic features of such moments, there is no evident reason why I am able to access the former but not the latter. (It could be noted in passing that at least prima facie the idea of a block universe scores better on this point, for here the past is settled and the future is open.) Most importantly, the analogy can be shown to be inadequate as an illustration of the eternal nature of the cosmic Consciousness. In the course of a critique of Royce’s theory of the Absolute, the already mentioned James Ward raises the following objection: “Comparing the whole temporal order to an infinite symphony, he [Royce] holds that the Absolute knows it at once as we might know one brief rhythm. But now, we ask, when is it that we grasp this rhythm as an ordered whole? When it is complete—a parte post…” “If the Absolute takes in at a glance the whole temporal order”, Ward also says, “it can only be, according to Professor Royce’s analogy, because… the world’s evolution is for it merely a rehearsal after the symphony is composed”.37 The point of this critique would seem to be that Royce’s claim is based upon a mistaken psychological interpretation of what is really happening within the

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specious present. Ward argues indeed that we are able to apprehend a piece of melody as an “epochal whole” only after the piece has reached completion in the immediate past. Thus, experiences such as our apprehension of a melody are unhelpful as illustrations of the suspension of time in the Absolute, because such experiences presuppose the reality of a past to be retained by—and to be enjoyed within—the present moment of experience. Contrary to what Royce and Sprigge contends, there could be no experiencing a succession of notes as a completed “epoch” if time were not real, for what we are experiencing in such cases is not the original (“the symphony”), but a reproduction or echoing of it in our present consciousness (“a rehearsal”). Apparently, even in this case too much explanatory weight has been put on the analogy between the larger Experience and the unity of our consciousness. As a consequence, we are left without any conceptual model in terms of which to grasp the idea that we are really aspects or modes of a larger whole of experience.

5. Conclusion In a paper entitled “Bradley’s Doctrine of the Absolute”, Sprigge explains that “the doctrine of the Absolute, or of a cosmic consciousness at large, vindicates the sense we have at times of the ultimate unity of all things”.38 I agree with Sprigge in recognizing the reality of experiences of community with a larger whole and also that they evoke a sense of the actual existence of higher values. As Bradley writes in the introduction to Appearance and Reality, “No one, probably, who has not felt this, however differently he might describe it, has ever cared for metaphysics”.39 Nevertheless, in this paper I have raised a doubt about the intelligibility of Sprigge’s interpretation of such experiences, while also suggesting that it fails to vindicate the sense that we also have of our own irreducible individuality. There might be important aspects of Sprigge’s position that I have failed to grasp in the foregoing discussion. If my observations are sound, however, then that finite minds exist within a larger eternal Mind is a view that remains as mysterious in Sprigge’s absolute idealism as it does in the metaphysics of his philosophical ancestors—Bradley and Royce in the first place—and in the background the great Spinoza.40

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Notes 1. I wish to thank Leemon McHenry for comments on a previous draft of this paper and for several conversations on this and related topics. 2. W. James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), p. 181. 3. Ibid., p. 184. 4. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 245246. 5. Sprigge, James and Bradley. American Truth and British Reality (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993), p. 478. 6. T. Nagel, “Panpsychism”, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 181-195; D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 153-155 and 293-301; W. Seager, “Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2. 3, 1995, pp. 272-288. 7. D. J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, op. cit., p. 154. 8. Sprigge, “Bradley’s Doctrine of the Absolute”, in Appearance vs. Reality. New Essays on the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, ed. G. Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 215216. Here Sprigge also explains his position as follows: “I believe that the world ultimately consists of innumerable flows of experience, some of them of the high level which constitutes our own streams of consciousness, others streams of mere dumb feeling with a certain volitional charge. As all these intermingle, they constitute a system with a certain overall structure which is what science seeks to capture in its description of the natural world, and of which our life-world gives a less precise indication” (p. 216). 9. T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 49. 10. C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body (London and New York: Macmillan, 1903). 11. Sprigge, Theories of Existence (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 18. 12. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, corr. edn., eds. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 14. 13. Ibid., p. 15. 14. T. Nagel, “Panpsychism”, op. cit. 15. See for example H. S. Jennings, Behaviour of the Lower Organisms (New York: Macmillan, 1906); I am indebted to Jonathan Butt for having drawn my attention to this book. 16. W. James, A Pluralistic Universe, op. cit., p. 270. 17. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), p. 146. 18. See L. McHenry’s discussion of this point in “Whitehead’s Panpsychism as the Subjectivity of Prehension”, Process Studies, 24, 1995, pp. 1-14. 19. W. James, Principles of Psychology, op. cit., p. 146. 20. W. K. Clifford, “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves”, Mind, 3. 9, 1878, pp. 57-67, at p. 65.

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21. W. James, Principles of Psychology, op. cit., p. 160. 22. T. Nagel, View from Nowhere, op. cit., p. 59. 23. J. Searle, Mind. An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 150. 24. W. James, Principles of Psychology, op. cit., p. 158. 25. Ibid., p. vi. 26. Ibid., respectively pp. 180 and 161. 27. Ibid., p. 181. 28. In God and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 210-221, G. F. Stout provides a brief but clear account of Lotze’s monadism and of its problems, while also comparing it with other forms of panpsychism, such as those of Clifford and Fechner. 29. It is unfortunate that Ward is so much neglected today, even among scholars with an interest in British idealism, for he seems to have been a quite insightful and influential thinker. A survey of his metaphysics, one that emphasizes the problems inherent in his conception of “sympathetic rapport”, is provided by P. A. Bertocci in The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 92133. I have provided a brief account of Ward’s critique of Lotze’s and of Leibniz’s monadology in “All Monads have windows: James Ward and the Reception of Leibniz’s Theory of Monads in British Idealism”, in Einheit in der Vielheit. Proceedings of the VIII International Leibniz-Conference, eds. H. Breger, J. Herbst and S. Erdner (Hannover: G. W. Leibniz Gesellschaft, 2006), pp. 29-36, and of his influence upon a major Cambridge philosopher such as Whitehead in “Rethinking Leibniz: Whitehead, Ward and the Idealistic Legacy”, Process Studies, 35, 2006, pp. 207-227. 30. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), p. 230. 31. Ibid. p. 96. 32. T. Nagel, View from Nowhere, op. cit., p. 50. 33. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 489. 34. Ibid. 35. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 251. 36. Ibid., p. 253. 37. J. Ward, The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism. The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the Years 1907-10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 314. 38. Sprigge, “Bradley’s Doctrine of the Absolute”, op. cit., p. 217. 39. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), p. 6. 40. See for example the corollary to proposition 11 in part II of his Ethics, ed. and tr. E. Curley (London: Penguin 1996): “From this it follows that the human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God”.

From Consciousness to the Absolute William J. Mander

1. Introduction In spending a career swimming against the tide of prevailing philosophical fashion Timothy Sprigge has kept open space for speculative thought in general, and idealism in particular, his own constructive work serving as an inspiration, encouragement and model for others who have felt themselves uncomfortably bound by the sterile narrowness of orthodox analytic philosophy. And so perhaps the best way to honour his contribution is to take up that invitation and foray for ourselves into those “deep ontological questions about the concrete nature of reality”1 that have so exercised him. It is in this spirit that the following essay in constructive metaphysics is offered. It presents an argument (or part of an argument) for an Absolute Idealism not greatly unlike Sprigge’s own, but it is a case which grows out of a certain dissatisfaction with the strategy which he himself employs in advancing to that conclusion and which, as a consequence, has certain implications not wholly in line with his own views. To announce that one is about to put forward an argument will generate, no doubt, all sorts of expectations in the mind of the reader, so let me say something immediately about the kind of case I shall be making. All too easily the word “argument” prompts us think of the sort of thing we meet in logic books; where we pass deductively on the strength of clear and indubitable premises to equally clear and indubitable conclusions. It is my belief, however, that this sort of exercise plays a smaller role in philosophy than is usually thought, and probably ought to play a smaller role than it does. For the conceptual clarity and epistemic certainty it demands are but rarely available to us. Indeed, often enough it is their very unavailability that creates the impulse to philosophise in the first place. Thus motivated by the inadequacies of our current ways of thinking, the real work of establishing a position in philosophy is the creative one of carving out a new conceptual scheme through which we may adequately see, describe and explain the world. It is a matter of weaving new sets of concepts that make sense, both in themselves, and of the world. As such, it finds a kind of hypothetico-deductive justification—we propose an account that makes the best sense we can of what we experience—but even here there are no epistemic anchors; for the two elements, experiential data and interpretation, can never be wholly separated. We see through our concepts—nothing reaches us untheorized—and although one set of concepts may escape the defects of another, there

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is no question here of getting back to “pure experience”. In this sense if what I am doing is like phenomenology, it would be better described as explanatory or creative phenomenology. But even if readers should not expect anything like a deductive proof, they have surely the right to expect, in its place, a detailed story. But here too I’m afraid I must disappoint. A full articulation and defence of my case would take many pages, and all I can offer on this occasion is a sketch. But so long as overviews are not mistaken for complete accounts, they have value. Or such, at least, is my hope!

2. The Vindication of Absolute Idealism In his book The Vindication of Absolute Idealism Sprigge argues for two main conclusions: panpsychism, the view that noumenal reality is psychical, composed entirely of what is experienced, and holism, the view that the relations between its parts are such as to make the universe not merely an aggregate but a single unified whole. Consciousness is the best candidate for the nature of reality, as the only mode of being we can conceive, and more importantly as the one point where we have direct contact with things in themselves. He endorses a Schopenhauerian idea that in ourselves we meet the thing in itself, although he would say that we do so in our stream of consciousness rather than in our will: “there is but one thing which we know as thing in itself… and that is the centres of experience we recognise as the consciousness of man and beast, and… if one has only one example of something which is more than mere phenomenon we should take it as a clue to the character of that fully concrete reality which we know must be there underlying the phenomenal world at large”.2 If the world is made up, not of material beings, but of centres of experience, how do these stand to each other? In a line of reasoning much indebted to Bradley, Sprigge argues that all real (as opposed to ideal) relations are holistic, that is, ones which jointly form a more comprehensive existence, indeed strongly holistic, that is, such that the whole which its term unite to form so suffuses its every element that apart from that whole they would be different in some intrinsic non-trivial fashion. There are no external relations.3 He thus concludes that the many centres of experience must combine together to form one whole.4 Since our best example of such a concrete unity is our own consciousness, we can say that the whole stands to its parts as our consciousness does to its contents, that “the universe is a single concrete self-experiencing whole of experience”.5 For all the great ingenuity and skill with which he develops its two parts, Sprigge’s argument suffers from a structural flaw in bringing them together. Sprigge allows that the two parts of this argument are separate; we might accept one and not the other. However, it seems to me that they are not merely separate, but in fact contradictory. The problem comes from the nature of holistic rela-

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tions. These are prior to their terms, and consequently any attempt to consider the terms of such relations is to abstract from a wider whole. It is to take something out of context and distort it, to take something to that extent unreal. But if the many centres of finite experience are bound together in such holistic relations, it seems that they cannot quite be the windows onto noumenal reality Sprigge takes them to be. Considered separately they must be distortions. Another way to bring out the contradiction would be to reflect on Sprigge’s influences. He follows William James in stressing the reality and importance of the individual stream of consciousness, and Bradley in stressing the problematic nature of relations. But Bradley was sceptical about the individual self—he pronounces it unreal. He allows that it emerges from out of something more real and more basic, a finite fragment within the infinite experience of the Absolute. But this fragment—which he terms a “finite centre”—is far from anything we ever experience in accessible consciousness. Ordinary experience is so distorted by relations, that such centres must be regarded as a posit not a given.6 The alternative argument which I propose attempts to overcome this flaw. It starts at the same point as Sprigge’s, namely consciousness. But where he moves indirectly from consciousness to the Absolute, via abstract considerations about the nature of relations, I suggest that there is available a more direct route. I think it can be shown that consciousness itself is explicable only if our minds are parts of a wider whole. That is, an account of the phenomenon of consciousness will show that it points beyond itself to an absolute mind. It might be thought possible to dismiss any such an argument before we have even heard it. For does it not simply fly in the face of how things seem? Do we not seem conscious of ourselves as separate mental units, distinct individual minds? Is that not the very mark of consciousness? Since I have no wish to dispute this phenomenology, in order to even get a hearing for my argument, I must admit from the start that it is a further and important part of my view that, in so far as consciousness says otherwise, that it is a deceptive voice. Our consciousness of ourselves as independent entities is an illusion; for there are no such minds as we feel ourselves to be. It is an illusion created by abstracting out an element from a wider infinite whole, by bracketing off all of its proper surrounding context. When this happens it causes us to mistake or mis-read the element thus abstracted off or left behind.7 This is the point of the holism just mentioned above. To abstract a part from its context is inevitably to distort it. Whether, as Sprigge believes, this holds for all relations is something we have no space to pursue, but within the mind itself, at least, phenomenal interdependence seems to me something which cannot be doubted. The parts of experience with which introspection confronts us are not, as Hume believed, a set of phenomenologically distinct experiences. Instead they depend for their qualitative character upon the whole of which they are parts; each is coloured and shaped by those co-experienced with it.8 Salt is tasted, not as a

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separate component, but as a flavour of the whole; and in the same way any one experience affects the character of all other experiences brought before the same awareness. For example, our visual experience of a film can be completely altered by the musical soundtrack we hear alongside it. In the same way our experience of recalling a person or place will be coloured greatly by the accompanying emotion of love or loathing; in the one case their peculiarities seem charming and characterful, in the other they strike us as monstrous and ugly. Again, to think a problem difficult but also believe it manageable, is a quite different experience from thinking it difficult and believing it impossible to solve; it is the difference between hope and despair. But if that is correct, if mind is in its very nature holistic, then it will be a further consequence that if our minds are part of a wider mind that they too will be misunderstood to the degree that they are taken out of that wider context. I realise, of course, the paradox involved in calling consciousness an illusion. For, as Descartes reminds us, the one thing we cannot deny, on pain of selfcontradiction, is our own experience. This is why Schopenhauer and Sprigge regard it as a window onto reality. And I do not mean that consciousness simply does not occur; it cannot be that we merely seem or appear to be conscious. But although it cannot be that things do not really appear to us in experience, we may well form mistaken beliefs about the character of that experience. Further reflection or the very closest examination may show that our experience is not really as we took it to be. It is no easy matter to distinguish between what is given and our beliefs about what is given. All too easily we assume a phenomenology on the basis of a false theory, and it is in the exposure of such misperception that the value of perceptive philosophy (and good literature) resides. There are numerous visual illusions which testify to the fact that we see what we expect to see, what we think ought to be there. But the effect is not confined to sense experience. For example, two young people finding themselves spending more and more time together may take themselves to be falling in love, for that’s what everyone else is saying, and isn’t that what happens between young people? Yet on consideration they may come to realise that that is not what they feel at all, that in fact their friendship is of an altogether different sort. Again, because we term it “creation”, we may feel inclined to regard the process of coming up with ideas as an active one, but really reflecting on the matter we may have to admit that as often as not inspiration comes to us when we stop striving, and that in the purest acts of invention we are more properly passive. It is my claim that the great part of our conscious experience is, in ways similar to these, baseless; that is to say, not phenomenologically, but interpretatively. I suggest then that our consciousness of ourselves as independent entities is an illusion. But here we come to the crux of the argument I wish to put forward. For it is my suggestion that its appearance in this respect arises only because, contra to what it seems to say of itself, it is really contiguous with a wider men-

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tal whole. That is to say, although consciousness seems in its insistence on completeness and exclusiveness to be the very antithesis of the notion of a wider universal mind, it is in fact the very best evidence we have for that more comprehensive awareness. I shall argue that these illusory aspects of consciousness arise only, and can be explained only, because our consciousness is a fragment from a wider whole. In particular I shall focus on two of the most central aspects of consciousness—self-awareness, and unity—and in both cases argue that these are but appearance, explicable only insofar as we are parts of a wider whole.9

3. The Subject-Object Distinction Without begging the question, awareness may be understood as a two term relation between a subject and an object; between a mental state and a content. I say “without begging the question” for, if we leave it open how the distinction is to be characterised, and whether it represents a fundamental or merely apparent feature, that awareness presents us with such a dichotomous structure seems undeniable. Given this mode of speech, a key part of what makes the difference between simple awareness and awareness that is conscious can be expressed in the thought that conscious awareness is reflexive. In conscious experience we do not simply think or feel or apprehend, but we are aware of doing so. There is something that it is like to be in these states, as the mind turns back upon itself and is acquainted with its own activity. Whatever its explanation, such introspective awareness is as undeniable as it is distinctive. It is the very foundation and precondition of phenomenology itself. But as we reflect further upon the matter, paradox descends and what seemed clear becomes opaque. For as Hume10 pointed out introspection finds for us specific thoughts, feelings, desires, or perceptions, but never any self actively thinking, feeling, desiring, or perceiving them. For all we are tempted to describe conscious states as ones of self-awareness, the active mind is never among the objects of our experience. Nor could it be; for there seems something contradictory in the very idea of self awareness. Were mental states focused only on their proper objects we would not know ourselves to be in them; as a beam of light they would illuminate what they touch, but not themselves. Yet focused only back on themselves states of awareness would not have proper objects at all; they would be quite empty or blank. If all I know is my own knowing, I do not yet know anything. And there is no way through this paradox by suggesting that a single mental state might be in some way bi-directional, focused both on its proper object and itself, for different mental states are individuated precisely by their different objects. It is Schopenhauer to whom we owe this deeper diagnosis of Hume’s observation, the recognition that no subject

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of experience could ever be its own object. Like the eye, he says, it is the one thing that can never appear in its own field of vision.11 Contemporary philosophy of mind has made little inroad into this problem. A common approach is to treat mind as a complex system and seek to explain how one element in the system may become directed upon or aware of another element,12 but this does not really account for what we mean by reflexive awareness. Why should the intrinsic nature of any given mental state be affected by the quite external matter of whether or not there exists some separate state directed upon it? The fact that I can see you in no way implies or helps bring about a sense in which you can see yourself, and the fact that parts of my central heating system can monitor the condition of other parts no more makes it conscious or self-aware.13 But now we seem to find ourselves in an impasse; “the paradox of reflexiveness” we might call it. The sheer fact of reflexive awareness seems undeniable, but we can explain it neither in terms of one mind focused on itself nor in terms of one mind focused on another. It is my contention that only on the thesis of Absolute Idealism (where one mind is part of another) may this puzzle be solved. The basic ideas can, I think, be expressed simply enough (even if a full defence requires something more protracted.) Let us allow that an isolated mind could not be self-aware. But now let us suppose that our minds are literally parts of the wider mind of God; that somewhat as the parts of our experiences stand to the whole experience, so our finite minds stand to an infinite mind which contains them. In such a situation, although we have no view of ourselves, God would have a view of us; for as we are aware of the various elements that go to make up our experience, so God would be aware of us as among the various elements that go to make up his experience. While we see the world, God would be like someone standing right behind us, who sees not only what we see, but also our seeing of it. It is crucial at this point to realise that we are not talking here about two quite separate minds, one directed on another; for that, as we have already seen, will not give us what we need. Rather on this scheme finite minds are related to the infinite mind of God as parts to a whole. God’s view of us is that part of his awareness which has our mind as its object. And this is precisely our mind itself. Our minds contribute to a wider experience, and in that wider experience are recognised as thus contributing parts. But if our mind is one with the divine awareness of our mind, then we have located the mental reflexivity we sought. What we are inclined to call our awareness of ourselves is best understood as God’s higher level awareness of us. To make this clearer let me consider an immediate objection. Are we not, it may be said just playing fast and loose with parts and wholes? What has been proposed might render God aware of my awareness, but not me. For, even if

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Absolute Idealism is true, I am a part not a whole. My view is that of a part, so what does it matter to me what the whole sees? For I certainly do not see it. To answer this challenge it must be understood that every part has a dual existence. It has an intrinsic nature of its own, otherwise it could not be considered separately, but it has links to the whole in which it resides, otherwise it would be a separate thing. To put the point another way, if we take any part of any thing its features will be of two kinds, those explicable solely by reference to its intrinsic character and those which make sense by reference to the whole from which it comes. For example a rectangular piece of pine with a knob in the middle of one side is only a “door” by reference to the wardrobe of which it is a part. In the same way I am suggesting that experience is only “self-aware” with reference to the divine whole to which it belongs. To object (as is done here) that my view is only that of a part not a whole is ambiguous. If it means that my view is only part of the whole view, then it is true, just as it is true that a door is only part of a wardrobe not a whole wardrobe. Even if I see myself as the whole sees me, I certainly do not see everything else that the whole sees. I am not God. I am not omniscient. But if the point of the objection is to suggest that the character of my experience can be adequately explained without reference to the whole from which it comes, then I suggest it is false. We cannot explain a “door” simply by reference to its intrinsic features— we need to appeal to the wardrobe whose part it is—and it is my thesis that the “self-aware” character of experience is, like the notion of being a “door”, something inexplicable while concentrating on its intrinsic character; rather it requires us to appeal to the whole from which it has come. If the Absolute Idealist thesis is correct then, as a part, I bear the stamp of the whole. I am a part of a whole. I have a dual consciousness. I see through two sets of eyes. Consciousness is a kind of schizophrenia, a holding two points of view at once, a standing outside—while at the same time remaining within— oneself. In so far as we only are ourselves, we do not see ourselves. But God sees us. And in so far as we are also identical with God, we may come to participate in what he sees and we cannot. It is only in this way (it seems to me) that the paradox of reflexiveness can be solved. No simple undivided self could know itself and one self directed on another is no help either; only with a partwhole relation can we bring together the seemingly opposed requirements of diversity and unity which self-awareness calls for. At this juncture a new worry may surface. Suppose this model provides us with a viable explanation of self-awareness, suppose we have got round Schopenhauer’s reason for thinking that we never could be aware of ourselves, do we not still find ourselves on the wrong side of Hume’s more point of fact observation that we never are aware of ourselves; that the self just never is an object of perception? For surely he is right that all we ever encounter in intro-

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spection are thoughts, feelings, perceptions and the like, but never any self experiencing them. I shall suggest that a way may be found between our theory and Hume’s point if we distinguish between two different senses of the word “object”. But before we can get to that result, we need to reflect very carefully on the nature and contents of our experience. We said a little while back, while trying to give as few hostages to fortune as possible, that experience is an essentially relational concept; a subject-object structure, an apprehension of content. We need now to explore and see just what might be meant by that.14 What is the basis of the distinction which we all make between the object and the subject of awareness? I suggest that in large part it lies in this; that the object or world is something multiplex, while we—our experience, our understanding—are something unified. A great many objects come to us in awareness, all themselves complex and variegated, but the awareness we have of them is unified; they all come before one awareness. Although we speak loosely of parts of our experience, in truth, each distinct element is read by, not a part of ourselves, but our whole self. The grounds for holding this are not two distinct intuitions of two distinct objects, one divisible one indivisible; rather what we have here are two corresponding sides of a single intuition. Taken objectively experience is divisible, but on its subjective side it is indivisible. Our sense of our own unity is one and the same with our sense of the disunity of the world; each grasped in contrast to the other. Our intuition of ourselves is precisely our intuition of the unity of our experiences, whatever its ultimate explanation may turn out to be. And in the same way, though we may wonder what grounds the apparent divisibility of the world, for us such divisibility is precisely what makes it the object of our experience. This conception of the subject-object distinction as grounded in the unity of consciousness is one we find most clearly articulated in Lotze,15 though it is a view originating in and perhaps more commonly associated with Kant. For what we are appealing to here is, of course, something very close to Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. But for my part I prefer Lotze. Kant identifies the unity of consciousness with the relational or conceptual ordering by the categories of the manifold of sensations; it is something to be found in the relational structuring of our experience. But the categories are, in their own way, as much objects of experience as the manifold of sensations they relate. Relations are not terms, but they are elements in our experience, and thus—although not in quite so crude a fashion as Hume’s disappointed introspector—Kant is still looking for the distinction between subject and object among the contents of experience. However the unity of experience is not itself any kind of object or element in experience.16 The intuition of our own unity is not an intuition of anything that could itself be unified. As the boundary of any given space demarcates but does not itself lie within that space, the unifying principle of our experience is not itself any kind of component of that experience.17 It frames but does not lie within

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experience. It is one common arena that makes possible all and any comparison,18 the perspective from which the world is seen. If it is indeed right to draw the difference between an object and the subject of experience in this way, as that between an element in experience and the unifying principle of that experience, that between a part and the whole, two lessons may be drawn immediately. In the first place, if we ask again how it is that reflexive awareness comes about, our original hypothesis falls into place. For if it is only as one among many distinguishable elements in a wider unity that any item can become an object of thought or awareness, then our own mental life will be a possible object of awareness only if it is part of a wider whole. We will become “aware that we are aware” only if there exists some further awareness—a mind behind our mind—which includes ours. This mind, I suggest, is best identified with the mind of God or, for the theologically squeamish, the Absolute. It should be pointed out at this juncture that we cannot, on this model, say that God himself is reflexively aware in the same way that we are. For that would launch us on an infinite regress. As simple awareness is of the object known but not itself, so God is aware of the things he knows but not his knowing them— that is just the nature of the subject-object relation. Reflexive awareness only arises, I suggest, because God is aware of us; it only occurs, that is to say, in the unusual case where a greater mind contains a lesser one. We should not be so metaphysically parochial as to regret this implication; for self-awareness has to do with the way or quality in which something is known, not with whether it is known. God does not know things like this, for only parts come to know in this fashion, but he still knows everything perfectly and completely. Indeed, we might even suspect that consciousness is a rather rudimentary form of mental life. The key thing about consciousness is that all of one’s mental light is focused on one place at a time—this is why it cannot easily admit contradictions or differences—and as such it is perhaps the mental equivalent of reading aloud, one word at a time with your finger under each. A second lesson may be drawn if we return to Hume’s observation that the subject is never an object of awareness. If an “object of awareness” is some discernible element or component of experience, then Hume is right that we ourselves are not to be found among the objects of awareness. But if our use of the term is widened and covers not simply the constituents of experience but the principle of unity that frames them—not just the land but its border—then matters are more complicated. Schopenhauer is right that, not even thus construed, could a subject ever become its own object of experience. For a purely finite or purely infinite subject there can be no reflexive-awareness. But I suggest that where one mind contains another, a new possibility emerges; we may be given a fundamental intuition of our own unity, not as any component of experience, but as the space they take up.19

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4. The Unity of Consciousness In suggesting that our intuition of the subject-object distinction lies in a recognition of our own unity, it might seem as though I undermine my own position. Surely Absolute Idealism holds precisely that I am not a genuine unity, not a genuine whole? In a sense this observation is right, yet the conclusion drawn is the very reverse of correct, and in this next section I want to explain why, rather than undermining it, our apparent sense of our own unity is in fact something that can be explained only if Absolute Idealism is the case. Let us then look a little further into the unity of consciousness. Granting for the moment that we have a basic intuition of our own unity, where does it come from? What is its basis? The question is notoriously hard. At first, no doubt, we might be inclined to look for some common feature or element among the objects of our experience. But it is the lesson of Hume’s philosophy this is a mistake, for there simply is no common feature among all the objects of experience. There is no object present to all experience, not even any pattern or structure which must be displayed by all possible experience. For pace Kant there is nothing that we could not experience; nothing that we could not think. To be sure there are many things that we cannot think or experience now, but thinking is plastic—its shape is determined by its object—and I see no reason to set any a priori limits to it.20 It thus follows that nothing in the content of experience can explain its unity, for it has no fixed a priori content. The unity of consciousness is utterly independent of, and can never be explained by, what it is consciousness of. If introspection reveals no common feature among the objects of our experience, we might be tempted to suppose that their unity lies in a common relation to some external point. Perhaps they are all “entertained” or “experienced” by some further self; something not itself an idea which is aware of them all, the subject behind our ideas which knows them. Such a model will not do, however, for it would wholly divorce our identity from our experiences. If what makes a set of experiences all “mine” is their shared relation to some external X, it is natural to identify myself with that X, opening up a gulf between the self and its experiences. It then begins to seem as though one and the same self could have had totally different experiences, such that its thoughts, feelings and perceptions make no contribution to its identity. But in truth, although I could experience anything, experiences, once had, become essential to me. They go to make up my identity. I am not some hidden core which would remain the same whatever they had been. Our intuition of ourselves as unified is one with our intuition of ourselves as existent; the second is not some inference from the former. The unified subject of experience is not something we infer. Rather it is something given, though not as any contents of experience.

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But if the unity of consciousness is not to be explained by appeal to its parts, or to some external point, how is it to be explained? It is my suggestion that principles of unity may appear if we concentrate on how, as a collected mass, it may contribute to some wider whole; that the given unity of any finite consciousness may be explained by the input it is able to make to the wider whole which contains it. The basis of its unity is not intrinsic, but extrinsic; related, however, not to some external point, but to a wider whole in which it lies. Some general illustrations of the sort of top-down unity I am thinking of here may help. (a) The point of a single line of music, say the base line, may wholly elude us until we see how it is supposed to counterpoint a second line of music, such as the melody, producing the whole piece. (b) The slight difference between the view of the left eye and the right eye is explicable only when we realise that they are designed to be combined together to produce stereoscopic vision. (c) In a painting, often the reason why a group of colours are placed together in a certain way can be appreciated only by their contribution to the whole. (d) Lastly, thinking about our own practice as philosophers, we know that often the unifying point or principle behind a given line of thought may become clear only when we see how it meets together with another at a given point in a greater argument. In each of these illustrations the unity of some group is explained, not intrinsically, but by how it stands to, through what it can achieve together with, other similar groups in a wider whole which contains them all. Thus it is, I suggest, with the unity of consciousness. Just how our minds combine with others in the mind of God, and what they are thus able to contribute above a mere sum, we can only guess. Intellectual history and the experience of social life give us clues, but a full answer would be nothing less than a universal theodicy. And yet, such ignorance notwithstanding, this seems to me the only possible principle of unity available. On this understanding, the unity of consciousness, far from a challenge to an idealistic holism such as mine, is in truth something explicable only in its terms. But in being so explained it is also, of course, tempered. For what we are really saying here is that the unity of consciousness is relative only, not absolute. It can be understood only by reference to a wider whole, from which it is abstracted. Things are parcelled up by their contribution to the whole, and not genuinely distinct in their own right. To this extent, consciousness in so far as it is an intuition of our own unity is an illusion.

5. Concluding Remarks In broad terms the argument presented above agrees with the views of Sprigge, in both its starting point and its conclusion. But the agreement is not

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complete. While I accept that our correct starting point must be our own experience, I differ significantly from him in how I regard that experience. Where he regards it as a window on reality, I think that consciousness is very largely an appearance. The conclusion too is weaker than Sprigge’s own. It holds that finite experience is part of a wider experience, but does not argue that there is one overarching experience that includes all others, nor does it take the further step of arguing that such experience is all there is to reality. I believe these further steps can be made, but they would require new arguments which cannot be presented here.21

Notes 1. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), p. vii. 2. Ibid., p. 109. 3. Ibid., pp. 187, 208-215, 218-219, 232-247. 4. For Sprigge’s account of how the many finite centres combine into one whole see ibid., pp. 253-263. 5. Ibid., p. 252. 6. See my “Levels of Experience in F. H. Bradley”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 33, 1995, pp. 485-498. 7. Here occurs a very difficult problem, which I do not have space to treat. Throughout this discussion I speak of consciousness as somehow illusory, as a kind of distorted partial view. But, it may be objected, it is all very well to speak of a part “abstracted from the whole” or “regarded in isolation from its context”, but who is it that regards it this way? I could look at a given whole and abstract away some part of it. But this is to suggest something outside, and there is nothing outside the Absolute. The Absolute itself does not regard its parts in this way. It sees them as they truly are, in their full context. The only option left is the part. But what can it mean to say the part misperceives itself, that it mistakenly “takes itself” as independently real? For this seems to give to it a kind of autonomy and independence, not just in illusion but in act. In short we have a paradox: if the self is not real, how can it misperceive itself? We seem to have here some sort of violation of the cogito. What is seen and who it is seen by are equally illusory—indeed one and the same illusion. 8. For a contrary view see B. F. Dainton, Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience (London: Routledge International Library of Philosophy, 2000), Chap. 8. 9. It will be surmised from this that consciousness, far from the unitary phenomenon it is usually taken to be, must be understood as having numerous sides that need to be held apart. (I suspect that more than anything else failure to recognise this is what has hindered attempts to solve the problem.) And I should emphasise that not everything we might say about consciousness is mistaken. Some are reliable, some not. (1) I need not doubt the reality of qualia, of phenomenological experience itself, in the manner of some eliminativists like Daniel Dennett. For the occurrence of such experience is quite compatible with the Absolute. (2) Nor

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need I deny that I exist as something different from others around me. Although they are not really organised into distinct and separable bundles, whose many elements are all co-accessed together but which as whole are inaccessible to each other, the (infinite) mental whole really does contain many different aspects. My mind is a real and unique contributor to the whole— a genuine moment of diversity—although it is not a complete entity or individual in its own right. Although I make a unique contribution to the whole, my contribution is not necessarily one which stands alone or which could be identified in its own right. My contribution is a key collaborator with others. But other things we might say about consciousness are less reliable. In addition to (3) self-awareness and (4) unity, I could add (5) its finitude and (6) its perspective. 10. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Book I, Part IV, Sect. 6 , p. 252. 11. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), Vol. I, Book I, §2 , p. 5 and the supplementary Chaps. XIX, Vol. II, p. 202, and XLI, Vol. 2, p. 491. 12. So called higher-order thought (HOT) or higher-order experience (HOE) theories of consciousness are put forward by, for example, D. Rosenthal, “Thinking that one Thinks”, in Consciousness, eds. M. Davies and G. W. Humphreys (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), Consciousness and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and P. Carruthers, Consciousness. Essays from a Higher-order Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 13. This paragraph needs apology. It is my claim Absolute Idealism offers us a possibility of explaining consciousness, something physicalism cannot do. Now, since a large part of the vast resources of modern naturalistic philosophy are currently directed on this phenomenon in the belief it can be explained, this second negative claim may seem premature—a giant hostage to fortune. And this paragraph makes no attempt here to prove it in any detail, except to note that it is part of my thesis that if the mind were self-contained then consciousness simply could not arise and that this is precisely what all modern philosophy of mind assumes. But even without a full demonstration of failure by rivals, at very least the lack of any conspicuous success on their part, should serve to give alternative accounts a hearing. 14. We can leave for the present the question of whether this “apprehension” is a passive relation of “being given” or an active one of “creating” or some combination of the two. 15. See H. Lotze, System of Philosophy, §§241-244 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887, 2nd edn., Vol. I: Metaphysic), pp. 169-80; Microcosmus, Book II, Chap. 1, §§4-5 (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1890, 4th edn.), pp. 152-163. 16. The self is never an object, only a relation or principle of unity. To turn it into an object, can only lead to a new principle. This was Bradley’s point about relations. 17. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6 to 5.641, tr. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). 18. We can only compare or relate what is already before the mind, making the unity of consciousness a precondition, not a product, of relational thought. 19. I say a “fundamental intution” because, although it is possible to discuss its basis or origin (as I do in the next section), the feeling of unity is, I think, sui generis. We feel it but there is little more than can be said. There are two types of unity: bottom-up and top-down. In the bottom-up unity the parts come before the whole; the whole is made up by them. But in the top-down unity the whole comes before the parts; they exist only through the whole. In

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bottom-up unity the intuition of oneness which we have about the whole may be explained as deriving from a number of intuitions we have about the parts and their interrelations; but in top-down unity the sense of unity is basic. 20. It might be objected that we cannot experience a contradiction. But as Bradley argues in the Principles of Logic what is or is not analytic depends on the vagaries of how we define our terms. F. H. Bradley, Principles of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922, 2nd edn.), Vol. I, p. 185. 21. The second is something which I have argued at some length in “Omniscience and Pantheism”, The Heythrop Journal, 41, 2000, pp. 199-208.

How Many Divine Minds? John Leslie

1. Introduction Timothy Sprigge’s masterpiece of 1983, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, could be the best-ever defense of a way of thought coming down to us through Spinoza, Hegel, F. H. Bradley and numerous others. Chapter eight of his fine Theories of Existence (1984) develops similar ideas under the chapter title “Spinozistic Pantheism”, and in the April 1997 issue of The Monist he is firm in labeling his position “pantheistic”.1 In that same issue I gave an identical label to my own position as developed in Value and Existence (1979) and in chapter eight, “God”, of my Universes (1989). I stuck with the label later, in Infinite Minds (2001).2 Here I plan to tackle two questions Sprigge raised when he reviewed Infinite Minds.3 Could that book of mine be right when it talked of infinitely many divine minds, pantheistic wholes each separate in its existence? And next, if there did exist such separate wholes, could each one know about the others? To make it possible to understand our differences over these two questions, I need to begin by summarizing our respective versions of pantheism.

2. My Version of Pantheism First, here is how my pantheism unfolds. (a) There necessarily exists an eternal Platonic realm of possibilities and of truths about them. It is, for instance, eternally and necessarily the case that mice are logically possible, and that any two groups of three mice would make six mice in total. Some of these Platonic affairs are ethical. It is eternally true that the presence of a blank, an absence of all existing things, would be better than a world of negative value, perhaps one whose trillions of inhabitants were in constant agony. Likewise it is eternally true that any blank would better be replaced by a good world filled with interesting consciousness, or by a divine mind that was supreme in its goodness. (b) Plato writes in his Republic that The Good, something “itself not existence, but far beyond existence”, is “what gives existence to things”.4 Plato could be right, as could Spinoza and Hegel who say very similar things. (“Through his perfection, God is the cause of himself”—Spinoza;5 “The Idea

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which thinks itself”, the Absolute, is one in which “The Good is really achieved”, since “it is not so powerless as to possess a mere right to exist, without actually existing”—Hegel.6 Variants of the theme can be found in Aquinas, Descartes, Dionysius, A. C. Ewing, Hans Küng, Leibniz, Maimonides, Plotinus, and Paul Tillich.) The crucial point is that goodness is not a property added to a thing’s other properties like a coat of paint. Goodness is ethically required existence of any kind, and thus is a reality which extends far beyond the morally required existence of good actions. (How absurd it would be to fancy that a genuine need for a divine mind to exist would be nothing but a moral demand for some person or persons to create such a mind, or to ensure its continued existence!) Now, it could well be that the ethical requirement for the existence of a divine mind, or of an entire cosmos, sufficed to create that mind or that cosmos. What would give the requirement its creative power? Not mere logic, for there is no contradiction in a blank, an absence of all things. And not anything else either! The Platonic theory is that a possibility’s ethical requiredness can itself in some cases be responsible for that possibility’s actual existence. Consider phenomenal colors—colors as experienced by us. What makes red nearer to orange than to yellow? Nothing. No cogwheels, magnetic fields or divine acts of will “make” the greater nearness. Cavemen without languages would have known it, for it is not “made” by defining orange as “reddish-yellow”; it is instead what justifies defining orange in that way. But as an eternal fact, any phenomenal red would just have to be color-nearer to any phenomenal orange than to any phenomenal yellow. Well, perhaps similarly with the creative power of ethical requirements, whenever they are not overruled by other ethical requirements. Unaided by cogwheels or divine volitions, such creative power could be eternally necessary. (c) Yet why in that case would there exists anything but the best, which is infinite divine awareness of everything worth thinking about? Answer: there exists nothing else, as Spinoza and other pantheists recognize. Our world is a physical world, but physics deals with the world’s structure. Physics does not say whether that structure exists inside the intricately structured consciousness of a mind worth calling “divine”. (d) Being parts of a divine mind would not make us omniscient. Monism—the theory that the things in our universe do not exist each in isolation, but are instead all mere aspects of the same one existent, somewhat as a table’s length and width are aspects of the table—does not claim, ridiculously, that everybody is aware of all the things in the universe and of whether these are simply divine thought-patterns. Still, the various parts of a monistic divine mind would be united in a fashion familiar to quantum physicists. When a box contains two photons in the same quantum state, with what probability are they in different halves of the box? The answer is one third, not one half. There is no real distinction between photon-A-on-the-left-with-photon-B-on-the-right and photon-B-

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on-the-left-with-photon-A-on-the-right. The two photons are a single reality in two locations. Rather similarly, many physicists think, with all the particles within reach of our telescopes. Though far less obviously, these are all of them mere abstractions, mere aspects of a cosmic whole. A human’s consciousness at any given moment can hint at the same fact. Some or all of its parts can be known to be unified in their existence. They are bound together by more than the mere causal integration that characterizes patterns of thinking inside typical computers of today. States inside what are known as quantum computers can, however, be unified in their existence in an obvious way. Regions inside brains could well form such computers. (e) A divine mind would, as Spinoza believed, possess an overview in which all its parts were known to it “as if in a single glance”. Yes, its parts wouldn’t each automatically know the whole. Otherwise the divine mind, when thinking of (and thereby “thinking into existence”) the structures of rocks and of humans, would be thinking not of these but of vastly knowledgeable gods! But this doesn’t deny the existence of the overview. (f) Despite being unified in its existence, a single cosmic whole, a divine mind would presumably carry the patterns of countless universes in addition to ours. It might also include much that was not organized into universes: knowledge of countless possible chess-like games, for instance, or of art forms which humans could never dream of. We might even come to experience these marvels. For we might have the immortality of an afterlife, an immortality added to the mere “Einsteinian immortality” in which physicists often believe. Einsteinian immortality? Well, the thoughts of a divine mind would presumably form an eternally unchanging whole because, as Spinoza argued, such a mind could alter only for the worse. Now, Einstein thought of our universe as indeed in a sense unchanging. His theory of relativity, he wrote, made it “natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three-dimensional existence”.7 (Our experience of what philosophers call “a specious present”, for instance of successive musical notes grasped as a single whole, could again make it natural to think in this way.) Writing to the relatives of his dead friend Michele Besso, Einstein mayn’t actually have used the word “immortality”, yet he made clear that he didn’t view Besso’s life as something that had been wiped from existence. We could say he pictured Besso’s life as something “still in existence back there along the fourth dimension”. However, humans and other animals could well also have an immortality of consciousness that continued onwards beyond their earthly deaths, so that they perhaps became progressively more aware of the wonders of divine knowledge. This might be miraculous, but not in the sense of making natural laws on Earth break down. Were Plato’s ideas on the right lines, then we could positively expect this further type of immortality just so long as it was good. Wouldn’t a

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pantheistic divine mind—a mind in which we lived and moved and had our being, since we were mere elements of its intricate thought-patterns—have good reason to think of our lives as continuing onwards after our bodies had died? Compare how a scientist, after creating a fully conscious computer, has no right to put an end to its thought processes. And similarly when the scientist is an extraterrestrial clever enough to simulate the thought processes of such a computer through thinking about them in complete detail. The simulated computer’s thoughts would be real extraterrestrial’s thoughts, parts of the extraterrestrial’s own thought-patterns; yet why should this bestow a right to put an end to them? (g) If a Platonic creation story were correct, then reality would consist of more than one infinite mind. It is no use protesting that even a single such mind would have infinite value and that therefore there would be no need for any others. (Imagine a mind infinite in negative value, perhaps through containing infinitely much suffering and nothing else. Would you argue that creating a second such mind would be quite all right because it would make the situation no worse? Surely not.) A properly developed Platonic story must involve infinitely many infinite minds, each infinite in its positive value, because this would be best. (h) None the less, the situation would not be perfect in such a way that the ethical need for one thing never conflicted with the ethical need for another. Regardless of whether our world exists four-dimensionally, making it in some sense eternally unchanging, and regardless even of whether it is ruled throughout by deterministic laws of physics, there is plenty of room for us to struggle to improve it. Pantheism, the theory that nothing exists except divine thinking, does not deny the obvious facts of science and of common sense, one such fact being that our actions can affect the world for well or ill. Science and common sense can, though, point to problems—why do there exist any things at all? why does our world conform to physical laws, let alone ones “fine tuned” to permit the evolution of intelligent life?—which Platonism and pantheism can answer.

3. Pantheism as Developed by Timothy Sprigge Now for Sprigge’s position. It is astonishing how closely it resembles mine: astonishing not just because it is odd to find two philosophers agreeing on so much, but also because he makes no use of the idea of Creative Value that is so basic to my world-view. Right or wrong, his arguments are powerful enough to place him among the very best philosophers in the Idealistic tradition (and hence among the very best philosophers, period). Inspiring though Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley are, they often argue too obscurely. With Sprigge one knows just where one’s going, and why.

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(i) He believes that nothing exists apart from consciousness. Not, though, for my sort of reason, viz., that Creative Value would never create anything else. Rather, his argument is that nothing but consciousness is truly conceivable. This doesn’t say that ponds, trees or tables are conscious wholes, in opposition to what science tells us. Sprigge’s view is that the world’s structure is more or less as described by the physicists. Yet, he points out, whatever has structure must have something more to it than structure. Now, what can that something be, if not the feeling of what it’s like to be something that characterizes conscious states? Challenging us to imagine anything else with any completeness, he is confident that we’d fail. What better proof could we need that the nonpsychical is strictly impossible? Being, knowing and being known are all one and the same affair in the case of consciousness; and consciousness is the sole part of the world’s furniture whose inner nature is known to us. Shouldn’t we therefore take it as our clue to the inner nature of reality in general? This line of reasoning is far harder to dismiss than Bishop Berkeley’s argument (which leads straight to solipsism) that conceiving something is always conceiving oneself as conscious of it. (ii) At least at any particular moment, one can know that one’s conscious state is unified in its existence. Its elements can be seen to be mere aspects of it, rather than things each existing in its own right. Can we say the same about all the parts of our universe? Immediate experience cannot be of much help to us here, tempting though it is to take mystical feelings of union with all of Nature as clues rather than illusions. Abstract arguments might serve us better. Sprigge gives many pages to the idea, central to Bradley’s thought, that absolutely any relation between things can exist only inside an existentially unified whole. While fairly confident about this, he appears to place yet more reliance on the following reasoning. How could things come to be cemented together into a single world? By forming parts of the same space and interacting causally? Well, how would they ever manage to do that? Sprigge replies that being in the same space and interacting causally are possible only for centers of consciousness that are united in a cosmic consciousness of which they are only aspects. Every item inside the cosmic whole has a character that it could possess only where it actually stands inside just this whole. The whole is not an aspect of anything else, and it can be fully conceived without reference to anything outside it. Not so with the parts! Like every other reasonable monist, Sprigge does find room for beingdistinct. A man can be importantly distinct from his dog and therefore ignorant of just what patterns fill its canine thoughts. Still, Sprigge’s cosmic consciousness possesses, in addition to all its distinct parts, the kind of overview of itself that I talked of earlier. There is “some kind of unitary cosmic experience which the universe has of itself”;8 all elements of the universe are there experienced by “one total individual which experiences them as ingredients in its own being”;9

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“the best image of the unitary totality of things is that of a vast symphony which experiences itself in one single specious present of colossal extent and complexity”.10 (iii) I suggested that we do experience specious presents. We can be conscious of successive musical notes together, for Einstein was right; the past can in an important sense exist side by side with the present, and can hence be “there” to be experienced by us at this present moment. In Infinite Minds I followed Michael Lockwood in arguing that quantum wholeness can stretch in time in a fashion helping to explain the affair. And—without bringing in either Einstein or quantum theory, let alone the point that alterations in a divine mind wouldn’t be allowed by a Platonic creation story—Sprigge tells us that his cosmic whole is not subject to change. Our successive mental states, whether past, present or future, are therefore all of them eternal. Unless the past is an eternally existing realm, its each event a fleeting present from its own viewpoint, it could not be determinate, he reasons; there could be no definite truths about what forms past events had taken. And he rightly sees no force in the argument that extending the same being-determinate to the future would make efforts pointless since future events would all be fated to take forms unaffected by our struggles. One might equally well argue, “If the world is physically deterministic, humans cannot cause anything”. (iv) As well as being a whole whose every element has a nature that dictates and is dictated by the natures of all the other elements, the universe is probably necessary through and through. There seemingly could not be some further universe, also with elements whose natures dictated one another’s, but with different elements; “the whole thing” seems “necessary in its every detail”, there being “no alternative to things being as they are”.11 Or at least the possibility of further and different universes seems very unlikely. Sprigge does toy with the idea that further universes might be possible if they had strictly speaking “no properties” in common;12 he appears confident, however, that there just couldn’t be a second universe in which, say, a single atom was slightly differently placed, this being reflected by marginal changes in the properties of all the other atoms. And utter emptiness is not a real alternative either, he claims, for an absence of all things isn’t truly conceivable. Similarly with an absence of space, time or consciousness. (v) The universe contains foul things, evils, but considered in its totality it is good in an important sense. It is a mind or center of consciousness whose experience of itself lacks all restlessness, all dissatisfied itching. Necessarily existing, never changing, knowing every last detail of itself, unified in its existence, and with no possible thing to which it is inferior, it can reasonably be called God. It has the uniqueness so often attributed to the divine. There are absolutely no other entities outside it, let alone other deities.

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4. What Number of Divine Minds Should a Pantheist Accept? We are now in a position to discuss the first of the two questions I raised at the start. In how many divine minds ought a pantheist to believe? I never have had problems with the idea that there are infinitely many things, each separate in its existence. Suppose a cosmologist dreams up some universe-creating mechanism. I find it bizarre if the mechanism is described as acting on just one occasion; for if it acted once, then why not again and again, producing infinitely many separately existing universes? And certainly, my Platonic creation story makes me believe in infinitely many separate existents, all identically good. You cannot have too many things of the same good type, or at least not when they are so distinct that they cannot interfere with one another. Imagine two minds, each contemplating all that is worth contemplating. It couldn’t be that something called The Good of Variety would make it better for one of them to contemplate something else. Mine is a pantheism of infinitely many divine minds, each carrying in its thought the structures of infinitely many universes. If you are to be serious about the religious attempt to explain the world by reference to its goodness, then this is where you must end up, I think. The alternative is that the world exists for no reason whatever. To Sprigge, things look very different. He notes that “quite a number of commentators on Leslie’s thought—I had cited people such as S. R. L. Clark, Brian Davies, Peter Forrest, Ronald Hepburn, J. L. Mackie, Derek Parfit, John Polkinghorne, Nicholas Rescher, Hugh Rice, Keith Ward and Mark Wynn— “have agreed that it offers a serious alternative to the view either that the existence of our actual universe (or of the collection of actual universes) is just a brute fact or, if not, that the existence of the God who created it (or them) is just a brute fact”. He even expresses “some sympathy with the view of Aquinas, Spinoza and Leibniz that all essences have a certain nisus to exist”. But, he then says, he is “uneasy with the idea that it is degree of ethical requiredness which determines which of them will have their way”.13 His own theory, remember, is that there simply had to be a world; an absence of all things is strictly inconceivable. Furthermore, the world necessarily took—for reasons having nothing to do with Creative Value—the form of a divine mind that includes your consciousness and mine and all the structure of our universe. No single detail could be different. Now, he thinks there couldn’t be more than one mind of this type, for two reasons. (A) First, the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles is right. That’s to say, there could never be two existents, each possessing precisely the same properties as the other. Yet if the divine mind inside which we exist is necessary in its every single detail, any other divine mind would then indeed have to possess precisely the same properties.

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(B) Second, Sprigge is strongly attracted by the argument that relations between things must always have their reality inside a unity-of-being which includes the things in question. It follows that if there existed several infinite minds of the sort John Leslie believes in, then these minds would necessarily exist side by side within some still greater mind. True enough, Sprigge is cautious here. He is unwilling to use the argument—“I do not think it any more than a dodge”, he writes—that even being-separate would be a relation and would therefore connect up any allegedly fully separate things into an existential unity. Still, he thinks it “very likely true” that any two things would have to stand in various “ideal” relations, i.e., would be like or unlike one another in various ways, and that such relations would have to be “holistic”, i.e., present inside some unity-of-being. Now, “in that case there necessarily is only one universe”.14 (He must not be read as denying that many universes-in-some-sense could all of them exist inside a single divine mind. Instead, his surrounding arguments show that he here uses the word “universe” to mean an existentially unified totality. Yes, a divine mind could contain many universes of the sort discussed in my book Universes, universes as envisaged by contemporary “multiverse” cosmologies; but No, there couldn’t be two or more such minds, each separate in its existence.) How ought I to react to these two points? Well, I have never been much attracted to point (B). It seems to me that two universes could be alike, for instance in both containing atoms, without thereby being forced to be mere elements inside a super-universe, a unity-of-being that included them both. I can point to Sprigge’s own hesitations to support my position here. One thing making him so fine a philosopher is that he sees how hard it can be to know who’s right. What about the Identity of Indiscernibles appealed to in (A)? It strikes me as a mistake. Suppose two universes differ just in the following way. In the one universe, two atoms are exactly five inches apart, whereas in the other universe the equivalent atoms are separated only by 4.999999 inches. If the atoms moved so as to destroy this difference between the universes, would they have to collapse into a single universe? This looks to me implausible. The argument “But there would now be no describable differences between the supposedly separate universes!” could only question-beggingly settle the point in Sprigge’s favor. Those who reject the Identity of Indiscernibles are happy to do without describable differences! Still, all this is comparatively unimportant. Instead of believing that Creative Value was responsible for the existence of infinitely many divine minds, each precisely the same as the others, I could move to believing that each of the minds was infinitesimally different from the others. Identity of Indiscernibles would have nothing to say against it. Oughtn’t I to think, though, that any independently existing divine minds would better be fused into a single super-mind? It might at first seem that this

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would be best. If the divine minds were identical in all their properties then such fusion would admittedly be nonsense, because inside any existential unity Identity of Indiscernibles is surely right; to reject it in this case would be like saying that an emerald could be green and in addition green; however, I see no impossibility in a fusion of divine minds when each was slightly different from the others. And here, one might think, The Good of Variety would have some importance. Second thoughts suggest that any such fusion would bring, at the most, only minor benefits. (a) For a start, the addition to Variety would seem of little use. Imagine one divine mind that contemplated absolutely everything worth contemplating, and a second mind, fused with the first, which contemplated—well, what? Just fewer of the things which were worth contemplating? Or else all the things which were worth contemplating, together with some which weren’t? In any overview that the fusion had of itself, so that it could stand a chance of enjoying the variety, wouldn’t there instead be irritation at the lack of variation (to the extent that the first and second minds did contemplate the same things) plus dismay at whatever did vary (for instance, through one of the minds contemplating something ugly that wasn’t contemplated by the other)? (b) Next, imagine two minds whose properties were almost the same. The intrinsic value of the one could be more or less exactly equal to that of the other. Even when the value of each was infinite, the value of the two together could be in some good enough sense twice as great. But after the first mind had been altered through having the second mind fused with it, how much different and better would it have become? Hardly at all different, hence at most only marginally better, seems the answer. For consider one mind after fusing with another whose properties had been not just very similar, but precisely the same. Since, as noted just now, Identity of Indiscernibles surely holds inside any single existent, this would leave the first mind precisely as it had been and therefore not in the least better. The situation would be just as if the second mind had been annihilated, without the slightest effect on its companion. However, let’s concede for argument’s sake that there would be some benefit in fusing two or more somewhat different divine minds. (After all, doesn’t Christian theology discover that type of benefit in its Trinity?) The concession would make little difference to the general picture. If it were good for there to be a divine mind that was itself an existential fusion of divine minds, then the Platonic creation story would lead us to expect that mind’s existence and also the presence of infinitely many other such minds, each separate in its existence from the others. The notion that Creative Value would operate only once, producing just a single existent, strikes me as indefensible. Imagine that there existed two minds, each with a conscious state as good as it possibly could be. Would it be acceptable to claim that each mind, all by itself, would include all the value that could be needed, then picking one and annihilating it, just for fun?

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5. Could Any Divine Mind Know of the Existence of Others? Finally, let us examine the second intriguing point Sprigge raised. If there existed infinitely many existentially unified wholes, each a divine mind or (as suggested a moment ago for argument’s sake) a fusion of two or more divine minds, then could each of these wholes know about the others? The crucial point is that the wholes in question wouldn’t themselves be fused with one another. The existence of any particular one of them would be fully separate from that of the rest. How, then, could it know that they existed? Sprigge’s hunch is that it could not. How do we know various contents of our own conscious states? He answers that elements of one’s conscious state at any moment are knowable immediately. They are elements of a whole which, although it is just a part of the larger, existentially unified totality of the cosmos, is itself existentially unified. This whole knows all its elements directly, for that is the very nature of consciousness. In consciousness, being and knowing and being known are all one and the same affair, you will recall. In all this I think he is right; and I think him right, too, when he claims that one’s own consciousness is the sole thing one can know incontrovertibly through experience. It makes him inclined to conclude that a divine mind could know of another, separately existing divine mind only if the two were aspects of a single existent, “a more comprehensive mind”.15 He notes, however, that I’d see the knowledge as potentially gettable by another means, namely, through working things out. Couldn’t a divine mind do what even John Leslie does when he reasons that there must be infinitely many separately existing divine minds? Leslie’s idea, Sprigge writes, is that “the existence of many infinite minds, sharing essentially the same knowledge, is better than the existence of just one”, and is therefore dictated by “the principle of ethical requiredness”.16 Well, yes; but can the principle of ethical requiredness—the rightness of the Platonic creation story, that’s to say—itself be something that’s known? Perhaps not, or at least not in the very strong sense of “known” in which elements inside a single mind can be known to that mind’s consciousness. In the “overview” that a divine mind had of itself, it would be aware of all its contents, including the structures of countless universes. It would also, I’d argue, know that there were hugely many things it didn’t know. Sprigge’s tendency is to say that his pantheistic mind is “all-knowing”, contemplating “all actuality and all possibility”.17 In contrast, any pantheistic mind that I’d readily accept would avoid contemplating, for instance, the structures of immensely many possible universes in which Induction suddenly broke down, or exactly how it would feel to be tortured to death in all logically possible ways. Through its overview of itself, any such divine mind could be sure that it failed to contain such rubbishy or unpleasant knowledge. It could know, therefore, that its totality might reasonably be con-

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sidered supremely good. It could know, too, all the arguments which show that the notion of creative ethical requiredness contains no contradiction. But would it then know for certain that it was the product of such requiredness? This could reasonably be doubted, I suggest. The trouble is that goodness indeed isn’t a quality added to a thing’s other qualities like a coat of paint. It is, as G. E. Moore pointed out, a “nonconstitutive” quality. You could know all the qualities which made a thing just what it was, without thereby knowing its goodness, its status of having ethically required existence. Hence perhaps even a divine mind couldn’t know for sure that anything was ever better than anything else—that belief in ethical requiredness wasn’t just an error. And if so, of course, then it couldn’t know for sure that creative ethical requiredness was a reality, then deducing the existence of infinitely many other minds like itself. Mightn’t it be good, though, for a divine mind to have a vision of infinitely many other separately existing divine minds, plus a strong belief in the vision’s trustworthiness? It would then automatically have the vision and the strong belief, were creative ethical requiredness responsible for its being. It would also have no adequate reason for doubting the trustworthiness. Still, all this might fail to provide knowledge quite as firm as the knowledge a mind has of its own unified consciousness.

Notes 1. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983); “Pantheism”, The Monist, 80. 2, 1997, pp. 191-217; Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984). 2. J. Leslie, “A Neoplatonist’s Pantheism”, The Monist, 80. 2, 1997, pp. 218-231; Value and Existence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Universes (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Infinite Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 3. Sprigge, “Review of Infinite Minds”, Mind, 2003, pp. 749-754. 4. Plato, Republic, Book VI, 509. 5. Spinoza, Short Treatise of God, Man, and His Well-Being, Book I, Chap. 3. 6. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Sections 6 and 235 of Part I (Logic). 7. A. Einstein, Relativity, the Special and the General Theory, Appendix Five (London: Methuen, 1962, 15th edn.). 8. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 233. 9. Ibid., p. 204. 10. Ibid., p. 253. 11. Sprigge, “Pantheism”, op. cit., pp. 207-208.

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12. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 191. 13. Sprigge, “Review”, op. cit., p. 751. 14. Sprigge, Vindication, op. cit., p. 250. 15. Sprigge, “Review”, op. cit., p. 753. 16. Ibid., p. 754. 17. “Pantheism”, op. cit., p. 205; Vindication, op. cit., p. 194.

Sprigge’s Spinoza Peter Forrest

1. Introduction Metaphysics is the jig-saw puzzle from Hell: the pieces change when you look at them; some seem to belong to a different puzzle; and many are missing. And yet, finding some portions that fit together, I cannot help trying to complete the picture. I am indebted to Timothy Sprigge for the Absolute Idealist corner. But how it fits in with agency, time, modality, or even analytic ontology, I have as yet no idea—my fault not Sprigge’s. As for Spinoza, he is an awful warning: a lesson to young philosophers as to how not to practice their art. And yet, intuitively something rather like Spinoza’s pantheism strikes me as the way to combine the truths of Science and Religion. In this tribute to Sprigge I shall, therefore, be looking at Sprigge’s Spinoza, the topic of Chapter Eight of his Theories of Existence.1 What we are looking for in the case of thinkers like Spinoza is not interpretation so much as rational reconstruction: what Spinoza might have said if he had had the benefit of good contemporary philosophy education, and if he had kept up with four hundred years of scientific progress. Accordingly Sprigge in his account of Spinoza says, “In what follows I shall sketch a view… which is essentially Spinozistic, but in which the argumentation and some of the details… are rather what I think is best said today by one who would recommend a Spinozistic point of view…”.2 It is in this spirit that I introduce T. B. Sprigoza, who shows how Absolute Idealism solves three problems with Spinoza’s metaphysics. Moreover, Sprigozism coheres remarkably well with contemporary science. There remains, however, the most serious defect in Spinoza’s thought, namely his version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

2. Preliminaries Space-time—Sprigoza’s metaphysics is about Space-time rather than Space as such. This is both in the spirit of Spinoza’s own thought and supported by Relativity. Moreover Spinoza’s Necessitarianism strongly supports the Block Theory according to which the differences between past, present and future are merely perspectival. God or Nature—Next, Sprigoza accepts Spinoza’s central thesis that we can

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understand the whole of reality either as God or as Nature. Both ways of understanding are, in principle, complete. So we may adopt either the theistic vision of the entire world as God’s rational self-expression or the naturalistic vision of the world as a closed system governed by causal laws. Substance, Attributes and Modes—Spinoza’s metaphysics states that there is only one substance with infinitely many attributes of which we know only two, and that finite minds and finite bodies are modes of these two known attributes. Notice the failure to mention any relations. With the exception of Leibniz I take it that philosophers in the time of Spinoza, and earlier, tended to obscure the role of relations by considering the corresponding relational properties. When reconstructing their thought we should therefore feel free to introduce relations where appropriate. So where Spinoza talks of distinct mental and physical attributes, Sprigoza considers relations between them, notably that of awareness or, if you prefer, knowledge by acquaintance. And Sprigoza prudently ignores all but two of the infinity of divine attributes. What, then, are substances, attributes, and modes? The full-blooded Aristotelian conception of substance is such that: (1) finite bodies (rocks, trees, etc.) are paradigmatic substances; (2) the existence of everything else depends on the existence of substances; and, if this is not the same: (2*) substances are the only concrete things, everything else is abstract; (3) any substance could have existed without any other substance existing; (4) all substances persist, for a while at least; (5) no substance is instantiated by any other substance (so properties and relations are not substances); (6) every property is a property of some substance, and every relation a relation between substances; (7) all substances have causal powers; (8) no substance is made up of successive stages that are substances; (9) no substance has spatial parts that are substances. This is an alarmingly comprehensive package, and various metaphysicians have used the term “substance” while jettisoning one or more of the nine characteristics. Nonetheless (1) to (7) and even (8) are taken as intuitive and hence their denial is treated as a defect in a theory, which opponents seize upon. Thus monists such as Spinoza are treated with “incredulous stares” because, even jettisoning (9) they deny that there are any substances that are finite bodies. Again the suspicion of non-theistic Platonism about numbers lies in the denial of (2) (assuming by (7) that numbers are not substances). Yet again, the suspicion of even theistic Platonism about universals lies in the denial of (6). Finally, the widespread rejection of the coherence of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity lies in

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the insistence that the divine Persons do not satisfy (3) and yet could have been the only things to have been related by loving knowledge, thus violating the conjunction of (3) and (6). Is this deference to Aristotle just plain common sense, or the most persistent culture cringe in history? To avoid begging questions we should break up the full Aristotelian conception of substance into its components. Let us therefore distinguish two concepts of substance, ousia and hypostasis. These are important in part because they correspond to Descartes’ usage. An h-substance (hypostasis) is some thing that has properties and stands in relations but is not itself a property or relation. This latter clause is only required because we might think that properties and relations could themselves have properties and stand in relations, in which case they still do not count as hsubstances. When I discuss modes I shall also stipulate just when a mode is to be considered part of an h-substance. An o-substance (ousia) is something that can exist all by itself, a Humean “distinct existence”. I use this definition rather than (3) because without any additional characterisation of a substance (3) would be circular. Descartes’ definition of a substance is explicitly that of an o-substance and because he holds that all else depends on God he says, incorrectly, that God is the only substance, meaning the only o-substance. Now Descartes considers those non-divine things that exist independently from each other to be substances in a different sense. And I could burden you with a definition of a semi-o-substance to apply to them. However, for these non-divine things Descartes uses the rule that something is a substance if and only if it has an attribute, hence, in effect, talking of h-substances. Because Descartes was the chief philosophical influence on Spinoza it is especially appropriate, then, to distinguish o-substances from h-substances, when discussing his thought. Spinoza famously held that finite bodies and finite minds are not themselves substances but modes of the two known attributes of God-or-Nature. I take an attribute to be an essential property of an h-substance, so a common sense position (not Spinoza’s) would be that having mass is an attribute of a rock. Properties that are not essential are said to be accidental, but I find it useful to distinguish pure accidents from sub-essential properties. Many of the attributes of common sense metaphysics, such as having mass are determinable and cannot have an instance without some determinate property having an instance. Thus common sense would suggest that nothing can have mass unless it has some determinate mass. So although having mass 1000 kilos is not essential to a rock of that mass, it must have some determinate mass. I call the determinates of essential determinables sub-essential properties. The remaining accidents, if there are any, are to be called pure accidents. I take it that Spinoza’s idea of a mode derives primarily from Descartes, who

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was in turn influenced by Scholasticism. There is, however, some controversy in interpreting Spinoza here, so again I reconstruct. An attribute may be said to be instantiated at one time rather than another, or in one place rather than another or as one determinate of a determinable. In this context Descartes talks of variegation in the attribute. These are the modes of instantiation. Thus if we supposed, as part of a common sense world-view, that a rock has the attribute of being coloured, then its being rust red on its top surface in 1600 would be a mode of its colour. If we took the modes to be o-substances they would be what D. C. Williams jokingly called tropes.3 If they are not o-substances then, I assume, they depend for their existence on the truth that a property or relation is instantiated by one or more h-substances. In that case I shall stipulate that they are not themselves hsubstances but merely parts or components of h-substances. If the mode depends only on the instantiation by some h-substance (or a part of it) of a property I say it is a modal component of that substance, so in the prescientific common sense worldview the rock’s upper surface being rusty red in 1600 is a modal component of that rock. Where the mode is an instance of a relation I shall say it is a modal component of any h-substance that has as parts all the relata. So the mode that is the rock’s being adjacent to a pebble in 1600 is a modal component of the h-substance which is the sum of the rock and the pebble. I further stipulate that a particular x is not an h-substance if it has as a part a mode that is not a modal component of either x or some part of x. This is to bar such monsters as the sum of rock and a colour mode, such as ochre, of an adjacent pebble; while not barring the sum of the rock and the pebble. A rock plus a mode of a pebble is not to be considered an h-substance. (Blessed be the reader who does not need to be told such things!) Although the inclusion of some but not other modes as parts of h-substances is stipulative, it is important as an explication of ordinary usage, and hence as a way of understanding why some metaphysical theories such as Spinoza’s can sound so strange, while not really problematic. One curious consequence of these stipulations concerns the case in which all the properties of something are analysed in terms of relations to things other than its parts. In that case we either treat it as a bare particular, that is, something without any properties at all, or we deny that it is a substance in either sense. The idea of a bare particular existing all by itself is highly counter-intuitive. So something all of whose properties are relational might be an h-substance but cannot be an o-substance. To say that finite bodies and minds are modes of attributes of God-or-Nature is, then, to say either that these finite things exist but not as h-substances, or to deny that they exist and say that truths apparently about them are to be paraphrased as truths about the mode of instantiation of the attributes of the one substance. But in either case Sprigoza asserts that when we talk of finite bodies, whatever truth there is in this is due to the physical attribute (namely extension)

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being instantiated by the one substance God-or-Nature at a certain place and time and in a certain manner, just as in the common sense pre-scientific metaphysics rusty redness was said to be instantiated on the top surface of the rock in 1600. Using these definitions we may define some types of quantitative monism, the thesis that there is one substance—not to be confused with qualitative monism, the thesis that there is one kind of substance. The weakest is the thesis that there are several o-substances but no two are disjoint. Those theists who like Descartes hold that God is the sustaining cause of all else are monists in this weak sense. I am more concerned with the strict monist thesis that there is only one osubstance. A physicalist theory according to which there is only one universe, all of whose properties are essential or sub-essential, would be monist in this sense if the only o-substance is taken to be the whole universe. Finally there is the strongest monist thesis, namely that there is one and only one h-substance, which is also the unique o-substance. This is what I take Sprigoza to hold. Absolute Idealism—The last of the preliminaries concerns Sprigoza’s Absolute Idealism, which I take to be the conjunction of two theses. The first is that everything is made up of awareness, or, to use near-synonyms, knowledge by acquaintance, or experience. Now awareness is described relationally, so we may talk of awareness-instances, such as x’s being aware of y. The absolute idealist holds that the relata, the xs and ys, depend on awareness for their existence. This thesis is shared with some neutral monists. But as I understand it, the latter hold that the different instances of awareness are distinct o-substances and hence tropes, so that is a version of qualitative monism. According to these neutral monists an object (veridical or illusory) is a sum of awareness-instances, as is a mind. If we think of these awarenessinstances as having two “poles”, then minds are the result of “joining” them at their subject poles, and objects the result of “joining” them at the object-poles. Absolute idealists reject this atomist approach and instead think of experience as the stuff of which everything is made, with awareness-instances either treated as abstract entities or as fictions, which correspond to the two interpretations of modes. A corollary of the denial of atomistic experience is that necessarily awareness-instances form minds and objects. They cannot exist by themselves as in a Neutral Monism. Therefore there is no need to “join” together the “poles” of the awareness-instances. Instead we think of minds and objects, along with the awareness-instances themselves, as the result of abstracting them away from the tangled web of experience. Absolute idealists also reject the existence of bare particulars, because these would not be constituted by experience.

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3. Problems for Spinoza Spinoza’s metaphysics presents five problems of the “Why should anyone believe this?” kind. One of these concerns the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself, which in his version is almost universally rejected and which I shall replace with a different and more plausible version. The second is whether the one substance deserves to be called God. The other three are the ones that Sprigoza solves using Absolute Idealism. They concern monism and psycho-physical parallelism. The Principle of Sufficient Reason—Although not as explicit as in Leibniz it is generally agreed that Spinoza relied upon some version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely that if p is true it is possible to understand why p is actually true. This principle has fallen into disrepute because it is usually explicated in Spinozistic fashion, leading to the repugnant conclusion of Necessitarianism, the thesis that nothing is contingent. This follows because Spinoza seems to have held that to understand a truth is to know its necessity. There are putative mathematical counter-examples in which there is knowledge of necessity but no understanding. For instance, it is elementary that any odd number, and a fortiori any prime greater than 2, which is the sum of two squares must have remainder 1 when divided by 4. The converse is not so elementary: any prime that has a remainder 1 when divided by 4 is the sum of two squares. This is known as Fermat’s Christmas Theorem. We understand why it holds provided we can follow a proof. But Spinoza would not have known of any proof. Assuming, however, that he had been taught multiplication tables up to 12 times, he could have checked in his head that this result held when restricted to primes less than 144. In that case he would have known the necessity of the restricted result. But he would not have understood it, for to understand this restricted result we must follow a proof of the general result. Now Sprigoza could simply grant that knowing necessity is not sufficient for understanding but insist it is required for understanding. In that case Necessitarianism would still follow from the Principle of Sufficient Reason. But this example is, I submit, more insidious than a straightforward counter-example would be. For I say that we do understand the restricted result just by checking it. The putative counter-example, and similar examples, show instead that understanding comes in degrees, and that knowledge of necessity is sufficient only for there to be some degree of understanding. Greater understanding is provided by knowledge of a necessary generalisation, such as Fermat’s Christmas Theorem. But once this is conceded it will become plausible that there are ways of understanding—to some degree—other than knowledge of necessity. Spinoza’s Necessitarianism interacts in a devastating way with his psychophysical parallelism, which is opposed to any straightforwardly physicalist or interactionist understanding of human actions in terms of brain processes. Instead they are to be understood in terms of reasons for acting. Therefore he is

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committed to the thesis that agents have what are all things considered better reasons for acting as they do than for not acting, or acting in some other way. Hence when we perform actions as a result of urges we are not conscious of, those urges must, according to Spinoza, be unconscious reasons. Sometimes this is so: as Pascal was to put it, “The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing”. But Buridan held a similar position and the ass named after him, who starves to death lacking a reason for preferring either of two bales of hay, would also starve according to Spinoza. Yet in such a situation we expect Buridan’s ass to start moving towards one bale without any reason, conscious or unconscious, and then, lacking any reason to stop, end up choosing that bale. My diagnosis of why Spinoza is committed to the implausible thesis that Buridan’s ass would starve is his coupling of understanding with necessity. I shall return to this problem after showing how Sprigoza solves some other problems. Meanwhile, I note that it is this combination of Necessitarianism with a reasons-based psychology that leads to the repugnant ethics of detached forgiveness. Spinoza is committed to the following counterfactual: were I to decide otherwise, different mental events would occur in the immediate future but there would be no difference in the physical events. He is therefore a fatalist about the physical occurrences but accepts responsibility for the accompanying mental events, which are, however, the only mental events that could rationally occur. Presumably, he holds that we would grant this if we were better at introspecting our reasons for acting. Hence resentment at the way others have done us wrong is based upon the thought that we expect of others that they be kind to us in ways that are, unknown to most of us, irrational, even though of necessity they act rationally. The First Monism Problem—Spinoza held that God-or-Nature was the one and only substance, and I take him to be saying that there is just one osubstance, which is also the unique h-substance. The first problem then is what reason there might be to hold that there is just the one o-substance. Now it is a plausible enough hypothesis that the physical world is just Spacetime with its properties.4 And we can argue in two ways that no proper part of Space-time is an o-substance. The first concerns what makes a given region in Space-time the region it is. An intuitive answer is that it is precisely its relation to other regions. And nothing that is essentially related to anything other than itself or a part of itself could be an o-substance. This argument is especially cogent if we are persuaded that the alternative to treating the whole of Space-time as an o-substance is to take every point to be an o-substance. For it is especially plausible that points do not differ except in their relations to other points and so they have essentially relational properties. The second argument is based upon the premises that Space-time cannot have a boundary, and that it is connected. I call this the No Boundary Argument. For this argument I do not use the topological definition of a boundary, but instead

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say a region has a boundary if it contains points that can be approached in one direction but not the opposite direction. In addition we need the technical premise that Space-time is complete, that is, any sequence of points that are getting closer and closer to each other are also getting closer and closer to a limit point. To be sure, an initial singularity, as the Big Bang is often taken to be, would be just such a boundary in a complete Space-time. But the intuitive dislike of that singularity attests to the plausibility of the premise. Therefore if a proper part of Space-time could exist by itself it too must be complete and lack a boundary. Assuming Space-time is connected (that is, does not fall into two or more distinct Space-times) this is impossible. If Space-time is not connected then we may think of it as making up several detached island universes, which would indeed be distinct o-substances, but we may assume that there is just the one universe. Hence there is a case for Spacetime being either a single o-substance or part of one. The above argument requires the independent rejection of the Growing Block Theory, according to which Space-time does have a boundary, the present, and it has proper parts that were once the whole of Space-time, whose boundaries are the hypersurfaces that were once present. These are distinguished from other parts by the way they contain everything prior to any part of them, and they are distinguished from each other because, of any two of them, one is a part of the other but not vice versa. So the argument that parts of Space-time are only distinguished relationally also fails in this case. Moreover, if the whole of Space-time is as the Growing Block Theory describes, then we must grant that it has a boundary (the present) whether we like it or not, and so the No Boundary Argument fails. But as explained above, I take Sprigoza to hold the Block Theory. If no properties of Space-time are pure accidents it follows that no proper part of the physical world is an o-substance. What would such pure accidents be? If we were attribute dualists and considered persons to be portions of Space-time that had extra non-physical properties, then these would be pure accidents. An attribute dualist should not, therefore, hold that the whole of Space-time is the unique o-substance. And clearly neither should a substance dualist such as Descartes, who could hold that there is one physical o-substance but either one or several mental o-substances. It might seem, therefore, that only a physicalist, who insists that not merely all substances but all attributes are physical, could be a monist in the sense of believing in a unique o-substance. The First Monism Problem, then, is why someone who follows Spinoza in distinguishing mental and physical attributes would nonetheless believe there was just the one osubstance. One answer might be that this is a trivial consequence of Spinoza’s Necessitarianism, but I am aiming for a reconstruction which eventually avoids this peculiar doctrine, and Absolute Idealism provides an argument for there being just one o-substance.

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First, I note that Absolute Idealism explains why bodies cannot exist without minds and vice versa. For both bodies and minds are made up of awarenessinstances and so a world with a body but no mind would be one of ownerless experience, whereas a world of mind but no body would be a world in which no experience, even of Space-time, was veridical. Now an idealist must treat the veridical/non-veridical contrast as one of coherence rather than any difference of kind. Therefore the situation in which everything physical is illusory would be impossible, so there must be one or more finite or infinite minds that are collectively aware of all that is physical. Now consider the sum total of all these minds with the whole physical world. Which if any parts could exist without the whole? Initially it might seem that certain instances of awareness are not essential parts so the remainder could exist. For instance it might seem that vision could be removed, leaving other forms of awareness. Are any individual minds redundant in this way? Not if each mind is required for there to be awareness of every part of Spacetime. The minds we are familiar with are only aware of very limited portions of Space-time, either brains if we follow Sprigge, or maybe parts of our bodies if we assume that awareness is propriocentation (i.e., body awareness). And these limited portions do not overlap (except perhaps at the surfaces that we are jointly aware of by vision.) Therefore we must posit an extra mind or minds to ensure that there is awareness of all parts of Space-time. There are several hypotheses about this mind or these minds. Three simple ones are as follows. First we might posit a single extra mind, God, aware of everything. In that case Monism would be false because God plus the physical world would be an osubstance that excluded finite minds. The next hypothesis is that there are many minds, including the familiar ones, aware of disjoint regions of Space-time. The third, which is perhaps less elegant, is that there are many minds with overlapping regions of awareness but that for each mind there is some region of which only it is aware. On either of these last two hypotheses there are no minds redundant to the existence of Space-time. There remains the problem that some ways of being aware, such as vision, might seem redundant in that a world without them would still count as an osubstance. Sprigoza solves this problem because there is only one kind of direct awareness, whose objects, for us humans, are brain processes. Now clearly we are not aware of them by propriocentation, which would be a sense of the shape of the brain and which parts were active. Instead, the direct awareness of brain processes is what we ordinarily think of as vision, hearing, propriocentation etc. Because there is only one kind of direct awareness there is no redundancy. The Second Monism Problem—Absolute Idealism provides a justification for the thesis that there is only one o-substance. What about h-substances? We might have expected Spinoza to say that the one o-substance has parts with mental and physical attributes. In that case the parts would be h-substances. But

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instead he says that the one substance has mental and physical attributes and that minds and material objects are modes of these attributes, that is, instances of them. Either he denies that the one o-substance has parts or he is asserting that these parts are not h-substances. In either case he is asserting a stronger version of monism than “merely” that there is just one o-substance, God-or-Nature. Spinoza is implicitly asserting that God-or-Nature is also the unique hsubstance. Consider, for example, a poached egg, called Bertie. Bertie is located in space-time region b and has the property P, which is in turn the conjunction of various other properties such as having a centre of half cooked egg yolk, and having a ring shaped part of fully cooked egg white. Spinoza rejects the, to my mind plausible, identity of Bertie and b-with-P. Instead he identifies Bertie with the (real or fictional!) instance of the property P-in-b, which is itself just one conjunct of the complex physical property that God-or-Nature has. Hence, according to Sprigoza, “Russell ate Bertie for breakfast” is true because God-orNature has a complex property one conjunct of which is P-in-b another conjunct of which is Q-in-c, where c is a region adjacent to b and where Q a complex property we usually think of as belonging to Russell. There is an alternative paraphrase of truths apparently about a region b having a property P. Instead of saying they are really about the property P-in-b, we could adapt Prior’s tense logic and say they are really about property P being binstantiated by God-or-Nature. If we would ordinarily say that b is part of c, then on this paraphrase b-instantiation entails c-instantiation. Whichever paraphrase we adopted the metaphysics has been made more complicated, and that should be avoided unless it is for a good reason. Why then did Spinoza adopt this paraphrase of talk about things such as poached eggs? Perhaps the correct answer is that: (1) he thought that metaphysics could be established more geometrico and hence was unconcerned with avoiding complexity; and (2) he incorrectly thought it obvious that every h-substance was an o-substance. Sprigoza, however, has an argument against treating finite minds or finite objects as h-substances. Recall the three hypotheses mentioned above, the last two of which implied that there was just the one o-substance. One of these two divides Space-time into disjoint regions for each of which there is an associated mind. On that hypothesis no mind in isolation is an h-substance because all its properties are characterised in terms of relations to disjoint thing, namely the regions, or if you prefer, finite bodies, of which the mind has awareness. Likewise no region/finite body is an h-substance. But h-substances are nonetheless plentiful. They include human beings and many other animals, for they are minds plus the associated regions. For relations between parts of a thing result in a structural property of that thing which is part of the thing considered as an hsubstance. Hence there is not just the one h-substance. The third hypothesis, however, had overlapping regions associated with the

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minds. In that case no sum of minds or regions less than the whole of reality would be an h-substance, because any h-substance that included some mind or minds would have to include all the regions of which these minds were aware; and any h-substance that included some region or regions would have to include all the minds aware of these regions. Could we find an h-substance that was not the sum of minds and regions? The sort of thing we would be considering would be the region x that is only experienced by a given mind y, plus that mind y, but without the region z experienced both by y and other minds. We ourselves might be just such things. I stipulated, however, that these are not h-substances when I barred such monsters as a rock plus the ochre colour of the adjacent pebble. I reach the conclusion that a certain hypothetical development of Absolute Idealism does indeed lead to the thesis that there is only one h-substance and hence that finite minds and bodies are modes of that one substance. But why adopt that hypothesis instead of the other two mentioned? In particular, why not posit God as aware of all Space-time, plus lesser minds aware of various regions, such as brains? To be sure this hypothesis fails to deliver either the monism of one o-substance or the monism of one h-substance. But that is no reason for rejecting it. At this point Sprigoza could argue as I do, namely that our autonomy requires that God not be aware of all the workings of our brains, for only in that way can God abdicate power over them.5 This excludes the first hypothesis. And, prosaic though it may seem, geometry might then exclude the second. For instance, if we assume that Space-time is the sum of points, and if we suppose that a region of which there is awareness must always include its boundary, then the boundaries will overlap. Or if it always excludes its boundary then there must be even greater overlaps to avoid holes. As far as I am concerned this exercise in reconstructing Spinoza’s dark saying that finite bodies and minds are modes of the one substance, implying they are not h-substances, is of much less significance than the monist thesis of a single o-substance. For the Second Monism Problem is an artifact of the scholastic way of describing things with essential relations. The resulting description in terms of substances, modes etc. is coherent but it makes certain positions, notoriously that of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, sound decidedly odd. But is It God?—This is a convenient place to discuss the problem of why anyone should call the one substance God. The hypothesis I have mentioned as showing that there is just the one o-substance, which is also the unique hsubstance, requires an unfamiliar mind or minds, which, if infinite, might well deserve to be called gods, with a lower case “g”. Let us suppose that that is what the unfamiliar minds are. Sprigoza would prefer the hypothesis of a single such god. But I note that three such gods making up a single o/h-substance would count as a Trinity, and hence as God, according to social Trinitarians, such as myself, and, more famously, Richard Swinburne.6 But there is a difference: a God made up in this way of three gods is divine in all its parts, whereas

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Sprigoza posits one or more gods plus finite minds as parts of the one o/hsubstance. So it is not divine in all its parts and therefore does not deserve to be called God. But even if this is not pantheism it is an example of theistic monism. Psycho-physical Parallelism—The problem here is that we do not understand the correlation of the mental and the physical merely by understanding the supposedly necessary laws by which the physical events occur and the supposedly necessary ones by which the mental occur. Jonathan Bennett interprets Spinoza as solving this problem by means of a mode/mode identity.7 Maybe this is meant to remind us of Davidson’s Anomalous Monism, in which the very same events are understood in one way considered as brain processes and in another considered as mental events.8 But unless we can understand how two apparently quite different things are in fact the same, identification does not remove mystery. Sprigoza can explain Bennett’s identification of the mental modes with physical ones. For it is just the familiar identity of a relation-instance with its converse. Any asymmetric relation can be thought of with one of the relata first and the other second, or vice versa. Yet there are not two relations. Now the two attributes that Spinoza says we know of, and the only two I am considering, are the mental and the physical. But on the absolute idealist’s account these are both relational properties derived from the one relation, experience. So there is nothing mysterious about mode identity. It amounts to no more than the equivalence of a’s instantiating R-to-b with b’s instantiating R*-to-a, where R* is the converse of R. Hence there is no need to posit psycho-physical interaction laws. Here is an analogy. Think of the instances of knowledge at a given time as like strings (apologies to String theorists!) with ends that represent the relata. These strings move around in an everlasting cosmic dance. If we concentrate only on the ends of the strings that constitute the finite bodies then their orderly behaviour obeys the laws of physics. If we concentrate on the other ends the motion is explained in terms of agents doing what gives them and others joy. Sprigoza and Contemporary Physics—Both General Relativity and Quantum Theory are open to several rival interpretations, but Sprigoza may take comfort from the existence of tenable interpretations compatible with Spinozism. First every current physical theory can be interpreted as a field theory, in which Space-time has an attribute, the field, which is described in terms of its values in arbitrarily small regions. The chief problem here for Sprigoza is the occurrence of several different fields, in which case only the gravitational, it would seem, would be essential. Hence Space-time without the other fields might be an osubstance that was a proper part of Space-time with all the fields. Now General Relativity is often interpreted geometrically without a gravitational field, but that does not solve the problem, since the resulting curved Space-time could exist by itself. The solution to this problem is a unified field theory, which might arise in various ways, for instance by combining quantum theory with General Relativity, with the other fields then emerging as a consequence.

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Then there is Quantum Theory, with the threat of indeterminism, noted by Sprigge.9 Because I shall reformulate the Principle of Sufficient Reason I do not myself see this as a difficulty, but it is worth noting the way in which Quantum Theory may be interpreted in a deterministic fashion. There are two such interpretations: the Many Worlds; and the Many Minds.10 Although I myself find the former more congenial I shall concentrate on the latter, because it is not merely compatible with Spinozism but strongly supports it. The idea is that the physical world is one enormously complicated thing describable mathematically as a wave function. This wave function is decomposable into simpler wave functions using two composition operations: the first is a straightforward joining together of two simpler systems into one. It is represented mathematically as a tensor product, or less technically, as the product of the wave functions. The second, superposition, is like combining waves. Using these operations the one complicated wave function is analysed into the simplest possible ones, which are then shown to behave like single particles. Given a unified field theory there would be just one kind of these simplest wave function, behaving like a graviton maybe. In that case no part of the whole physical world could be an o-substance. That is because if we try to describe the state of a subsystem, which we might think of as just some of the particles, what we find is something that behaves like a whole collection (ensemble) of systems. It is a mixed state. Anyway, for present purposes it suffices that the physical world behaves like a rather complicated field. And, moreover, this field evolves over time in a deterministic fashion. Nonetheless this field that evolves deterministically is itself characterised as a probability distribution for different observations. The Many Minds Interpretation treats this probability distribution as a statistical distribution for observations, which I take to be awareness-instances. The peculiarity of this interpretation is that you, as you read this, are unaware of most of the minds constituted by these awareness-instances. So as well as you there are other minds very like yours with slightly different experiences. The result is that there is nothing indeterministic going on: the great wave function for the whole universe evolves deterministically but it appears indeterministic because your mind and those you believe others have are only some of all the minds. Let us illustrate this with a standard thought experiment, concerning what happens when an “electron” “passes through” a screen with two slits. The theory tells us that the wave function evolves into one that gives an observer a 50% chance of it going through the first slit. On the Many Minds interpretation if you observe it going through the first slit a counterpart of you (another mind) observes it going through the other slit. On this interpretation there is no electron. Instead there is a wave function that behaves rather like an electron. So the question, “Which slit did it really go through?” lapses.

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4. The Principle of Sufficient Reason Reconsidered I have been examining Sprigoza’s metaphysics because I think it provides some of the pieces we need for the metaphysical jigsaw puzzle. But there is one feature of Spinoza’s thought that is both central and repugnant, his version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which leads to Necessitarianism. But I do not reject the principle itself. Although it is not the sort of thing I claim to know, I find it intuitive and it may well be correct. It states that everything can be understood, but as regards the nature of understanding I am Leibnizian rather than Spinozist. We understand the way things are largely by understanding why God creates in a certain way, being, as Leibniz puts it, inclined but not necessitated. I say that anything an agent does rationally is understood in terms of the agent’s power and reasons. Let us reconsider Buridan’s ass. On the Many Minds Interpretation the state of the universe evolves in such a way that one ass-mind observes one bale in a satisfactorily gustatory way and another observes the other bale in a similarly intimate fashion. It is as if the whole world has split into one in which the ass eats one bale and another in which a very similar ass eats the other. Something similar happens on the Many Worlds Interpretation. I submit that given Necessitarianism whenever we are tempted to say that one or the other of two events occurs at random in fact both occur. Now consider a naked moral choice: a decision that you must make, but influenced neither by worries about future guilt feelings, nor by some intuitive conviction that wrong-doers harm themselves. The choice is whether to benefit yourself a little or someone else a great deal. Neither action is either obligatory or morally wrong, and you are, for whatever reason, quite uninfluenced by thoughts of an afterlife. On the Many Minds interpretation we could say that both choices are made. The person choosing splits into the altruist and the egoist. That trivialises the moral choice because it is fated that you split in this way. I take this to be a reductio ad absurdum of the Many Minds Interpretation and the Necessitarianism that leads to it. But why should Sprigoza accept this person-splitting account of the naked moral choice, instead of appealing to an unconscious reason for making one choice rather than the other? The reason why not is that any event that is random on some other interpretation of Quantum Theory has to be understood by Sprigoza as due to a split in some mind or other, even if it is not in a finite mind. So even if our free choices are not in fact random according to Quantum Theory some other choices must be, divine ones perhaps. For there are many events that according to Quantum Theory seem random. Hence the problem arises for some mind, which seems to make a rational choice but must, according to Sprigoza, split in the process of choosing. Instead we should take rational action as comprehensible in terms of the powers of agents and their reasons to act. Then provided the ass has the capacity to

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act at random we can understand why Buridan’s ass chooses to act at random. Moreover, dear reader, we can understand why you choose to be the altruist. It will, no doubt, be objected that there is no way of understanding why you chose to be an altruist rather than an egoist. I could reply tediously as follows. If you chose to be an egoist, that would also have been understood. As it is your choice to be an altruist is understood. The contrast, being an altruist rather than an egoist, is not on the list of items for which we demand explanation. To be sure the Principle of Sufficient Reason could be strengthened to demand not just an understanding of all truths but also of all contrasts. If we had strengthened it that way then free choices would be counter-examples, which is a good reason for not strengthening it. This tedious reply is not, I think, the correct one. For there is something incomplete about the agency understanding of a naked moral choice. But that does not require us to abandon the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Instead I note the way that even the understanding provided by knowledge of necessity comes in degrees, with more understanding as a result of generalisation. My suggestion is that any correct agency explanation, just like any knowledge of necessity, satisfies the requirements of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and that we may hope for further, supererogatory understanding, as in the case of the further generalisation in mathematics. This modification to the Principle of Sufficient Reason combined with Spinoza’s psychophysical parallelism has further consequences. For a naked moral choice is the psychological description of what is described physically as a random event. The naturalist understanding is incomplete, therefore. But the theistic understanding is complete, provided the existence of God is known to be necessary. In this way Spinozism collapses into a more orthodox theism, because the theocentric understanding of things is preserved, while the naturalistic one is seen to be incomplete.

5. Conclusion My project, in honour of Timothy Sprigge, was to investigate the metaphysics of T. B. Sprigoza. I agree that there are good reasons to hold that there is just the one substance, on either the “ousia” or the “hypostasis” reading of “substance”. Moreover, the striking claim that finite minds and finite bodies are but modes of attributes of the one substance is neither contrary to our experience nor mumbojumbo. It is a piece of well-argued metaphysics. Psycho-physical parallelism without direct nomological connections turns out not to be sheer coincidence but a conjecture that arises quite naturally in the context of Absolute Idealism. Finally there are Spinozistic ways of interpreting contemporary physics, notably the Many Minds interpretation of quantum theory.

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Spinozism has, however, been modified in two ways. First, although there are many interpretations of physics that show the whole of a Space-time is the unique physical o-substance, and although those who hold the Block Theory of time may also argue that it is the unique physical h-substance too, the truly Spinozistic Many Minds interpretation eliminates Space-time in favour of some physical-world-in-itself describable only in mathematical terms. But that is a minor modification. The other modification is minor as regards the metaphysics but perhaps more significant in its impact on the Spinozistic attitude to the world. Sprigozism is not strictly pantheistic, although it is a version of theistic monism. For, it turns out, monism is correct only because the finite minds are aware of some things that God is not aware of. More serious than these modifications is Sprigoza’s pyrrhic victory over indeterminist physics. The Zeitgeist, that truly deceitful demon, made determinism seem obvious or “natural” until the rise of quantum theory. We may still interpret physics deterministically but that has come to seem just one interpretation and not obvious any more. Now, as long as determinism seemed obvious, Spinoza’s Necessitarianism could be taken as a consequence of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, even though it was contrary to moral experience. The effect of the Many Minds Interpretation is to emphasise the way Necessitarianism trivialises significant (“existential”) moral choices. If as a result we revise the Principle of Sufficient Reason, then Sprigozism collapses into a more straightforward theism—a good thing too, I say. One final remark. In the chapter before his discussion of Spinoza, Sprigge considers Sartre.11 Sartre would thoroughly endorse my rejection of Spinoza as trivialising moral choices, but go on to reject theism for the same reason. But notice how in order to defend the thesis that there is just the one substance I resorted to a slightly heterodox theism in which God is ignorant of some of what we finite minds are aware of, namely parts of our brains. It is reasonable to identify our “souls” with just those inaccessible-to-God parts of the brain. Sartre can have no objection to that.

Notes 1. Sprigge, Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 152-176. 2. Ibid., p. 153. 3. D. C. Williams, “The Elements of Being”, The Review of Metaphysics, 7, 1953, pp. 3-18 and 171-192. 4. J. Bennett, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics”, in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. D. Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 61-88, see esp. 66-67; Sprigge, Theories of Existence, op. cit., p. 155. 5. P. Forrest, Developmental Theism: From Pure Will to Unbounded Love (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 2007). 6. P. Forrest, “Divine Fission: A New Way of Moderating Social Trinitarianism”, Religious Studies, 35, 1998, pp. 281-298; R. Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 7. J. Bennett, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics”, op. cit. 8. D. Davidson, “The Irreducibility of Psychological and Physiological Description, and of Social to Physical Sciences”, The Study of Human Nature, ed. L. Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 318-324. 9. Sprigge, Theories of Existence, op. cit. 10. D. Albert and B. Loewer, “Interpreting the Many Worlds Interpretation”, Synthese, 77, 1988, pp. 195-213. 11. Sprigge, Theories of Existence, op. cit.

Idealism and God1 Leslie Armour

1. A Plurality of Views Idealist metaphysical systems are often thought to provide a natural home for those who have religious inclinations even if they remain skeptical about revelation. Equally, however, they are often thought to justify a vague “spirituality” whose only merit is that it might offer a haven for those who wish to escape the many species of contemporary materialism and their real or imagined implications for practical and political life. I want to argue that, while it is true that idealism, as such, leaves open one’s decisions about traditional theism, the exact nature of that relation depends, as one might expect, on the kind of idealism one espouses. I will suggest that there are three basic varieties of idealism: mentalism, the thesis that everything real is a mind or part of the contents of some mind; ideationalism, the thesis that ultimate reality consists of ideas; and what I shall call symbolism, the notion that the ultimately real is more like a book to be read than it is like a collection of simple objects and that the world we know is created by the ways in which minds read these symbols. All three, however, do provide a plausible alternative to reductive materialism and mind-matter dualism and respond in important ways to elements of human experience. They open the way to an understanding of the vexed notion of “spirit” which need not be vague. Certainly idealist philosophers can be found who have held almost every imaginable position about the existence of god. They have included atheists like McTaggart,2 religious skeptics like Bradley3 and Bosanquet,4 theists like the Caird brothers5 and Pringle-Pattison6 (and even one Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple7), as well as an array of pantheists and panentheists.8 The last group is harder to pin down. Timothy Sprigge calls his own thesis “pantheistic idealism”,9 and William Mander shares with him the claim to being the contemporary pantheistic idealist whose name first comes to mind among the idealists.10 But Spinoza was certainly a pantheist and may have been an idealist. Charles Hartshorne’s panpsychism is a form of panentheism, and he used the term himself.11 As modernity was unfolding Malebranche said we see all things in god, and Jean Guitton cites Malebranche’s Méditations chrétiennes and some of his responses to Arnauld to show that Malebranche was the truest of idealists.12

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Nicolas Malebranche’s arguments might suggest that some kind of idealism lies near the heart of Christianity, for, though he thought, indeed, that the things we call material objects really exist, he thought that they were expressions of the ideas in the mind of god. Malebranche was not only Cardinal Bérulle’s intellectual successor, but the culmination of a long line of Christian thinkers who wanted to overcome the dualisms of this world and the next, of body and spirit, and even that of our minds and god’s. But Malebranche, of course, has not always been a Catholic favourite, and philosophers like Jacques Maritain have warned of “angelism”—the tendency to forget that we have bodies—as something associated with idealism. The Catholic Church, committed, of course, to bodily resurrection and transubstantiation is usually imagined to be hostile to idealism. But the real problem, perhaps, is that idealism makes it hard to sustain the idea that a great chasm separates us from god, and so an “idealist god” would not be the god many theists, Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian have taken for granted.13 One might start this exploration with the idea of the absolute and its relation to the idea of god. And, indeed, much has been written—some of it by me— about the ideas of god and “the Absolute” in idealist philosophy.14 In this paper I want to explore a different question: Are all forms of idealism neutral to the concept of god? Is it true, that is, that being an idealist does not affect the quest for an answer to the question: Does god exist? Both “idealism” and “god” are, to be sure, terms too general to be of much help. I shall suggest that the issue is importantly changed by one’s choice of a kind of idealism. When people talk about idealism, mentalism is what first comes to mind. But ideationalism, from Plato onwards, has been a powerful force in western philosophy. Symbolism is, I shall argue, older than either and I rather think that modern physics and the need for a pluralistic but not relativistic picture of the world suggest this third kind of idealism. Some philosophers seem to move easily from one sort of idealism to another. Bishop Berkeley, for instance, is mostly thought of as a mentalist but the idea of “nature as the natural language of god” suggests the third kind of idealism, and Berkeley’s Siris has Platonic elements which one might associate with the second kind. But I shall argue that all the forms of idealism are interesting from the point of view of one concerned with the existence or non-existence of god. The concept of “God” is notoriously even more difficult to define, and my only recourse is to lay down what I think are minimal necessary conditions for a concept of god that is worth arguing about in this context.15 God must be conceived as a being who is as perfect as any being can be. Just to speak of god as “a being” will raise many hackles, for the idea of a god who is “beyond being” is far from unknown. But to be beyond being and non-being is also to be beyond such distinctions as that between perfection and imperfection, for something has to be perfect or imperfect if the words are to make any sense. What is possible is

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that one might conceive of god as an infinite principle that, as such, is not “a being” but is expressed in the world as a being who is as perfect as possible and this, perhaps, is the Christian idea of the incarnation. But this still entails that there is a being as perfect as any can be. And this one must insist upon, for what is at issue is a being who can be assumed to have ontological priority. A god less good—or a god who did not appear in the world at all—would have to have important imperfections and so be only one being among many. A god must also be the initiator of whatever can be initiated either at the origin of the universe or at the origin of what we perceive to be temporal processes even if those temporal processes are ultimately found to be only something that takes place in human experience. (McTaggart and various other idealist philosophers have thought that time has no “ultimate” reality but they accept that we perceive ourselves to be in time and that it matters that the train from London arrives in Stafford before it reaches Manchester.) Such a god must be able to do whatever can be done by any agent though not, of course, whatever is impossible. Nor need such a god be able to do whatever cannot be done in any universe that is well organised enough to be intelligible. A Hindu god with a fondness for cows might think of creating cows in an otherwise empty universe, but nothing we would consider to be a cow could exist except in a complex biological environment. Its food, the air it breathes, and the gravity which helps hold it together are all very much a part of it. Such a god must know what goes on in whatever universe there is but there is not I think, again, any need to suppose that any god knows everything imaginable unless one is prepared to deny that there really are any future contingent events, and everything exists in an unchanging and unchangeable eternity. If people are free in the sense that they can really change the universe, the preponderance of all the arguments suggests that such a god cannot really know what they will do, though it would be possible to make very good predictions. It seems to follow that such a god must be infinite, for otherwise there would surely be some restricting influence which would preclude these conditions. Infinity in this sense means what is essentially beyond the limits of all restricting concepts that apply to universes with logically coherent descriptions. How to express the high order values which would have to be those of divinity is a puzzle whose attempted solution has often led to narrow-minded and oppressive theologies. It seems to me that Cudworth must be right. If there is a god, then god is love and love is god, for all other values, even knowledge, are consistent with the expression of evil.16 This however is apt to depend on what the whole universe is like. Different sorts of idealism might yield different answers. At any rate, like god, “love” is difficult to define. I shall try, as the argument develops, to give it more precision. As I suggested, the notion that there is a god who lies wholly beyond being— and does not even exist in our world as a principle that finds expression

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there17—does not seem to me to count as something that the idealist philosopher can reckon with any more than anyone else. At any rate, idealism would throw no light on such a concept. The pantheist god (and perhaps the panentheist god) are furthest from the god wholly beyond being and present problems of a special kind. I will say something about them at the end of the discussion of the god whom I envisage as a distinct entity in the world.

2. Mentalism and Theism It is as well to begin with mentalism. Timothy Sprigge, in whose honour this volume is conceived, is a panpsychist and a pantheist (or panentheist) who has found a home in the Unitarian tradition.18 Whether mentalist theories tend toward the pantheism (or panentheism) he espouses or not, pantheism does suggest if not entail mentalism. But on the other side, McTaggart, as I said, saw no need for a god in a universe of timeless loving spirits all of whom have existed always, all of whom are equal and will be found to be perfectly and therefore equally happy when the illusion of time comes to an end. Since, if McTaggart is right, the inner states of these loving spirits include all of reality, there is really nothing more to be said. No god is needed to create a timeless world and no god is needed to bring sinners to salvation. They will find their own way to the end of apparent time, though McTaggart thought it would possibly take a lot of apparent time for them to do so. At least three sorts of arguments might lead from mentalism to theism. One is that if the world consists of minds and their contents, and if the finite minds we know do not seem to be self-generating, then something must account for the present existence and conditions of such minds. If there are only minds, the cause must be another mind, but a mind characteristically different from ours if it is indeed true that ordinary human minds are not self-generating. A second argument is that our experience does not seem to be the whole of experience. Our experience clearly leads us beyond our immediate consciousness. We never come to the end of our experience and any attempt to describe experience can always be extended. There is always more to be discerned. If this extension goes beyond the finite, it suggests something like a god. A third is the kind of logical argument used by Josiah Royce. We know we are often in error. But we cannot be in error unless there is some truth which we fail to grasp. That truth must be in some other mind. If that truth is extensive enough it again suggests at least a mind of a different order. Of course, to employ any of these arguments, one would first have to have some reason for being a mentalist. What is perhaps the earliest developed form of mentalism in the West occurs in the philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa who was born around 335 A. D. in Cappadocia, which is now north-western Turkey, and

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probably died in 391. And he may have had arguments for theism that are as good as any for mentalism, at least if one probes beneath the surface of what he says and looks at the implications of his position. He held that the objects we see in the world are simply bundles of properties which instantiate concepts in the mind of god. They are not simply Platonic ideas, but bundles of perceivable particulars. On the face of it, Gregory does not use his idealism as a ground for his theism, but his theism as a ground for his idealism. There is, however, an underlying structure, I think, that goes from idealism to god as well. His central argument initially is that god could not have created anything utterly unlike himself. The grounds for this claim are both logical and theological: Anything one genuinely creates, as opposed to things that are simply assembled from pre-existing stuff, must have a source in oneself. God is purely spiritual. If he could create matter he would have to be related to matter in an impossible way. Theologically the argument is that everything in the world must reflect the creator. Like Bishop Berkeley, 1,400 years later, he puts it that there are no material substances. Gregory means, of course, that the things we see around us— houses, trees, mountains and so forth—really exist but are not substances in their own right. They are expressions of the divine substance. Like Berkeley, he suggests that it is these qualities that figure in our awareness. Nothing points to material substances. Like Berkeley, too, Gregory worries about how we are to understand the stability and orderliness of the world. For Berkeley—at least the Berkeley who is the author of what is usually taken to be the main line of argument in The Principles of Human Knowledge and the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous—it seems that the stability of the world is maintained by deliberate decision of the deity from moment to moment. If one attends to the texts of the Principles, the fourth dialogue of Alciphron, the New Theory of Vision and the New Theory of Vision Vindicated, however, one sees that Berkeley uses the idea of the world as the natural language of god to explain the world’s stability—and this moves him toward the third kind of idealism.19 Gregory, of course, was a Neoplatonist as Berkeley perhaps tended to be later on, especially in the Siris.20 His position, however, is not Berkeley’s. He speaks of a “substratum” which is clearly associated with the order of the world. This has led Darren Hibbs to argue that Gregory was not perhaps really an idealist, at least in the same sense as Berkeley, for this substratum itself sounds very much like matter.21 But this would wreck Gregory’s argument. The meaning of the substratum doctrine is perhaps difficult to discern but a natural reading is to take it simply as the logical order of a universe of emanations. It is the logic of the divine concepts that they should be expressed in an orderly way. At any rate Richard Sorabji has expressed certainty that Gregory was an idealist.22 Sorabji cites passages in In Hexaemeron Commentarius.23 But the clearest

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statement of it perhaps is in De Hominis Opificio.24 And H. A. Moore speaks of Gregory’s “uncontrollable idealism”.25 He says that there are phrases “which are exactly the teaching of Berkeley”, and this may be true even if the ultimate doctrine is different. Moore finds passages in De Anima et Resurrectione which are like this.26 He also notes passages in which Gregory suggests that “the body is not a real substance”. The substratum evidently is not a substance but a mode of organisation, one of the neoplatonic emanations. If his substratum is indeed a necessary element in the emanations of reality, then one might think that the world works by logical necessity and then, as McTaggart thought, we would not need god. However, Moore notes in his “Prolegomena” to Gregory’s work that Gregory is preoccupied with human freedom. This preoccupation runs throughout his account of human nature and it is in this account that the idealist arguments occur. Gregory may well have taken his arguments about the true nature of what we perceive to illustrate that we do have choices, and it is certainly in the intellect that he locates freedom. If the world is governed by logical necessity freedom is impossible. Gregory’s world is certainly governed by the Platonic idea of the good, however, and that involves the possibility of human freedom. This creates a dilemma. If the good must triumph of necessity we are not free and if we are free the world is not necessarily governed by the form of the good. But if the form of the good is expressed through a god who is free, then such a god can see to it that the good triumphs while allowing through grace a measure of human freedom. He need only adjust his plans as the world unfolds. But this only works in a world in which mind is paramount. In a material world, as many people now think, it may be that we must make do with scientific laws and occasions of chance, and human freedom may well be a special kind of illusion. Mentalism is an element in the solution of the problem. The substratum only provides the background against which the world is organised. Gregory shows us that mentalism makes sense in a theistic world and (if I am right) shows us that mentalism gives us additional grounds for believing in the existence of god, or at least ways of avoiding some objections to theism. Nevertheless, Gregory obviously falls short, if this is all there is to his argument, of proving that these things must go together. I will suggest that there may be more to his arguments, however.27 We must admit that nothing Gregory said in In Hexaemeron Commentarius or in the sections of De Hominis Opificio I have referred to would be likely to move McTaggart, who thought he could refute the arguments for free will. Leibniz thought a god was necessary to get things into their proper order and to differentiate between them and, like Gregory, that we needed a god to see that we really had a world that was as good as it could be. But McTaggart had his own way of differentiating minds,28 and the best of all possible worlds thesis is, of course, contentious. McTaggart’s thesis is very complex and is expressed in

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his theory of “determining correspondence”, but essentially his timeless loving selves are distinguished by their perceptions of one another and perception implies a point of view. The perceptions of two percipients cannot, therefore, in principle be identical; but Josiah Royce argued that perceptions, after all, are only bundles of characteristics and if this is true McTaggart’s argument would need further defence. Royce argued that only love—the love that, for instance, makes one child’s doll quite different from any other doll—can really individuate. On this view he argued that only god’s love could really individuate all the things in the world.29 I shall return to Royce’s thesis, but McTaggart would no doubt hold that every object is part of the love of some particular timeless loving spirit. The crucial difference between them is that McTaggart thinks that individuation results from properties intrinsic to the object while Royce thinks that only a relation to a subject can effect individuation. The implications of the whole texts of De Hominis Opificio and De Anima et Resurrectione, however, may suggest another way of looking at the argument we have started. Perhaps it will not carry the day, either, but, as I said, god comes into Gregory’s philosophy by way of the problem of creation. Gregory was always concerned with creation, and the arguments I have drawn attention to—the ones usually cited—about matter and mind have to do with the ways in which the divine creation must be associated with the divinity itself. Now, in fact, we have no trouble ourselves in creating mental images or drawing verbal pictures or indeed putting ideas on paper or canvas provided we have a rich enough supply of ideas. Gregory’s Platonism is coloured by his belief that ideas have to take some kind of concrete form (and I suspect Plato also believed that the forms informed things and did not just float about in some heaven). But he did believe that god must have an ample supply of ideas. In this way creation makes sense perfectly whereas to construct solid material blocks out of nothing smacks of the absurd. Whether one wants to follow this argument or not depends to a large extent on what concepts one takes to be central. McTaggart was not interested in creation, of course, because he thought reality to be eternal. And yet he admitted that the world did seem to change and things did seem to come into existence, and this seeming surely needed some experience beyond the rather vague thought that it is caused by our finite perceptions of parts of an infinite series. But if one starts, as Scotus Eriugena did, with the problem of how the appearances of things came to be, one might find as he did that the notion of creation is central. It is hard to know, however, what Gregory or Eriugena would have to say to dislodge someone like McTaggart from his position. Still, if one is a mentalist there is another line of argument which I think is perhaps more promising for a theist. This is the consideration that our personal experience does not seem to be the whole of experience. The successor to every experience is another experience. They never run out. And any particular experience seems inexhaustible.

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Make a list of what you can see on this page or in the sky above you. You can go on making more and more distinctions, seemingly at least for ever. Do all these things which you only see as you pay more and more attention just pop into existence ex nihilo? The two claims, the claim about each experience’s successor and the claim about the infinite expansibility of detail have to go together. For on the face of it, when you reflect on an experience it is no longer the one experienced, for it changes. Continuity has to be given by the fact that the descriptive terms of the first report of the experience carry over to the successive experiences as the analysis proceeds. But if this is a fair account of the matter, it does suggest that our particular experience is part of some larger experience. William James had something of the same thought. Timothy Sprigge has noted that James had an interest in this argument.30 Both Gustav Fechner and F. W. H. Myers interested him. Fechner held that there are two levels of unified consciousness, our finite minds and the cosmic mind, but the cosmic consciousness unifies entities at many different levels and every real thing has an element of consciousness. Sprigge says that James admired the “thickness” of this panpsychism.31 James thought that F. W. H. Myers was important because he had developed the notion of a subliminal consciousness.32 James was interested in the extended mind and says the “sub-conscious self is now a well-accredited psychological entity”.33 He seemed to agree that there may be more to us than our immediate experience, but Sprigge notes that he felt there might be no common mind in which we all share. Assuming that the arguments about the nature of experience carry some weight how would one answer James’ puzzle about whether or not there is one common mind? One answer might lie in the claims about infinity. If experience is infinitely expansible (and not merely infinitely divisible) so that however much we reflect on it there will always be more, then it seems that such an infinity would embrace all the possibilities. We should be careful though, for claims about the nature of experience are notoriously slippery, as anyone who followed the controversy in the English-speaking world over “sense data” or still follows the fate of Husserlian phenomenology knows. Perhaps, then, we have only slender grounds on which to rest the case for arguing from mentalism to god. But Gregory of Nyssa did have a good case for arguing from theism to mentalism. The two are certainly not incompatible and, of course, an atheistic mentalist like McTaggart had to adduce further arguments to make his case. What he did come up with by way of arguments too complex to enter into here was a notion that reality consisted of a community of minds which collectively embraced all reality and were locked into a system of mutual perceptions. The experience of these minds was one of unending love. One may be struck by the fact that what this points to is the Trinity of Christianity writ

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large so all sentient minds were members of it. It is in fact the seventeenth century Dean Sherlock’s three “infinite minds” multiplied.34 Without McTaggart’s logical arguments, the mentalist may still be driven in this direction. For his world consists of nothing but minds and their activities. If, like Leibniz, one insists that the minds are independent and do not really interact, then they all become self-contained universes. If one wants explanations of things, then as Spinoza originally pointed out, if anything exists there is a reason why it exists, and if anything does not exist, there is a reason why it does not exist.35 If everything were exactly right for the natural existence of lions in London, there would be lions. In a self-contained monad with no outside influences in a mentalist world there is nothing that prevents anything possible from occurring. If, by contrast, one thinks of the minds as open to the influences of the world, then again there is nothing to prevent a complete overlap. A certain plurality in any case seems necessary if it turns out god is love, for love seems to require both separation and unity. The universes of Dean Sherlock, Leibniz, and McTaggart all provide for it and Leibniz and McTaggart may not be so far from Dean Sherlock in the end. This kind of argument, which draws on the negative form of the principle of sufficient reason, is probably not very popular for the moment, but to deny the principle of sufficient reason is to insist that some things or events do not have explanations, and that is a step to be taken with care. Perhaps, then, mentalism bends us toward theism or whatever one might call McTaggart’s expansion of the Trinity. This brings us to the problem of the unity of consciousness: Josiah Royce’s basic argument from the beginning was always that error presupposes truth, and he could not conceive of truth as other than in a mind. This leads, he thinks, to a single knower. Royce continued to believe in a single Absolute which must be expressed in a single community and was much like the traditional community of the saints. There were always very strong traces of Trinitarianism in Royce’s thought. Indeed much of his work might be taken by the orthodox at least to be a defence of the activity of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.36 Royce started with the notion of error. We do not doubt that we make mistakes, and so we often lack the truth. But the argument is that nothing can be lacking unless it has some degree of reality.37 That is, you could not be wrong unless there were something to be right about. In a world of make believe and imagination, there presumably could be no error in the ordinary sense. The truths would have to be in some mind, ours or an other, for us to know that we had made mistakes.38 This certainly gives us a reason to think that we must accept a reality beyond our individual minds, but in this case James’ doubts about a single all-embracing mind would be justified on most views of truth. What gave Royce his argument was that he thought that truth was coherence and that there must be a single sys-

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tem. But this leaves the absolutist who is a theist with the problem of having to demonstrate the coherence theory of truth. And the elision of the idea of a single mind with the idea of a single truth is, in any case, a doubtful one. One could, though, as I suggested, hold that the truth must be too extensive for a finite mind. Royce indeed generated the notion of infinity out of the problem of self-reflection and drew on Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor to show how it could be made intelligible.39 He thought, that is, that our self-reflections led to an infinity of experience, but such an infinity requires an infinite mind. Since self-reflection occurs within us, the suggestion is that the infinity is within our minds. The truth about all minds, however, still seems to be beyond us. Royce’s arguments though suggest only that there must be such a truth; they do not tell us where it must reside. The question is how such truths are to be conceived and whether there can be a real totality of them. Royce’s mentalism is suggestive but, in addition to the problem about truth, it leaves open the question of what the totality of knowledge might be and, indeed, if certain sorts of infinity actually characterise the universe, he is wrong to think that there is a single knower.

3. Ideationalism and Theism By “ideationalism” I mean the doctrine that what is most significant and basic in reality—the explanation of the world—is not minds and their contents but ideas. These ideas may find their expressions in things as well as minds, but, on this view, it is the ideas that are the basis of reality. This doctrine is most frequently associated with Platonism and, as with Platonism itself, it has taken on a multitude of forms. From the Platonic ideas of the good and the beautiful to the mathematical ideas that formed the ultimate reality of Sir Arthur Eddington and Kurt Gödel there is a vast distance. Ideationalism does have a natural appeal to those who seek decisive explanations because some of the entities that Platonists have thought of as ideas seem to exist necessarily. One cannot bring the number two into existence or get rid of it even if one dislikes numbers with irrational square roots. And an idea in this sense does not seem to be something that we easily say exists only in our minds. Would there be no twoness if there were no minds? Bertrand Russell at one time at least thought that the number two might just be the class of all couples and so in any empty universe there would be no twoness. But the number two is much more than that. It has many complex properties associated with the number system, and, in any case, even ontological minimalists like Willard van Orman Quine have thought that there are real classes. The attractiveness of necessity has always been there, but the idea of necessary existence has always been disputed, too, and my task here is not to settle the dispute but to see what the doctrine has to do with theism.

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For Plato himself the most real entity was the form of the good, and the god of the Timaeus is the craftsman who fashions the world from a mould that is already there when the god begins. Philo of Alexandria tried hard to make Plato compatible with the Judaic God, and ideas like his enter Christianity through the Fourth Gospel. In his account of the creation of the world he suggests that something greater than any Platonic craftsman explains the world: A god who made the mould. Philo has sometimes been credited with spreading the ideas that lay behind Christian Trinitarianism.40 But I shall argue in the next section that Philo in fact sowed the seeds of a very different kind of idealism, one that made the world a collection of symbols to be read like a book and to be read with the help of The Book, the Jewish scripture. Many of the Church fathers followed in his footsteps. But to get to their destination they had to go beyond ideas, and, like Gregory of Nyssa, they move, if not toward mentalism, at least to the view that it is a mind or a spirit and not an idea that explains the world. For they all faced the difficulty that if ideas govern the world and are driven by their own eternal logic, the world will turn out to be eternal, and in need of no god. And it will take a clever argument to produce ideas that do not engender determinism and so render the sins they preached against inevitable. If we take literally the notion it was the form of the good that forms the ultimate reality and indeed, in some sense, governs the world, then the world existed, as John Leslie in our time has argued, because it ought to.41 I will consider as the discussion unfolds whether or not what ought to exist might be a god in the theistic sense, but Plato did not see it quite that way, and such a god would not be the god of traditional theism because the ultimate explanation would still be the idea of good. It may turn out, though, to be the best bet for a theistic ideationalist. Recent mathematical idealists have thought that reality in the end is to be found in the formulae which shape the world and give us insight into and control over it. The elegance and beauty of the formulae are not to be denied, but the elegance and beauty of mathematical formulae are a long way from the Platonic good and beautiful. Still, there is a not-impossible connection between the traditional theist who thinks that god is essentially and infinitely good and the traditional Platonist. For the god of such a theist is the embodiment of the form of the good. But the distance is further between the mathematical idealist and the Platonist. The complexity of these ideas begins to emerge if one considers Hegel. It is hard to place Hegel in any classification of idealists. Does Hegel belong with the ideationalists because the Absolute is the Absolute Idea? Or should we place him with the mentalists because the Absolute is Absolute Spirit? Perhaps he belongs with neither group because the Absolute “leaps freely” into nature and the world has a history which includes the history of what we think of as the whole evolutionary process from matter, to life, to the emergence of spirit? Hegel

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thought of himself as a good Lutheran though he was perhaps lucky that Martin Luther was not around to comment on his claim. But though the Christian god plays a role in the Phenomenology of Mind, religion is in the end surpassed by philosophy and, though the dialectic includes and transmutes rather than obliterates as it proceeds, there does not seem to be anything in his system which in the end corresponds closely to the Christian god or to the elements I suggested in my “minimalist” definition of theism. In general, in fact, ideationalism does not produce a lovable god. The connection between theism and the god of love has nearly always been strong and if the connection is essential ideationalism and theism fit poorly. Aristotle remarked that “It would be absurd for a man to say that he loved god”.42 He faced squarely the distance and absolute otherness of his god. But Aristotle’s distant god might actually be easier to love than a Platonic form, and it is hard to think that committed Platonists would not be wise to share Aristotle’s view. The mediaeval Platonists who were committed theists, of course, insisted on the importance of supplementing reason with revelation, and revelation took them well beyond Platonic forms and indeed well beyond the bare bones of Aristotle’s god. The mediaevals, too, fleshed out Aristotle’s god with revelation. Some more recent idealist theists—especially William Temple—have also insisted on revelation. The most famous theists with a taste for Platonism were, of course, Augustine and Anselm, and they are not exceptions to the rule that Platonism is acceptable to theists only with some additions. Anselm did argue from the idea of god to the existence of god, but the ultimate reality in his system is far more than an idea. One might, indeed, say that the whole point of his most celebrated argument is that the idea of the greatest possible being cannot be merely an idea. Augustine’s god chiefly manifests himself through the divine will, above all as the agent of love and grace. Ideas do not will. An ideational universe is governed by the logic of ideas and one cannot even intercede with them. Plotinus properly refused to go church crawling with Amelius, no doubt on precisely these grounds. Still, as I suggested, there seems to be one more avenue worth exploring. Suppose, as at any rate some Platonists have thought, the world exists because it ought to.43 This may seem a curious view. But consider: Most explanations for the origin of the world end in absurdity. Every child who is told that god made the world naturally asks who made god. If we are told the world started with the “big bang”, we naturally ask “what caused that?”. We may be told that it is a “singularity” and can have no connection with anything else, but that only states the mystery. However, we at once recognize that some ideas cannot have any origin. If the number two can be said to exist, nothing could bring it into existence—or take it out of existence—because it is not the sort of thing that can come or go. So it is with the Platonic form of the good. Good things come, and, alas, go. But “the good itself”—in this sense—cannot come and go.

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Ideas do, however, have a necessary place in an order. The number two cannot exist without the other integers and much else besides. Now Plato, I think, actually believed that there had to be an idea of the order of ideas. At any rate a good case could be made for the proposition that, if one is an ideationalist, one is committed to such a notion, for ideas take their sense from the order in which we find them. Ideas may be very different from one another and for every idea there is whatever is the expression of the negation of that idea, but that itself implies that they all belong to a system. What does this have to do with goodness? Well, it could be argued that the good is designated by the best-ordered system, the one that gives the fullest scope to each of the ideas which express positive values. And this is one of the slippery points in any such argument. Certainly, however, ideas only make sense if they have expressions. They are not themselves things in the ordinary sense. If they were, one could ask many often-asked and legitimate questions with devastating effect. Is the form of redness red? Is the form of justice just? Red things are red but the form of redness is not, it is what informs red things. I think Plato meant his forms to inform. But this suggests that what drives the world is the logical necessity that forms should have expressions. They are simply unintelligible otherwise. So then, if the world is driven by the master idea which is the form of the good, what sorts of things will exist? Well, just as the ideas need an organising master idea so the world of informed things must have an organisation. This might well be a god. Still, the argument does not in this form seem to be decisive, and the theist would have a lot of work to do to make it finally persuasive. One slippery point I have already noticed is the association of ideationalism and theism alike with what I have called the “master idea”, the form of the good. I think that both connections could be argued for. But I am much less sure that the best world includes a god of the traditional theistic sort. For such a being is also a kind of master tyrant and, though he might exclude Cudworth’s love and “sweetly govern”, he might also turn out to be the god of Cudworth’s Calvinist enemies who seemed to be in the business of damning people for all eternity and of doing so even before they were born. And it is hard to get a link to what I have suggested is the minimally acceptable concept of god.

4. The World as a Natural Language What remains, then, is the form of idealism that hangs on the thesis that the world is to be understood as a symbolic structure, as a book to be read or, as Bishop Berkeley put it, as a natural language. One basis for such a thesis has to do with the plurality of interpretations that we put on the world. We are inclined to think of the world as a collection of dis-

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parate objects—galaxies and their stars, planets and their oceans and fish, their landmasses with their plants and animals, some of whom walk and talk and think. But we also suppose that there are rather different levels of things to be discerned, even in the physical world. Sir Arthur Eddington liked to tell his audiences that the table in front of him looked solid, but that it “really” wasn’t: It was mostly empty space and within it were atoms with their nuclei and electrons like miniature solar systems. At some still more fundamental level we now find an array of sub-atomic entities. But these two accounts are not rival descriptions of the world. Rather, they are rival interpretations or readings of what we experience. Trees and mountains are things you can see and touch and our knowledge of them is mostly assembled out of experience. Orangutans are creatures you can interact with, about whose feelings you ought to worry. People talk to them, and to do so is not wholly foolish. Nor is it foolish to talk to one’s dog. But electrons cannot be seen. If you could see them you couldn’t see anything else, for they are involved in the optical and neural systems with which we see. They are not tangible objects, either. There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to electrons. The causal relations of things that we claim to exist at this level, at least among sub-atomic particles, are of a somewhat different kind than those in the macroscopic world. Middle sized objects are governed by gravity and electro-magnetism. Physicists speak of the “strong force” and the “weak force” when they talk about sub-atomic entities. We can use electrons, for instance in electron microscopes, to see other things, but that is not a way of seeing them. Sir Arthur Eddington thought that beyond both of these levels—the ordinary objects and the realm of atomic physics—were the mathematical realities which governed the world. God, he said, mathematicises. But another level is still not another kind. So a better way of putting it might be that these three accounts are ways of reading the world. But they are not readings that allow the partisans of one to ignore the other. They have to be understood as different levels of the same whole. The fact that my neighbour’s cat is composed of atoms that do not communicate or feel is not a ground for saying that it doesn’t matter what one does with cats. Responsibility does arise out of the way we read the world but that does not mean that responsibility is ungrounded in the facts. Even in the realm of books, responsibility can be generated from our readings, how you interpret a murder mystery by Mickey Spillane is entirely a matter of what gives you pleasure. But if one reads a philosophy book or a medical text one acquires a responsibility (not the same in the two cases) to take it seriously and not to misrepresent it. Whether Finnegan’s Wake is more like a murder mystery or a philosophy text is a serious question in itself and deserves to be taken seriously. These accounts are sometimes said to be accounts of different levels of analysis. One picture emerges if one considers the universe of middle-sized objects,

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entities ranging from very small stones, particles of dust, and very small creatures like viruses, to quite large things like stars and galaxies. The world of middle-sized objects is a world of causal regularities, obeying something like universal laws, spread out in three-dimensional space and tending, therefore, to inverse square laws. There also seems to be a single irreversible time at this level. There are some puzzling questions about biological entities and there are some awkward objects like black holes, but on the whole this is the world of comfortable classroom scientific explanations. If one probes below this level, one gets a different picture. The objects turn out to be composed of smaller entities that we don’t see—atoms, their electrons, and many still more fundamental particles. Perhaps, indeed, at the bottom of things one does not find particles in the ordinary sense but something we can visualise only as vibrating strings. Causal relations become merely probabilistic and sometimes we have choices and have to choose between determining position and velocity. At the level of quantum theory it is sometimes urged that the universe divides into different possible universes at every moment and that a rich variety of possible universes emerges—perhaps even all possible universes exist. If one goes a level upward from our common-sense world to the observable universe taken as a whole, other kinds of strangeness seem to emerge. The observable universe as a whole is most commonly now said, as I noted, to emerge in an original big bang behind which we cannot go. This big bang is a “singularity” in two senses—it is the moment when the gravitational forces emerge so strongly that we have the curved space of contemporary cosmological theory, but it is also singular in the sense that it is unique and therefore no causal explanations apply to it. It is possible however that our universe is merely a black hole in another universe, for black holes are so dense that very little can escape from them. This condition might lead to an explosion, but it can’t. It may therefore implode and create a new space. Such theories are taken seriously by people like Brian Greene.44 Greene and his co-workers have also done considerable work on the notion that spaces can tear and recreate themselves in new forms. Such notions suggest—and Greene himself points this out—a further sense of “multiple readings”. For we might not be able to choose between “big bang” and the older “steady state” theories. For the notion of multiple universes as black holes in other universes might take us back to cosmologies in which the whole universe is always much the same. For each black hole is a little leaky, and so they would all be emptying out—only to be replaced by new ones. Fuel has been added to the impulses toward the idea of real multiple readings by some recent work of Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog. The implications of quantum theory and speculations about the origin of the physical universe lead to the view, indeed, that the history of the universe varies with the way we look at it. There may be infinitely many different histories to choose from, and

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the one which appeals to us may be determined by the observations we make of it.45 The notion that the world is, in some sense, a book to be read, seems to inspire the idea that the world has an author. Sir Arthur Eddington, who was convinced that reality is best understood as the expression of underlying mathematical structures, thought that there was a god who “mathematicises”. But one might at once think of a contrasting notion. If the world consists of entities whose existence is somehow a logical necessity in the way in which the number two, if it exists at all, exists necessarily, one might think it needs no author, only readers, and that such a universe simply makes god superfluous, at least as an explanation for the world. It is certainly true that the notion that the world is there to be “read” arose among people who thought that there was a god who literally sent us messages. The idea that there is more than one way of reading the world goes back at least to Philo of Alexandria. Philo started with something that literally needed to be read: the Jewish scriptures. These, he thought had come from god, not in the literal sense in which centuries later god was said to have dictated the Koran to Mohammed, though Philo did suppose that the Decalogue had come directly to Moses in much that way, but in the sense that they represent the considered distillation of those experiences of the Jews that represented divinity more or less directly at work.46 This process of distillation was a continuous one. The Jewish tradition represented the accumulated and accumulating commentaries of large numbers of men who spent their entire lives in such scholarship. Long before Philo’s time the scriptures and the commentaries had become separate, but the process must have been a gradual one. It was not Philo’s view, however, that this was enough. Both reason and ordinary experience played their part and had the same divine origin. Philosophy was a divine gift to the Greeks, but Philo insisted equally on the importance of experience.47 The truth about the world then is that it can be read in more than one way, and this is true of all the sources of information that are presented to us. In De Opificio Mundi, Philo’s account of the creation of the world according to scripture, we are reminded that scripture tells us that the world was made in six days and we are given a verbal picture of it. The picture is given in terms of things we have experienced, but according to Philo it is told in such a way as to draw us beyond it. The world cannot have been created in six days, for days depend upon the sun which did not exist at the beginning of creation. H. A. A. Kennedy put it neatly: “he (Philo) has set himself as a rule to show that the details of ritual and biography [in the Biblical texts] were but a rich symbolism veiling the story of the world’s progress from the sense-bound life of earth to the vision of a perfect reality in god.”48 This, in fact, is Philo’s test, a test built from his reflections on scripture in the light of reason and experience.

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Kennedy says that Philo has been widely misunderstood. He has wrongly been taken “as the chief exponent of a fantastic method which can scarcely excite even the archaeological interest of the modern world”. The alternative to this has been (too often) to see him as “an interesting link in the long chain of speculation on the philosophy of religion”—“a blend of Jewish monotheism with later Greek eclecticism”.49 What seems evident enough is that much depends on what the “book” to be read is actually like. If it comes to us as a scripture already written and composed of messages that are not logically necessary but apparently exhibit the active will of some agent, then, naturally, we will suppose that there is an author. Philo in fact had three sorts of “texts” in mind. The Jewish scripture was one of them and the reason for accepting it was, indeed, that people had tried to sift and correlate what they took to be their interchanges with their god and had come up with a story. Philo was not impressed with its literal reading which was quite often nonsense so far as he could see. What impressed him was that on analysis it could be made into something rational. For this to be true, of course, he had to have a belief in reason. I think he quite clearly had in mind a test for this. There seemed to be a growing consensus among educated and enlightened men in all the communities around the Mediterranean that something like the Platonic picture of the world, modified by various criticisms of it, was true. This was a consensus to be added to the consensus of Jewish scholars about the scripture. Finally the two together seemed to prescribe a way of life which experience showed to be most successful: one which led educated human beings to a unity of mind beyond mere pleasure, to sustain the idea of a human community, and of course to give the Jewish community an important though not an exclusive place in it. Philo would never have claimed to put all this together in a final synthesis. But he would have claimed that it led to the notion that behind the appearance of the world there was a god. His problem perhaps is that what ties it all together is a rational necessity, a world that does not seem to exhibit very much arbitrary agency. By contrast, Philo’s god seems, on any reading of the actual words of his scripture, to be very arbitrary. By the time Philo has worked his story out, his god seems to be becoming a rational Platonist—or rather his message can be read that way. If god is simply an expression of rationality, then, of course, he may not exhibit any will at all. If agency appears only in one of the readings, and not in the most fundamental one, agency at the root of the universe may well be taken to be an illusion. Can we shed more light on these arguments by turning to Bishop Berkeley? It is Bishop Berkeley, as we saw, who comes to mind most often when we think of the world as something to be read in which the world is to be taken as the natu-

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ral language of god. Berkeley defended his theism explicitly by introducing a notion of divine agency, expressed through the arbitrary exercise of will. And the clearest reading of it appears to be in Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher. In the Fourth Dialogue, Section 7, Euphranor promises to show how a natural language enables god to speak to us by the intervention of “arbitrary, outward sensible signs”.50 For the theistic reading the most important word in this list is certainly “arbitrary”. Now, if one starts, as Philo did, with the fact that at least one of the sets of signs and symbols actually is a book which comes to us in a human language, the arbitrariness of the signs is not in question. Words and things do not correlate in any case on a one to one basis and we know that thousands of different languages use different words and that some language groups are so different from others that there seems to be no common stock. If anything does, languages themselves show the activity of agency. So does their use. We all know the difference between acting deliberately, being pushed, acting on whim, being overcome by emotion and so forth. There is a cogent argument to the effect that languages must show the activity of agency, for in order for us to mean anything it must be clear that we deliberately use some parts of our stock of language and withhold others. If we think that someone babbles of necessity—that nothing else is available to him or to her—we mean that the words uttered are the only words at the disposal of the utterer. Then we no longer think agency is involved or that anything is necessarily intended though we may still of course pay attention to apparent howls of rage or pain. But Berkeley was not talking about a book. Let us think for a moment about how the science of Berkeley’s epoch dealt with the world. The things that Berkeley’s contemporary Newton saw in some sense led him to the laws of motion and gravitation, but people had always seen these things and had not deduced the laws. Indeed, Newton was troubled by the fact that Moses, who was in direct contact with god, was not reported as having grasped the truth about physics. Newton spent much time studying Scripture with such things in mind. There was a good dose of Cambridge Platonism in his thought and, indeed, where Aristotle thought we had to explain how things got moving, Newton thought one needed to explain the apparent deviations from the universal laws. Bodies, he believed, continue in a uniform direction at a uniform velocity unless something gets in the way and slows them or speeds them up. Something always does. The laws are the forms that inform the world, but they are not to be found simply by observing things in the way that naturalists observe turtles. The seemingly arbitrary leads us to the truth because we must look for the laws behind events. Berkeley meant still more than this. He meant that the universal laws of nature could have been illustrated by all sorts of things. What reveals this natural

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language is what happens to exist. It is this that is arbitrary and that forms the natural language. Berkeley’s thought is that there is a parallel here between our alphabet, which could have been very different and is not important in itself except from a practical point of view, and the expressions that describe nature. One may think about alphabets. They must be written easily, be readily recognizable, and be able to express something that will convey the words to us. But that is all. There is perhaps a better parallel here between what Berkeley has in mind and sets of characters in languages like Chinese. They may have started as pictograms, but in due course they became ideograms, no longer pictures but abstract symbols that need have no relation to the things to which they refer. In some languages (Italian for instance) the alphabets are substantially phonetic and are therefore related inseparably to sounds. The written words then can generally express only one language whereas Chinese characters can represent very different dialects which are virtually distinct languages. The language of “nature”, if there is one, must be like this, for nature is intelligible in any language. The parallel between what we actually see “in nature” and the characters in the Chinese written language can only be taken so far, however. It is true that the visible entities which we can take as symbols can and do have different interpretations, but still the observed properties have substantial ties to the theory building process. Is that a reason for thinking that they are not really “arbitrary signs”? Indeed, we often think there is a gulf between words and things though sensible linguists may warn us of the silliness of the “surrogate theory of words” in terms of which words are surrogates for things.51 If what we see is “god’s natural language”, and this is what Berkeley means, then Berkeley means that there are no things. This is still compatible with the notion that the symbols are not completely arbitrary if, for instance, the measurable and so mathematicisible properties of what is observed are what in the end give rise to theories. Then, however, we are in Eddington’s difficulty, though perhaps there is a way out of it. God mathematicises, but non-mathematicisible worlds could not form part of the kind of physics we have. The problem arises because, if we accept that physics as we have it offers an approximation to truth, then it is a necessary truth that, if god exists, he or she mathematicises. This would seem to weaken, though not necessarily destroy, any argument from mathematical physics to god. If there is arbitrariness, it has to arise from the fact that there are as many mathematically describable universes as there could be and those that exist observably are some sub-set which happens to show the kind of intelligence which we call “making sense”. If one takes this view seriously it is important to grasp what is involved. We know there are automobiles and umbrellas in the world. But we also know that what people buy is not a collection of metal but something much more complex which figures in their psyches in all sorts of ways. This is why it is so hard to

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wean us off them even when we know they are trashing our cities and perhaps bringing ruin to our planet. You may own an umbrella. But you don’t own the atoms of which your umbrella is composed. If you burn it in the trash you have no claim on the dispersed particles. All you own are some rights—the right to use it to keep the rain off you so long as you don’t poke your neighbour’s eye out with it. Helped by you, it has the power to break your neighbour’s best Ming vase, but this is not a power that you own. The thing that you own is understood through a complex set of symbols. It is not to be denied on such a theory that there is another complex set of interpretations through which it is grasped by physicists and chemists. They see what you see, though they produce complex objects which produce additional symbols—principally numbers—which both add to their vision and suggest lines of interpretation. They read what they see, however, in ways largely closed to laymen. Berkeley seems to have thought that the natural sciences give us a unique and true reading of the world, but few people quite think this now. On the face of it, the scientific account of the world is a very important additional set of readings. It takes a further theory to give it priority and even then no one thinks that the physicist’s reading is exhaustive. When all the possible sets of readings are put together, they do exhaust the thing. If this is true there is not really a distinction between the language of description and the things described. For the “things” are the symbols being interpreted and they can be held, as Berkeley thought, to be a kind of “natural language”. Berkeley struggled with related problems a number of times—in The New Theory of Vision, The Principles of Human Knowledge, in the little work called The New Theory of Vision Vindicated, and in the Siris. In places some commentators have found traces still of the distinction between words and things, but I think this was not Berkeley’s final intention. The world and the natural language of god are one and the same, though the understandings of that language are various. So, how good is the argument from a symbolist position to the existence of god? On what does it depend? The most basic suggestions are first that nature is intelligible and secondly that its intelligibility takes a form which suggests that the deliberate exercise of intelligence pervades the world. This is admittedly hard to prove. Evidently, this intelligence was not always our intelligence because our reading of the data convinces us that it was intelligible long before we were here to read it. The universe may however be infinite even if our particular branch of it, starting with a primordial explosion, is not. Furthermore the appearance of time is created by the ways in which the data are organised. But the answer might well be that there is a pervading intelligence which finds expression in many different ways but that it is nowhere unified in a single consciousness in any way corresponding to the god, or one of the gods, of the theistic religions.

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5. Pantheism and Panentheism So much for the sort of theism which corresponds to the definition I offered of the concept of god. I have suggested that the notion of a god so far beyond being that he or she makes no appearance in our world at all (even as the instantiation of a fundamental principle or set of principles) is beyond reason. Such a god can neither be sustained nor undermined by any sort of idealism. But this still leaves open various forms of pantheism and panentheism. It is, as I said, not easy to define these terms. It has often been suggested that pantheism is the opposite in some sense of the notion that god is absolutely transcendent and beyond everything. Pantheism therefore is the doctrine that god is immanent in all being. But need it be? William Mander’s pantheism is simply the doctrine that the whole of reality is god’s knowledge. That was Malebranche’s view, too, and it may well be the most plausible form of the doctrine. Such a god is certainly not “merely immanent”. Idealists—even those who clearly thought they were not—have not infrequently been imagined to be pantheists. W. Preston Warren, for instance, urged that both Edward Caird and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison were pantheists.52 Warren’s argument was that Caird believed that everything was a manifestation of one self-consciousness. But, if the one self-consciousness is active, then there can be a real plurality, for it can change as the individual consciousnesses change, and change its relation to them even if it manages, from one perspective, to include them. And indeed Caird’s infinite self-consciousness could itself be fully expressed in all the others, though Warren finds this idea “ridiculous”.53 Warren allows that Pringle-Pattison actually accepts a kind of dual consciousness which would seem, in the same general way, to avoid pantheism.54 Still he thinks that finite selves may be unreal for Pringle-Pattison though this seems to be a question of levels of reality. Warren did not make his case, but it would seem initially likely that every sort of idealism is helpful to one who wants to believe that there is a god who is literally identical with the whole of reality. For pantheism seems to be intelligible only if reality as a whole has the qualities of a mind. To deify a collection of matter seems perverse. Mentalism asserts that everything participates in mind, ideationalism that the world is the kind of place in which ideas are fundamental, and symbolism that the world is something to be read and that its reality depends on cooperation with readers. The snag here is perhaps with the problem of agency. A mind does not just contain and process information. Computers do that. It is not just to be a storage place for knowledge. Computers and libraries alike do that. A mind is conscious and aware. It is also capable of bestowing meaning on things and events. This requires a subject confronted by objects and a pattern of intentions. If god is a mind and is identical with the whole of reality, then the whole intends and

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means and has an object which is itself. This seems perfectly possible until one considers: The way in which we assign words from our vocabulary is to make distinctions. For something to be known to be x, we must know what not-x is. Now the great mind of pantheism may distinguish itself from what is merely possible, but then it is not, after all, co-extensive with reality. For we must give some ontological status to what is distinguished from it, but might have been real and is not. It would seem that this great mind cannot quite be a mind like the minds who author logic books. But it is when we come to values that the problem perhaps becomes acute even for the thinker who does not want to play such logical games. For I have urged that the highest value is the love which brings together minds in a shared community. Self-love of course exists, but to love oneself excessively is narcissistic in a way which misses the value of coming together with something better than any individual can attain—a community. It seems only in the context in which love can extend beyond oneself that it is intelligible as a high order value. It may bind everything together in a communitarian absolute, but it must not obliterate the individuals. Nonetheless, one may think that pantheism is a possible doctrine if one makes a different choice of values. But then the question is still: What values does one ascribe to the whole? A variety of answers is available and nothing forces an idealist of any sort to deify the whole universe. It may be this that causes pantheists to qualify their doctrine with adjectives. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacock have edited a volume of nineteen essays on pantheism and recent worldviews, in which nearly all the authors soften “pantheism” with some adjective. Participatory pantheism, ecclesial pantheism, eschatological pantheism, sapiential pantheism, emergentist pantheism, sacramental pantheism, Trinitarian pantheism, and pansacramental naturalistic pantheism are among them.55 Nor does anything prohibit an idealist from seeing god in all things or force him to see god in all things or all things in god, for that will depend on how he thinks the universe is organised and, again, many modes of organisation are possible within the idealist framework. Dr. Mander, indeed, expressly insists that his pantheism is not either an idealist or a materialist reductionism.56 For if, as he urges, the world is god’s knowledge, everything depends on what that knowledge is like. So the position remains the same. Idealism fosters the spiritual life but need not lead to theism, pantheism, or panentheism. Neither need it preclude any of them.

6. Getting from Idealism to a God What would an idealist in search of divinity need? An idealist in search of deity would have to think that there is a story like the one Philo tells—that what is

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suggested by the data is that the unfolding universe has a purpose which is to develop intelligences that surpass the merely sensory and that they eventually find their intellectual repose in a final unity. There are a number of notions involved here. Evidently, if we can understand what is going on, it is intelligible and makes some kind of sense. What is needed to make the argument work is that the world should seem to be the sort of place which furthers the aims of a deity. The deity may, of course, exist and be extremely odd from a human point of view, but not, on the definitions I have been working with—and those used by Professor Sprigge in his recent discussion—wicked. It has been suggested by those who use the “anthropic argument” that it is, after all, very unlikely that the world should turn out to have just the right conditions to produce creatures like us. The creation of a world like ours would be a foolish project for a Calvinist god who apparently created many people only for the purpose of damning them and produced others so they could be saved. Surely such a god could create people ready-made and perfected who would not have to go through the perils of a life on earth in order to be saved. Adam and Eve may have been perfect people to start with, but Calvinists and others have believed that god knew they would fall from grace and went ahead with the plan anyway. Making a world fit for people only makes sense if there is some plan that gives their lives a point. When such questions are raised we must remind ourselves that Christians have often said that “god is love”, and Ralph Cudworth went further and said “love is god”.57 If this is so and if, as seems very likely, love is the highest order value not just for Christians but in the view of sensible people generally, then we could have an explanation. For love requires both distinctness and community. One must be separate and one must come together. It is this struggle to be an individual and then to come together and share that unique perspective on the world with others that renders the adventure of life worthwhile. The coming together expressed as love, however, involves an initial separation. A god of love would create other beings knowing that they would first suffer the deprivations of being apart and could only come together meaningfully if they did so freely. The point is that each person has something distinctive to contribute and this distinct contribution, because it is unique, must be a free creation not ordained by the deity, however benevolent. If the contribution were not made freely it would be the work of the deity done through one of his puppets and would not be distinct from the acts of the deity. Such a god would need a very complex world, one no doubt with many properties capable of sustaining persons like ourselves. And so the anthropic argument would take on a theistic tinge. In such a world god would have to appear as Christians have thought as a person like us. Josiah Royce tried to give a more theoretical underpinning to such arguments.58 Royce associated love with the problem of individuation: On one view

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things are individuated by the matter through which they are instantiated. But this has never been a very satisfactory notion. For matter does not have individuality in and of itself. Aristotle’s matter was only the capacity to take on form. The contemporary “matter” of physics consists of particles which are indistinguishable apart from their space-time coordinates. One electron has to be just like another. There may be isotopes of hydrogen but hydrogen atoms are in principle all the same. Space-time coordinates do not finally tell us what occupies those positions. There are very complex arrangements of course. But it is only as a matter of statistical probability that two people do not have the same fingerprints or non-mitochondrial DNA. For an idealist there is no matter to individuate. This poses a problem. Bruce Kuklick notes that Royce pursued the issue in detail.59 He thought that points in space and moments in time can only contain clusters of properties which do not individuate. Thought cannot individuate either, for thoughts only identify types—a thought can be shared by many people. The same is true of experience. Royce evidently rejected, as we have seen, McTaggart’s notion that perceptions which have a unique point of view individuate, presumably because nothing in that point of view is necessarily unique. But this is perhaps because problems of perception analyse out into perceived contents and adopted points of view which might be occupied at different times by other observers. In McTaggart’s picture of reality there are no different times. So Royce says only a specific interest can individuate and only love is powerful enough to do this. Hence god appears in the world as individuator. If this is true it directly connects god and love in a way that supports Philo’s contention that we are driven in our self-recognition to something beyond ourselves and our immediate sensory experience. There is a problem here for Royce because of his bias toward an all-absorbing absolute, but no such problem seems to exist for Philo. For Royce, the whole simply is what it is and, as Royce’s opponents like Howison and Watson kept pointing out, it absorbs everything. What is really left of love? We are better off with Philo’s god who steps out into the world as a Logos and generates the germs of something like the Christian trinity within which love is a perfectly sensible notion. I would argue in any case that religion is primarily a matter of orientation—a way of directing us toward some goal. Such a goal given in this way would be perfectly intelligible. So this third kind of idealism may, after all, have theistic tendencies. One can certainly be an idealist of some sort and take any view about theism, but such views make one recognize the human spirit at work in the world and provide a basis for a religion that does genuinely orient us.

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Notes 1. I am indebted to Dr. William Mander for a long discussion and invaluable written comments on the draft of this paper. 2. McTaggart’s avowed atheism is evident in Some Dogmas of Religion (London: Edward Arnold, 1906). But his universe of timeless loving spirits locked into an infinite love is very like a vast expansion of Ralph Cudworth’s (or at least Dean William Sherlock’s) trinity and may be only a late stage in Cambridge latitudinarian Christianity. 3. Bradley’s aversion to his father’s evangelical Anglicanism is celebrated, and he is careful to dissociate the absolute and god in Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (London: Swan Sonnenschein 1893; 2nd edn. 1897). 4. Bernard Bosanquet hoped that the churches would eventually be turned into museums. See “The Future of Religious Observance”, in The Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co.; New York: Macmillan, 1893). 5. J. Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1880) and E. Caird, The Evolution of Religion (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 2 Vols., 1893). 6. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930, 2nd edn. rev.), esp. Chap. XVI. 7. See esp., perhaps, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1951). 8. A pantheist is literally one who believes that god is the totality of reality. Nothing exists except the divine being and its components. A panentheist is one who finds god in all things and all things in god but does not hold that god and the objects are identical. 9. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 10. See W. Mander’s “Omniscience and Pantheism”, The Heythrop Journal, 41, 2000, pp. 199-208. 11. See, e.g., C. Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962), p. 85. For a discussion see D. H. Nikkel, Panentheism in Hartshorne and Tillich (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), and Sprigge’s The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 451. 12. J. Guitton, Le problème de la connaissance et la pensée religieuse (Paris: Aubier; Aix: Imprimerie d’Éditions Provençales, 1939), pp. 36-37. 13. Some idealists would reply that we are finite and that our god must be infinite, but for others we are instantiations of the infinite too, and for virtually all of them we share in the infinite mind of the absolute or god. 14. See, e.g, “The Idealist Philosopher’s God”, Laval Théologique et Philosophique, 38. 3, Octobre, 2002, and, most recently, “Repenser l’idée de Dieu” in L. Langlois and Y. C. Zarka (eds.), Les philosophes et la question de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), and “Green’s Idealism and Metaphysics of Ethics”, T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy, eds. M. Dimova-Cookson and W. Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 160-186. In the section headed “Eternal Consciousness, the Choices” my essay contains a taxonomy of the common accounts of the absolute and their relations to the concept of god.

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15. No doubt any concept of god that figures in any substantial organised religion is worth talking about in the appropriate theological or sociological contexts. 16. R. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Royston, 1678), p. 123 (the page number is misprinted 117 in the three British Library copies), ed. J. Harrison (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), Vol. 1, p. 179. (The Royston edition remains definitive, but the Harrison-Tegg edition has a rich index and also J. L. von Mosheim’s still valuable notes.) 17. Notice that the god wholly beyond is a rather rare notion. The One of Plotinus, for instance, is the most celebrated instance of divinity beyond being and non-being, but finds expression through the emanation in this world. The god of Samuel Alexander (Space, Time and Deity, London: Macmillan, 1920) never appears in being, but portents of divinity are found at every stage of the Alexandrian universe. 18. I do not mean to suggest that Professor Sprigge has adopted the deism often associated historically with English unitarianism or that Unitarians these days have any uniform creedal commitments, but they would no doubt agree with Alfred North Whitehead that Unitarians believe that there is at most one god. Many are agnostics and some are atheists, but those who believe in god have a propensity to believe that the deity is benign. 19. One of the most crucial passages seems to be in A New Theory of Vision, Sect. 147, p. 51 of George Berkeley. Philosophical Works, ed. M. R. Ayers (London: Dent, 1975): “Upon the whole I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of vision constitute an universal language of the Author of Nature”. In the first edition the text reads “the universal language of Nature”. But an equally basic passage is in Principles of Human Knowledge, first published in Dublin (Jeremy Pepy, 1710), §65. There Berkeley claims that the laws of nature are god’s language and that there is a one-to-one correspondence between signs and things— according to G. A. Johnston. A good discussion of this is in Johnston’s The Development of Berkeley’s Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 221-222. On p. 222 Johnston talks about our finding out by experience how ideas are related to one another and the dualism seems to weaken. There is also a little tract vindicating the “new theory”: The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (London: J. Tonson on the Strand, 1733). See esp. p. 11. 20. G. Berkeley, Siris, A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another. This, the last of Berkeley’s major works, was published in 1744 (London: C. Hitch and C. Davis). 21. D. Hibbs, “Was Gregory of Nyssa a Berkeleyan Idealist?”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13. 3, 2005, pp. 425-435. 22. R. Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 226. 23. The Greek text cited by Sorabji is in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Greca (Paris: P. J. Migne, 1858), Vol. 44, Col. 69-BC. An influential Latin version In Hexaemeron Commentarius, ed. Petro Francisco Zino, appeared in Venice (Aldi filii, 1553) and there is another in the Migne edition. 24. Gregory, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Greca, Vol. 44, Col. 133 AD. There is an English translation by H. A. Wilson in Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, eds. H. Wace and A. Schaff, second series (Oxford: Parker, 1893), Vol. 5, pp. 413-414. 25. H. A. Moore, Prolegomena to Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nissa, Vol. 5, p. 19.

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26. Gregory, De Anima et Resurrectione, translation in Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, Vol. 5, p. 445 and in Patrologiae Cursus Completus Series Greca, Vol. 46, Col. 124 BD. 27. Fourteen hundred years on, Berkeley’s arguments for the existence of god may seem, if they simply amount to arguing that god is needed to keep the world stable, still weaker. For the world may be ordered by logical necessity or even by a subconscious union of finite minds. But, as I said, the situation is different if one invokes the “natural language of god” theory. This I must leave to its place which is in the discussion of the third kind of idealism. 28. See J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), Vol. I, Sect. 202. 29. J. Royce, The Conception of God (New York: Macmillan, 1897), Supplementary Essay, Sect. VI. 30. Sprigge, James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993), pp. 232-239. 31. Ibid, p. 175. James wrote the introduction to Fechner’s Little Book of Life After Death, tr. M. C. Wadsworth (Boston: Little Brown, 1904). Sprigge discusses James’ view of the continuity of our existence with god’s on p. 239. 32. W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 403-404. See F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death (New York: Longmans Green, 1903). 33. W. James, Varieties, op. cit., p. 403. 34. W. Sherlock, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God (London: W. Rogers, 1691). 35. Spinoza, Ethics, Proposition XI, alternative proof. 36. The association with the work of the third person of the Trinity and with the gospel of John has deep roots in German idealism going back to Schelling. 37. J. Royce, “The Possibility of Error”, in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), pp. 384-435. 38. Royce’s argument can be nuanced in many ways. See, for example, Timothy Sprigge’s excellent discussion in The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., pp. 359-362. See also my essay “Error and the Idealists”, Philosophia, Philosophical Quarterly of Israel, 21, 1-2, December 1991, pp. 3-24. 39. J. Royce, The World and the Individual (London and New York: Macmillan, 1900, 1902), 2 Vols., esp. the Supplementary Essay “The One, the Many and the Infinite”, pp. 473588. I have explored this aspect of Royce’s philosophy in “The Great Debate: Infinity and Absolute; Individual and Community: Royce, Watson, Howison and Abbot”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13, 2005, pp. 325-348. 40. See particularly, perhaps, De Opificio Mundi, “On the Creation”, XLVIII: 139 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), Vol. I, pp. 110-111. 41. J. Leslie, Value and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979).

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42. Magma Moralia, 1208b, 27-31. The remark is cited in J. A. Arieti and P. Wilson, The Scientific and the Divine (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 144 as evidence of what they think was a common intellectual attitude of the period. 43. This is the view of John Leslie in Value and Existence, op. cit. A rather different account is to be found in A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality (London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Humanities Press, 1973). My paper “Values, God, and the Question About Why There is Anything at All”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1. 2, new series, 1987, pp. 148-162, seeks to clarify some of the basic issues. 44. B. Greene, The Elegant Universe, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999). 45. See the account by A. Gefter, New Scientist, April 22, 2006, pp. 28-32. 46. C. A. Qadir, “Alexandrian-Syriac Thought”, in A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1963), Vol. I, pp. 116-118 argues that Philo is “not a complete symbolist”. By this he means that when Philo offers allegorical readings, he does not mean to deny the literal reading. But both are readings and what is being read consists of signs and symbols. See esp. p. 116. 47. Philo, De Specialibus Legibus, 34, 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). 48. H. A. A. Kennedy, Philo’s Contribution to Religion (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), pp. 2-3. 49. Ibid., p. 5. 50. G. Berkeley, Works, eds. A. L. Luce and T. E. Jessup (London: Nelson, 1948-1957), Vol. III, p. 149. 51. See, e.g., R. Harris, Language and Communication (London: Routledge, 1996), esp. pp. 125-145, 164, and 209ff. 52. W. Preston Warren, “Pantheism in Neo-Hegelian Thought”, Yale Studies in Religion, 3, 1933. 53. Ibid., p. 13. 54. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1917, 2nd edn., Oxford, 1920). 55. P. Clayton and A. Peacock (eds.), In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). 56. W. Mander, “Omniscience and Pantheism”, op. cit., p. 199. 57. This is not often mentioned when those who call themselves Christians are speaking of damnation, but damnation is not so popular these days. 58. J. Royce, The Conception of God, op. cit., p. 266. Royce’s position is summarised and analysed carefully by B. Kuklick in Josiah Royce. An Intellectual Biography (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p. 44. 59. Ibid.

God, Sprigge, and Idealist Philosophy of Religion William Sweet

1. Introduction The theme of religion has long had a place in Timothy Sprigge’s work,1 but it has its most thorough statement in his most recent book, The God of Metaphysics.2 The presence of this theme is intriguing. Sprigge describes himself as an absolute idealist, and some might wonder in what sense the “God” of metaphysics—particularly, of an idealist metaphysics—is a God or an element that can have a place in any of the major religious traditions. There are, of course, different idealisms and different absolute idealisms, and the place and character of religion within them varies widely. It is, then, not surprising that Sprigge’s own views seem sometimes tentative. He remarks that “absolute idealism has in its own way a certain religious character”,3 and that many of the philosophers he reviews in his study have a notion of “‘God’ or ‘the absolute’”,4 as if one is much the same as the other. Such cautious remarks, however, invite several questions: What does it mean to have an idealist theory or philosophy of religion? What is Sprigge’s contribution to an idealist philosophy of religion? Is an idealist philosophy of religion useful or satisfying—does it fit, for example, with religious orthodoxies, or does it help to account for the phenomena of religious experience or to resolve the putative conflicts between science and religion? Here, I want to outline formally what seems to be involved in an idealist philosophy of religion—or, rather, in some idealist philosophies of religion. This will help in determining where Sprigge’s own views fit within the idealist traditions, and tell us something of Sprigge’s own “God of metaphysics”. This survey will allow us to reflect briefly on whether idealist accounts of religion have anything that might recommend them to us. And, finally, such a study is important because it will serve to address a question about the relation of the philosophy of religion to idealism as a whole; J. H. Muirhead, for example, has made the claim that “British idealism from the first has been in essence a philosophy of religion”.5

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2. Idealism and Religion Is there an idealist philosophy of religion? This is, at the very least, a challenging question for, as noted above, there are many forms of idealism and the term “idealism” itself is broad and potentially ambiguous. (It is also a term that many who were idealists came to abandon precisely because of this ambiguity.6) Sprigge himself draws on a complex lineage of idealist philosophers—Bradley, Spinoza, and Royce—as well as some rather non-idealist thinkers, such as James, Kierkegaard, and Whitehead. But Sprigge’s approach frequently adverts to the idealism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it is this that will be focussed on here. In general, idealists—particularly those with whom this paper is concerned— hold the view that there is no rigid distinction between the material and the mental, and that material objects, as we describe them or conceive of them,7 do not exist or have an essence independent of and outside the mind—or, at the very least, that there cannot be an adequate account of any aspect of reality without including a reference to mind or consciousness. By taking this approach, it seeks to be open to all experience—ethical, religious, and aesthetic. And while reality is rooted in the mental, these idealists sought to avoid what R. B. Perry called “the egocentric predicament”8—i.e., subjective idealism—and offered in its place what is commonly called objective idealism. Nineteenth and early twentieth century British idealist accounts of religion derive their inspiration largely from the writings of Hegel and, more remotely, from Spinoza. There were other influences as well.9 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the writings of David Strauss, Ferdinand Baur, and others provided a radical turn in the scholarly approach to religion and scripture, so that religious experience, sacred texts, and religious practice were seen as phenomena open to critical investigation and which could—and should—be examined independently of one’s religious commitment. By the mid-nineteenth century, this approach to the study of religion had established itself in Britain, particularly in Oxford. Figures such as Benjamin Jowett, Edward Caird, and Thomas Hill Green, and those in the Church of England “Broad Church movement” (such as Frederick Temple, Bishop J. W. Colenso, and Thomas Arnold) argued for a more analytical and rational approach to understanding religious belief— one for which they were frequently criticised by Church authorities. By the late nineteenth century, these accounts had gone through significant development and refinement in the writings of figures such as F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Andrew Seth (Pringle-Pattison), J. M. E. McTaggart, and others. And it is fair to say that this current has continued—sometimes unknowingly—to today.10 In examining idealist accounts of religion, it is important to remind ourselves that religion is not the same as theism—even though, in many of the idealist philosophers cited above, they are closely related. A religious view would involve,

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at the very least, a belief system (including moral precepts or guidance, some notion of an end—such as liberation or salvation—and instruction and encouragement on how to achieve this end) together with attitudes or emotions and a set of practices (e.g., worship and a discourse that refers to or involves some ultimate or transcendent principle around which individuals and communities organize their lives). As well, religion usually includes a dispositional element— i.e., it is a platform for action for those who believe. It is generally held to be a comprehensive principle that provides unity to one’s life and that seeks to address the tension or bridge the division between the world as it is, and the world as it ought to be. It is usually held in community, so that the beliefs within the system come to exist through, and are assessed by, a community. We can see it as—as Sprigge puts it—“a truth to live by”11 or, as Bernard Bosanquet writes in a more forceful (and more satisfying) way, “that set of objects, habits, and convictions, whatever it might prove to be, which [one] would rather die for than abandon, or at least would feel himself excommunicated from humanity if he did abandon”.12 Theists would add to this account that there is also a notion of the divine and the human as distinct personalities, in which human beings are brought out of themselves, and into a real relation or even union with the divine. Idealists articulated and developed their understanding of religion, however, in rather different ways, and when we look at the idealism of the late nineteenth and early tweentieth centuries, we have to take account of the fact that there are at least two currents of idealist thought.

3. Personal Idealism The term “personal idealism” was popularized by the Americans George Holmes Howison and Borden Parker Bowne13 and used by Rudolf Metz (in a slightly different sense) to refer to a rather broad range of thinkers,14 including Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, James Seth, Hastings Rashdall, W. R. Sorley, (arguably) James Ward, and even J. M. E. McTaggart15—though its best known exponent (and the one who wrote most extensively on issues related to religion) is Pringle-Pattison. This is not to imply that there were no differences among these men. Rashdall was involved in a serious exchange with Pringle-Pattison following the publication of the latter’s first set of Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen,16 and many found McTaggart’s views on immortality rather difficult to accept.17 Still, we may discern a number of common features.18 To understand the approach of personal idealism, it is useful to start with its account of the real. Philosophical idealism in general reflects the view that reality is rational through and through, and it is on account of this that reality can be known. It embraces the view that the “knowers are in the world which they co-

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me to know”,19 and personal idealists, like idealists in general, admit that mind in a sense “makes” nature. But personal idealists make it clear that they reject all subjective idealism. Idealism holds, moreover, that there is a fundamental connection among things, and we see this, too, in personal idealism. In his The Idea of God, for example, Pringle-Pattison describes a growing acknowledgement of humanity’s oneness with the universe and with “the Absolute”.20 And again, personal idealists, like idealists in general, reject mechanistic views; nor do they allow any explanation of higher experience simply in terms of what is lower. Nature is only one factor in a larger whole. We find in personal idealism a notion of the Absolute—though what specifically this means is often left undetermined. Pringle-Pattison says that the Absolute is “the sweep of a Life which realises itself in and through the process of the finite world, as consummated in the divine sonship of man”.21 Yet we generally find little more said about it; his discussion, in lectures 14 and 15 in The Idea of God (on “The Absolute and the Finite Individual”) are principally just critiques of Bosanquet’s (and to a lesser extent Bradley’s) view. A key claim of personal idealism is that individual minds are real. According to Pringle-Pattison, for example, although there is an Absolute, we must not ignore the numerical and qualitative distinctness and uniqueness of each person. Each self has value and is ultimately independent of every other.22 Indeed, one finds in many personal idealists, such as Pringle-Pattison, strong realistic tendencies, and so some see in this account of the person a via media between McTaggart’s “spiritual pluralism” (which focuses on individualities) and absolute idealism.23 Pringle-Pattison was concerned that other—more “Hegelian”—idealisms had an overly “abstract” account, which ignored that “Every existent is a ‘this’, a ‘one’, a being in a strict sense unique... a ‘this’ as well as a ‘what’”.24 A principal reason for this emphasis on the individual, Pringle-Pattison writes, is because we need it to make sense of morality: “the real individuality and ethical independence of the finite selves [is] the fundamental condition of the moral life.”25 To be moral, and to shape one’s own destiny, one must be independent and free. For Pringle-Pattison, then, there is a metaphysical autonomy of persons which distinguishes personal from absolute idealism but—despite its realistic tinge— also distinguishes it from naturalism and materialism.26 What does the metaphysical autonomy of persons amount to? Here, there is a good deal of diversity among personal idealists. In general, however, it is—as one might expect—tied to the notion of person, and the claim of a “manifest distinctness” (and a superiority) between humanity and nature.27 (McTaggart, of course, goes even farther. Here, only finite individuals exist, and are included in the Absolute united to all other selves by a relation of Love; the notion of a personal God is, for McTaggart, a superfluous assumption.28)

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Panpsychism is excluded, then, because it allegedly deprives “externality of its necessary place in the universe”.29 As Pringle-Pattison puts it, panpsychism “transmutes the apparently unconscious system of nature into a multitude of infinitesimally conscious entities”,30 each of which, in turn, needs to be rooted in some medium which—if that medium is conscious—needs to be rooted in some further medium, ad infinitum.31 What exactly, then, is a person? In the first series of his second set of Gifford lectures, The Idea of Immortality (1922), Pringle-Pattison writes that there is a “systematic unity of the conscious experiences of a particular individual centre”.32 He calls this the soul. Moreover, if the notion of person is to have any sense at all, this soul or consciousness must be unique. To speak of a soul or mind “included in another” destroys the idea of the self. But a person is more than a consciousness; Pringle-Pattison adds that finite spirits require bodies for individuation33—“the individual centre being defined or determined at the outset by the bodily organism”34—and this ensures their numerically distinctness. This is another reason why persons are “impenetrable” and cannot be absorbed into one another.35 Of this, Pringle-Pattison writes, we can be certain, “based on direct experience”.36 While insisting on individuality and the distinctness of persons, personal idealism is also opposed to pluralism.37 Pringle-Pattison argues, presumably against McTaggart, that reality is not a “republic of related selves”.38 As a result, what we find is that, in personal idealism, there is an Absolute in which all things are. Thus, humanity needs God, for finite spirits are “grounded in and illuminated by” it.39 But wholes also depend upon their parts; God needs humanity, and God is “expressed in the system as a whole”.40 Following James Ward, Pringle-Pattison describes this relation as one of “God-and-theWorld”41—the hyphens reflecting the close connection and yet separation. This raises some rather thorny questions. One is the relation of God and the Absolute. In The Idea of God, Pringle-Pattison appears to identify the two,42 though later he insists that they are not precise equivalents.43 A second question is whether God is something transcendent. For Pringle-Pattison, God is a “selfconscious” personality that is “other than, and infinitely more than, that of any finite self”44 and, at times, it seems that he believes that God is outside the world. He writes of “the transcendent being of God for himself”.45 But what this means is not entirely clear, particularly as (as we have seen) God is certainly immanent in the world; Pringle-Pattison writes that God “realises itself in and through the process of the finite world”.46 The distinctiveness of the character of the relation of finite beings to God is present in a number of other personal idealists. For W. R. Sorley, God is still creator and source of values. C. C. J. Webb attributes personality to God, although it is personality in a different sense.47 For Rashdall, the Absolute “consists of God and the souls, including, of course, all that God and those souls

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know and experience”48 and, through his understanding of God as efficient cause, he attributes a high degree of independence to God.49 And, for McTaggart, there is no need for God at all; instead, he talks of an infinity of finite individuals united in Love. The personal idealist account of God and religion has seemed to some critics to be rather disappointing. Is the relation to God a relation to a person, or not? Why does belief in God—or in religion—matter? In what sense, if any, can God function as a normative principle? Can God call human beings out of their private desires and concerns? For Pringle-Pattison, the principal answer to the question of the nature of the relation between God and humanity seems to be that “the specific religious insight is the recognition of dependence”,50 notwithstanding the independence of things, and that there is an “intellectual love of God”—although the motive for this love must come from finite individuals.51 Apart from an insistence on the existence of God and of a relation of finite beings to it, we find little discussion of most theistic claims. Admittedly, there are frequent, lengthy discussions by Pringle-Pattison concerning personal survival after death. Given what he says of the nature of personality, one expects this, and Pringle-Pattison affirms that “unbelief in death” is necessary. Nevertheless, it is interesting that this does not obviously entail personal immortality in a thick sense,52 and for Pringle-Pattison “immortality is an unpleasant subject”.53 Central to the views of many of the personal idealists is the issue of what people are called on ethically to do in the world. There is, after all, a real problem of evil, and evil is to be actively engaged. Indeed, many personal idealists accused the “absolutists” of being overly optimistic about the success of good over evil, and Pringle-Pattison writes that the “The difficulties of such a [Hegelian absolutist] system are always found in accounting for contingency, for imperfection, for suffering and evil”.54 On Pringle-Pattison’s view, “we can understand evil only if we take seriously the freedom of the finite world”,55 but the key to these ethical issues is religion. The importance of finite individuality is, therefore, again related to theistic considerations. And if we can speak of a teleology, it is ethical rather than eschatological. We have, then, an ethical theism. But while theistic, there is little of creedal religion on this account. The “truths” of scripture or tradition, when they appear in idealist writings, do not mean what they are usually taken to mean, and when scripture is cited, it is generally to support views that are far from orthodox Christianity. The value of religious practice and worship seems to be largely social, and there is little encouragement or guidance to be gleaned from religion itself. Nevertheless, personal idealist accounts do provide a defence of the reality of persons, of God, of the unity of God and creation, and, to a degree, of the existence of an afterlife. It may not be orthodox Christian theism, but it is certainly recognizable as religion.56

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This focus on the practical and on practice within a broadly theistic context is significant. It is just this that allowed the personal idealists to have an influence—not only on the theological schools in Britain and its Empire, but also on the teachers, missionaries, and philosophers who found their way to colleges, schools, and religious institutions around the world, and particularly in the Indian subcontinent.57 And it was in such a context that the philosophy of religion of the personal idealists came to engage the pantheistic and non-theistic religions of the world.

4. Absolute Idealism “Absolute idealism” refers to a rather broad range of thinkers as well, including Bradley58, Bosanquet59, Henry Jones, (to an extent) Green and—arguably, despite the above-mentioned affinities with personal idealism—McTaggart. Like personal idealism, absolute idealism sees reality as fundamentally rational, and affirms that nature depends on mind. (Green, for example, can be read as holding that nature exists in space and time and is, therefore, inseparable from consciousness.60) But whereas personal idealists generally insisted on maintaining a certain realism with regard to nature, absolute idealists tended to have a more radical view. For Bradley, nature is an abstraction;61 it is something that consciousness separates out from reality, is thus an appearance and, on his account, is not fully real. Other absolute idealists, like Bosanquet, did not go quite this far. Like Bradley, Bosanquet held that the actual facts of this world are causally sustained by conscious intelligence, that nature can be divided up in different ways, that it makes our immediate conscious world,62 that the character of finite individuality is largely based on human interests, and that experience provides different perspectives on an object.63 Still, Bosanquet holds that mind is certainly not the source of what we call nature, that mind does not make natural objects, and that not only is nature independent of mind, but it actually determines mind (e.g., through the process of evolution). (It is in part for this reason that McTaggart accused Bosanquet of being a materialist.64) How, then are we to understand ultimate reality? One of the principal characteristics of absolute idealism was its dissolution of dualisms; its opposition to the notion of a world of fundamentally independent beings was manifested in its rejection of, for example, a dualism of “individual” and “other” (e.g., society), “nature” and “thought”, the “real” and the “actual” will, transcendence and immanence, and form (appearance) and subject matter (content) in knowledge. As in many of the personal idealists, ultimate reality was described as “the Absolute” which (given the preceding account) was held to be of a psychical nature. The precise description of such an ultimate principle was left often unexplored

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but, in general, one could say that it was that which was entirely without contradiction. For absolute idealism, then, there is—strictly speaking—only one individual (in the Aristotelian sense of a being that which is complete and self-sufficient), and it is the basis of value and the standard of good. The value or goodness of a thing is not determined simply so far as it is desired or “satisfies desire”.65 One can know the existence of this Absolute, many of the idealists held, both negatively and positively—negatively, simply because of the various contradictions in pluralist or “atomist” views, but also positively, through “feeling” (as in Bradley) or by seeing the multiplicity of “associations” or relations among finite individuals, and by understanding how these relations, once recognized or grasped, provided a more concrete and comprehensive account of reality (as in Bosanquet). What is the relation of wholes and parts on such an account? In general, this is explored in the notion of the Absolute as a “concrete universal”—i.e., that which is concrete qua existent, but universal qua comprehensive. All things are in the Absolute, but we may also say that the Absolute is present in and through every existing thing, just as when we say that the life of an organism is in every part of it. Another way of looking at this relation between whole and parts is to see reality as teleological. Involved in the absolute idealist analysis of finite individuality is the claim that, as contradictions are removed, there is a movement towards coherence or the “Absolute”; thus, Bosanquet holds that there is (to use a term employed in his metaphysics) a “nisus [of parts] towards a whole”.66 This “teleology” is not, however, one of individual or explicit purposiveness. For example, as Bosanquet would have it, we can speak of unconscious purpose immanent in nature.67 Even human conscious purposes are, he says, outgrowths of bodily processes which were initially “unconscious”. How are we to understand human beings in relation to this whole? Bradley is, unfortunately, somewhat unclear about the “immanence of the Absolute in finite centres, and of finite centres in the Absolute,” holding that this is all “inexplicable.”68 It seems as if “finite centres” may possess some degree of consciousness, and that human individuals are different only in degree, but not in kind, from other “finite centres”. Thus, while Bradley does not explicitly endorse panpsychism, his views certainly seem open to such a reading.69 Bosanquet’s view is much less ambiguous here.70 In answer to the question “What is the nature of finite individuality?” Bosanquet begins with an analysis of the relation of mind and nature. As we have seen, for Bosanquet, consciousness exists only when physical conditions are suitable for it,71 and it is a latecomer in evolution.72 Not surprisingly, then, Bosanquet is explicitly opposed to panpsychism and (what some take to follow from it) panentheism.73

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Bosanquet’s account of finite individuality—particularly, of the individuality of human persons—is, therefore, a subtle one. He writes that finite individuals are “provisional subjects”,74 but also notes that we “cannot value states of consciousness apart from individuals”.75 Given the account of the Absolute provided above, finite individuals are clearly “incomplete” and are defined in terms of the whole of which they are parts.76 Against Pringle-Pattison, however, Bosanquet repeatedly insists that it is important to focus on lateral, and not just linear identity77—i.e., on “the identity that we share at a time with others rather than over time with ourselves”.78 Yet this does not mean that Bosanquet denies that there is linear identity and—against panpsychism—he certainly sees human beings as having a distinctive and unique role to play in the relation of nature to the Absolute; he speaks of human beings serving as “copulas” between them.79 So, do finite individuals exist in the Absolute? It was Bosanquet, rather than Bradley, who directly confronted the personal idealists here. Bosanquet talks about finite individuals being “distinct” within ultimate being,80 and that an element of negativity or contradictoriness remains in the Absolute.81 (Bradley and Bosanquet differ on this point. Bosanquet seems to hold—apparently contra Bradley—that the Absolute is not entirely supra relational. And while both Bosanquet and Bradley deny the existence of external relations, Bosanquet does not seem to reject the existence of internal relations.) Indeed, the distinction between Bosanquet and the personal idealists seems to be largely one of emphasis rather than one of substance and, where they do differ, it is largely because they disagree over what sorts of beings can be independent and self sufficient—i.e., what “the individual” is. What sense can we make of the notion of God on such an account? While there is an Absolute, there seems to be a broad consensus among the absolute idealists that it cannot properly be called God. Orthodox theistic (e.g., Christian) religious belief would say that there must be a transcendent deity in relations with, but distinct from, finite human consciousness, and that there is a telos to reality in which evil is overcome, harmony established and, arguably, finite consciousness preserved. Such belief would also insist on the role of faith—a commitment on the part of the believer expressing a disposition to act in the world in such a way as to build that harmony and overcome evil and division. But it is clear that much of this is not to be found in an absolute idealist account. Is there a transcendent Deity? William James accused idealists of having adopted a “refined supernaturalism”82—which, he says, preserves religion from the vicissitudes of the natural world, though it “confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole”—but it is clear that the absolute idealists would have taken exception to such a view. To begin with, there is little sense given to the notion of the transcendent. If the transcendent is understood as something “supernatural”—something that is

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not part of reality as it is experienced, but exists separately and independently of it (i.e., “remote from nature and outside it, if also above it”83), it is not at all clear what, if anything, this could be.84 (Of course, if, by “transcendent”, one means only to refer to the highest development of nature at the level of spirit, or to the existence of the spiritual, or to not taking reality simply “wie er geht und steht”,85 Bosanquet would have no difficulty in accepting the notion.) For Bosanquet, “the ideal is given in the real here and here and here… [and this] reality is near us, is not separate and remote”.86 Moreover, for many absolute idealists, whether a God exists makes little difference. Bosanquet referred to the belief in “God in another world” as a “heathen” belief.87 And while, as noted earlier, Bradley’s account of finite consciousness and the Absolute might suggest panpsychism, he is clearly aware of the difficulties of pantheism or panentheism.88 Finally, the issue of the personality of God also does not seem to be particularly important. Like Bradley, Bosanquet says that to attribute “infinity” to a being would deny “every predicate which we attach to personality”;89 there could not be a being with an infinite personality.90 What many may call God and describe as a person cannot be a person at all. If there is a Deity, it is certainly not an infinite or perfect being existing independently of us.91 Still, Bosanquet writes that, “by dropping the notion of a person or of an intelligence, we have only shorn off some distracting accessories from the old problem of faith in God, which still governs life under the new name of faith in the reality of the good”.92 We are left, then, with the Absolute which is, as Bosanquet puts it, “the principle of individuality and value”. It is this comprehensive character of the Absolute that has led many— including Sprigge93—to attribute to certain absolute idealists a rather cavalier attitude towards evil, and to accuse them of promoting moral quietism or complacency or apathy. But this is to misrepresent or misunderstand their views. Absolute idealists acknowledge that there is evil and that evil needs to be overcome. Religion—which is more than morality—supplies a motive and a ground for opposing evil, but it is also the basis for the assurance that evil will be overcome.94 While evil is not part of the Absolute, and while we may have confidence that it will be vanquished, this in no way reduces our duty to engage it. Bosanquet’s insistence on duty—and Bradley’s as well—is not, however, simply a call for obedience to an abstract principle or to one’s station, but a demand for one to overcome the lassitude of one’s finite will and to aspire to what is represented in one’s true or “real will”. Here, then, there is a teleology in religion, and again it is ethical rather than eschatological. When it comes to the principal doctrines of theism and religion, however, absolute idealism is much less settled. Many of the dogmas that constitute a large part of peoples’ particular religious beliefs are, according to absolute idealists such as Bosanquet, simply interpretations of Biblical texts by groups such as

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“the Church” in order to avoid “wild theorizing” by believers.95 Bosanquet asserts that even some of the (chronologically) later New Testament books show “a beginning of theological superstition”96—though he does not explain in what this consists97—and many definitions and distinctions introduced there are “quite foreign to the mind of Christ or Paul”.98 Among the particular doctrines subjected to analysis was life after death. Bradley does not explicitly deny it.99 Nor does Bosanquet;100 indeed, in an aside, he refers to the “eternity of all spirits in God”.101 Nevertheless, he says that “We must clear away from our minds all such ideas as that the kingdom of heaven means a future life in Paradise, that salvation means being saved from eternal punishment, that eternal life means living forever in another world”.102 If called on to explain the notion of immortality, Bosanquet would say that it is the “content of the self”103—i.e., those “interests and affections which carry us beyond our formal and exclusive self”,104 and which are present in “the great achievements of knowledge, of social and super-social morality, of the sense of beauty, and of religion”105—that exists after one’s death; he denies that finite selves are “necessarily eternal or everlasting units”.106 Ideas of future “compensation, rewards and punishments” are, however, “all fancies” which have been “invented”,107 and the notion of “eternity”, he says, is that of a perfect (i.e., a complete) experience, not an endless period of time.108 Bradley, too, is doubtful of the standard conception of an afterlife.109 On this issue, Bradley writes that: “What is wanted for religion is not the mere continuance, in either direction beyond this life, of something which in a sense may be called myself. The main demand of religion is for the assurance that the individual, as one with the Good, has so far conquered death, and that what we call this life with its before and after is not the main reality”.110 Nevertheless, one cannot help but note the importance of religious consciousness in idealists like Edward Caird and Bosanquet, as well as the many references they make to standard religious views: to the notions of justification by faith, dying to live, the Kingdom of God, and the mind of Christ. But while religious consciousness is an important concern of the philosophy of religion, Bosanquet would be sceptical of any God of metaphysics—as would Bradley111—not just because of the what deity involves, but because a metaphysics or an apologetic is quite beside the point. Bradley distinguishes the sphere of philosophy from the sphere of religion112 and, for Bosanquet, philosophical argument—“the theoretical interpretation” of religion—“is not necessary to religion, nor any component of it”; he remarks that “in as far as the religious consciousness at its climax comes to include the vision of all that has value, united in a type of perfection, metaphysic comes to be little more than the theoretical interpretation of it alone”,113 and that “the speculative interpretation and justification of religious faith is quite another matter than the apparently imme-

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diate feeling itself”.114 For Bosanquet, what is important is the “experience of [the divine], not a proof of him”.115 Still, when we look closely at how religious concepts are employed, we see that much of the apologetic or creedal content has disappeared. The orientation is thoroughly “practical” and applied. Bradley writes: “religious faith” or belief is “the identification of my will with a certain object. It essentially is practical and must necessarily be exercised in conduct”.116 “Justification by faith”— “being one in the risen Christ”117—simply means, Bosanquet says, a spiritual unity or a society of believers who together constitute (as it were) the body of Christ. Again, to speak of “the mind of Christ” implies neither a specific creed nor a set of religious dogmas nor even particular faithfulness to the New Testament account of the words of Jesus;118 it can be understood as just “the general will or spirit of united humanity”.119 And when Bosanquet, following Caird, takes the Gospel injunction “He that loseth his life shall find it”120 and combines it with Goethe’s call to “die to live”,121 again we have a purely secular interpretation—that one is to “die” to one’s purely self-interested desires in order to “live” in a more fully human way. Like the personal idealists, for absolute idealists the focus of religion was clearly on practice. What is central for the absolute idealist, then, is religion, not theology. Bosanquet, for example, sees “the universal basis and structure of religion” to be “Wherever a man is so carried beyond himself whether for any other being, or for a cause or for a nation, that his personal fate seems to him as nothing in comparison of the happiness or triumph of the other”.122 The “essentially religious attitude” exists whenever “we find a devotion which makes the finite self seem as nothing, and some reality to which it attaches itself seem as all”.123 Religious belief is, in short, quite distinct from “theism”. We can see, however, why religion matters, if only analytically—for religion is, by definition, “what matters”. (Still, Bosanquet has an answer to the question why such things matter, and it is here, as we have seen, that the notions of the general or real will and self-realization—elements which are at the core of Bosanquet’s theory of moral obligation—are involved.) This description of religion should not lead one to conclude that all religions are on a par. Christianity is, many idealists argued, the most developed form of religion to date. Yet religion is neither the same as, nor tied essentially to, rituals and practices. Neither does it require adherence or assent to a set of propositions or dogmas—and certainly not to a set of propositions focusing on beings or events in the history of a community of believers. And Christianity must itself evolve, so that “man more fully apprehends his true humanity and his oneness with the spirit which is in the world”.124 This apprehension is more and more present as religious belief moves towards its highest or most developed form— what Bosanquet, following Caird, called “Absolute Religion”.125

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5. Sprigge’s Account of Religion Where does Sprigge’s account of religion fit with these idealist accounts? And what might we make of Sprigge’s account of religion? In the preceding outline of personal and absolute idealism, three points bearing on religion came to the fore: the conception of the Absolute and God; issues involving the status of finite individuals and their relations to the Absolute (which includes the matter of panpsychism); and the theme of ethical struggle and concern about evil and suffering. Sprigge addresses all of these points, and more. In the first chapter of The God of Metaphysics, we have a series of definitions, enumerations of criteria, or explanations—of religion126 and of God.127 And in Chapter 9, Sprigge summarizes his case for panpsychism128 and presents his views on ethics and evil.129 Sprigge also rightly notes that for the “God of Metaphysics” to be “God”, it must be something that “mattered religiously”130 or is “religiously relevant”131— though I would suggest that Sprigge never adequately discusses this central issue in a sustained way. What are we to make of Sprigge’s understanding of the Absolute or the Eternal Consciousness? Is it God? Which of the fourteen conditions for Deity that Sprigge enumerates132 would he himself hold? Sprigge’s own account of the Absolute133 is of a “single absolute allembracing experience which includes absolutely everything”; it is an “experience” that “exists” and which can contain other experiences. It is not something that changes over time134; it is “eternally... experiencing something like... our specious present”.135 It is satisfied with itself and, therefore, “good”. Sprigge writes that he leaves it “open” whether it may also be called “God”. But he allows that it is “likely” that there is a core to the Absolute “which perhaps merits the name of ‘God’”,136 and, indeed, he reverts to using the term “God” just a few pages after expressing his hesitations.137 What is curious, however, is that both the notion expressed in the title of this book, and the inclination to equate God and the Absolute, are elements with which the idealisms presented above do, in fact, take issue—and with good reason. For God—particularly a God with a capital “G”—is (in general understanding, at the very least) a personality, and it is by no means clear how an Absolute could have personality, experiences, and the like. This is precisely why both the personal and the absolute idealists, as we have seen above, generally wished to avoid identifying the two—and why (as Sprigge himself notes) Bradley and Bosanquet “may well be right” not to do so.138 Is this Absolute anything towards which one need or might have any concern or faith or commitment? Why “live by” (to use Sprigge’s expression) such a “truth”? Why would anyone “die for” such a principle rather than ignore or “abandon” it? Does Sprigge’s God “matter”? Is it “religiously relevant”?

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Sprigge’s answer seems to be that “emotions of religious devotion towards [the Absolute] are not inappropriate”139—though to call this “religious” devotion seems to be close to question begging, unless he wishes us to understand this to be what he earlier refers to, in the discussion of Spinoza, as the “intellectual love” of God. Sprigge’s Eternal Consciousness is “good”,140 but not, of course, in the sense of moral goodness; rather it is simply a “proper goal of endeavour”.141 He believes that this “reassures” us,142 and adds that “this surely does provide some comfort, if a rather austere one”.143 Such a God is rather austere indeed, and even more austere than the mediaeval model often challenged by process philosophers and theologians. But, more importantly, Sprigge never seems to address how a “belief system” (even accompanied by certain “emotions”) explains or reflects why people should be committed to it or disposed to act on it with great sacrifice144—or why they might possibly change, or even be interested in changing, these commitments (i.e., in conversion). Why, then, does Sprigge consistently return to the term—and the concept of—“God”? It may well be that this seems simply better suited to accompany the notion of an afterlife—a notion that Sprigge is not adverse to.145 But to keep this term, “God”, makes more sense on the model, not of absolute idealists, such as Bradley and Bosanquet, but of personal idealists like Pringle-Pattison. To insist on identifying the Absolute as something religious or as “God” would make sense if it had “significance” or meaning for a person—that it, for example, gave a feeling of safety, or a motive of encouragement, or a guarantee of worth.146 This means, then, that God must matter to selves—to autonomous persons—and this leads Sprigge’s reader to raise another question: Why do finite beings matter? It is unclear whether, on Sprigge’s account, human beings are particularly distinctive or valuable. He does not dwell much on the notion of the self; he more frequently adverts to the presence of “streams of experience”. Such a view fits with his putative radical “egalitarianism”147 about conscious reality. Indeed, the central feature of Sprigge’s analysis of finite being is his panpsychism. For Sprigge, the prospect of an unexperienced and unexperiencing reality is incoherent. It is interesting that neither the personal idealists, nor the absolute idealists, explicitly opted for the position that Sprigge takes. And why might that be? One reason may be that panpsychism does not seem to account for what many take to be fundamental differences in experience or in things, or that it does not have a strong analysis of nature as something that exists independently of consciousness. Why adopt an egalitarian view of streams of experience and of value? Sprigge presents some of Bosanquet’s critique of panpsychism and rejects it,148 though it is not clear that he responds to all of Bosanquet’s concerns. Bosanquet would surely note that some streams of experience are confused (i.e., “bad”),

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some may not have a “proper goal” (to use Sprigge’s term), and some may have a goal only in the sense of having (as Bosanquet expresses it) a “nisus to the whole”. But another reason why idealists might oppose panpsychism—one that Sprigge does not appear to address—is that, for many, a panpsychist view is simply too “individualistic” because it seems to locate reality in finite centres. If Sprigge believes that he can avoid this charge by reminding us of the importance of the relations among these finite centres, we would do well to note that such a view of individuals and the Absolute—i.e., of the network of increasingly complex relations among finite beings in the Absolute—is close to that described above by Bosanquet.149 A further reason that personal and absolute idealists alike may have had for avoiding panpsychism are its implications for the phenomena of evil and suffering. For Sprigge, of course, the presence of evil and suffering are important issues; indeed, he describes himself as an “ethical hedonist”.150 What reason, then, does Sprigge give us to combat evil and to prevent or reduce suffering? What is the motive to do “good”? For Sprigge, it seems that this is just a given for beings like ourselves—that, as ethical hedonists, we just do good—and when we fail to do our best, it is either because we think “the experiences of others are somewhat less real than our own”,151 or because “we are not in a position to know what the feelings of others are as well as we know our own”.152 But if we can overcome these limitations—which Sprigge believes we can, provided we recognize that “we all belong within one Absolute consciousness”153—we will. Sprigge recognises that adopting such a universal hedonism or utilitarianism may surprise his reader, and he suspects that he knows why many absolute idealists were opposed to it—sc., that pleasure was closely associated with “momentary titillations” and thus not worthy as an ethical end.154 But Sprigge appears not to acknowledge another key idealist objection, and that is that such a view locates the source of value in the satisfaction of desire in finite beings, and so—again—is fundamentally an individualist account. Besides, such a utilitarian view simply fails to provide an adequate explanation of why we should fight evil or why we should be concerned with the good (conceived of as pleasure). Here, Sprigge would have done better to turn to Plato and Aristotle, as did the British idealists, who held that pleasure is a good, but not a fundamental good. There are good pleasures and bad pleasures and, as Bosanquet writes, “the test is the satisfaction of our criticised desires”.155 Thus, for an answer to the question of why doing evil or good matters, Bosanquet would say that we need refer to the value of “self-realization” which draws its ethical force from the claim that it is demanded by our “real” or the “general will”. Sprigge may well be rather chary of this response; he describes the general will as a “morally and metaphysically dubious notion”156 and thinks that “self-realization… must not take on too com-

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petitive a form”157—but one does not find a clear or sustained argument for these assertions. Sprigge not only distances himself from many of the absolute idealists on certain issues in ethics, but he is particularly critical of Bosanquet. His reasons for this reaction are, however, unclear or undeveloped. They certainly do not seem to be directed to the metaphysical basis of Bosanquet’s views on the Absolute, on individuality, or even on religion. Rather, his objections appear to be somewhat moralistic—reactions to some of the social and public policies advocated by Bosanquet and his wife, Helen. Sprigge disapproves of Bosanquet’s views as “patronizing”,158 perhaps typical of “complacent Victorians”,159 who had a too “tough attitude”160 or were “callous and insensitive”161 towards suffering. Sprigge also seems to see the practical proposals of the Bosanquets as verging on the hypocritical, for (Sprigge remarks) how could opposition to certain kinds of social welfare come “from a couple living on inherited money”?162 One does not know what to do with these remarks. Are such criticisms justified? Are the views that Sprigge finds objectionable rooted in the principles of Bosanquet’s idealist ethics and metaphysics? Are Bosanquet’s arguments for his social and public policies plausible? Or did Bosanquet simply argue poorly, particularly on matters of applied ethics? Such questions are surely worth pressing, should Sprigge find Bosanquet’s conclusions unpleasant. But Sprigge does not go into these issues. There are, however, other, more substantive concerns that Sprigge raises against Bosanquet’s views. Sprigge fears that Bosanquet wishes to turn religious feeling into a loyalty towards the state,163 that his model of religion is elitist (as it focuses on “high culture”), and that he is too contented with the world as it is, viewing the world through “Panglossian spectacles”.164 Moreover, Sprigge takes particular umbrage at what he takes to be Bosanquet’s basic claim about evil (and, presumably, Bosanquet’s response to it)—that “the standard examples of evil are really examples of something good”.165 Such a critique is not new; one finds it in some of Bosanquet’s neo-liberal contemporaries, such as J. A. Hobson. It is, however, surprising to see it coming from a professed absolute idealist. Indeed, Sprigge’s concerns here may place him close to the kind of position marked out by personal idealism, which was also concerned about the struggle against evil in the world and the putative absolute idealist response to it. But can these criticisms stand? Is there any evidence that Bosanquet wishes to transmute religious feeling to loyalty to the nation state? Did he not take seriously enough the reality of suffering and evil? While Bosanquet clearly does see the state as “the guardian of a whole moral world”,166 he unambiguously insists that there is “no distinction of means and end as between Individuals and Society”.167 It may also be worth reminding ourselves that Bosanquet’s description of religion asserts that, when one fails in one’s dedication to it, one is “excom-

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municated from humanity”—not from the state. Sprigge also appears to gloss over the fact that Bosanquet had a much closer contact with evil and suffering than do many idealists today. Bosanquet’s work with the Charity Organisation Society (COS) and the Settlement movement, and his wife’s service on the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905-1909), would have given him a very detailed knowledge of poverty and its effects in Britain. As for his knowledge of war and suffering, Bosanquet’s brother, Day, was an Admiral in the Royal Navy; one of Bosanquet’s nephews was invalided in the first world war,168 and he had the experience of his wife’s illness during the period of her service on the Poor Law Commission and of his own declining health from 1908. Bosanquet may not have reacted to evil and suffering as Sprigge does. Perhaps he lacked (as Sprigge implies) compassion.169 Or perhaps he had a good empirical basis for holding that doing good required avoiding being a do-gooder. But the accusation that he was complacent about evil is clearly unfounded in light of what Bosanquet wrote and did. He certainly did not deny that there was evil, though he did deny that it was “absolute” or “real” (in the sense of an ultimate principle). But this is not far from the orthodox theist who acknowledges the reality of evil, but has the confidence that it will someday be vanquished. Bosanquet’s involvement with adult education and with the COS, his injunctions to build “the Kingdom of God on earth”, and his call that evil “cries out to be overcome”,170 and so on, would suggest, at the very least, that he took evil rather seriously.171 Sprigge is right to insist that an idealist account of religion must address the issues of the nature of evil and wickedness and of the moral response to suffering. If absolute idealists or personal idealists have failed in these tasks, one must ask whether it is a consequence of their analysis of the Absolute, or whether it is due to an inconsistency or error in discerning the implications of their positions. More to the point, however, is whether we can have a better account of evil or of ethical struggle on a panpsychist account. Personal idealists, such as PringlePattison, think not, and absolute idealists such as Bosanquet would agree, insisting that panpsychists undervalue the role and value of human persons, and the place of self-realization.172

6. Core Elements of an Idealist Philosophy of Religion What can we conclude from the preceding account of idealist theories or philosophies of religion? In general, an idealist philosophy of religion focuses on practice and not dogma or theology. But this is no surprise, since the descriptive content of religion in personal and absolute idealism is rather limited. As we have seen, for some idealists, many key religious doctrines—e.g., the reality of a personal God, the existence of an afterlife, and the divinity of Jesus173—were, at best, unimportant and, more likely, philosophically incoherent. How far this was

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the direct product of philosophical reflection on religion, and how far it may have been influenced by more personal considerations, are matters that scholars might well consider. It is worth noting that many British idealists were raised in Evangelical households, where the distinction of practice from dogma and creeds was a given, and where the emphasis on works was key to faith—and so there would likely be little substantive or worrisome conflict between religious convictions and philosophical views on religion. What, then, is the core of an idealist philosophy or theory of religion? There are, I think, nine elements that can be discerned from the accounts presented above. (i) Religion is social and focuses on life in community. This is implied in the very etymology of religion as religare, that is, “to bind”. Frequently, “religion” is taken to involve the building of “the kingdom of God on earth”—focusing on the immanent and the “here and now”, rather than on the “hereafter”. It also implies a community—a community of believers—and so would seem to preclude a purely individual or private activity. (ii) Religion is historical; it is not simply given, but is a product of development or evolution. When it comes to the doctrines and dogmas of particular religious traditions, it is important to focus on the context in which their seminal texts were written. To read the scriptures, for example, one must engage in hermeneutics, and learn to interpret them. (iii) Along with practice, what is central to religion is religious experience or religious consciousness. As noted earlier, dogma or theology is comparatively unimportant. But this is not to imply that religion is something non-rational or unreasonable. For the evolution of religion—or, more precisely, of religious consciousness—is, in part, a product of rational criticism. (iv) Religion and religious consciousness are not only evolving, but are teleological. As we have seen, there is a teleology in nature that continues into human action. This teleology is claimed to be something rational and, with regard to persons, involves self-realization. Religion and religious consciousness similarly involve an elimination of contradiction and a move towards greater coherence and, so, are teleological as well. Some have even seen this process as deterministic.174 (v) Religion is concerned with meaning—but not just in the sense of cognitive meaning. Religion must be something that has significance for the believer. This is expressed in the various definitions of religion—that it is “what matters” or what one “would rather die for than abandon”. (vi) An idealist philosophy of religion insists that—to the extent that we can distinguish them—mind or spirit is (ontologically) superior to the material. (vii) Although idealist theories of religion refer to the Absolute, they are nevertheless also attentive to particulars—i.e., human agents and their engagement

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with the challenges in life (such as those posed by evil and suffering)—as well as their responses to them. (viii) Religion has a number of functions175—but, fundamentally, it is “that which carries us beyond our finite selves”, thereby providing a standard of value and of ethical behaviour. (ix) Religion matters because it provides a principle of explanation, of individuality, and of value—and, presumably, therefore explains why one might engage in ethical struggle, self-realization, and even self-sacrifice. An idealist philosophy of religion is distinctively idealist, then, because of how it understands the relations of finite things to one another and to the Absolute—that is, within consciousness—because of the way in which ultimate principles are immanent in the world, and because it establishes a principle of explanation and of value that is open to all experience—to the ethical, religious, aesthetic, and not just the empirical. But an idealist philosophy of religion also professes to be a philosophy of religion—not just a moral philosophy. This is not, of course, because it refers to the doctrines and dogmas of any creedal religion—since it does not—but because it focuses on deals with the highest, most comprehensive, and most fundamental experiences, and with what is radically significant to beings like us. Given that there are many different currents of idealism, however, some might argue that it is more appropriate to speak of idealist philosophies of religion rather an idealist philosophy of religion. This would require focusing instead on some of the particular approaches to religion taken not only by personal and absolutist idealists, but also by others who may be difficult to classify, such as McTaggart. Nevertheless, there is much that is shared by these different views, and the elements presented above show that there are a number of common features running through various idealist accounts that bear on religion.

7. Some Final Remarks Still, is an idealist philosophy of religion, as described above, useful or illuminating or satisfying? The principal concern many have had with idealist accounts is that, in relation to religious belief and practice, they seem rather peculiar and thin. For, despite the features outlined in the preceding sections, there seems to be little that would distinguish them from a purely normative, ethical approach to life.176 Idealist accounts appear to exclude or marginalize elements of both metaphysics and doctrines that are central to many religious traditions. In The God of Metaphysics, Sprigge rightly asks, then, “Do [idealist metaphysical systems] lend support to any kind of genuinely religious outlook at all?”.177 And the thesis of his book is, presumably, that at least his can. Yet, as we have seen, while some personal idealists, such as Pringle-Pattison, are open

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to responding to this challenge, absolute idealists, such as Bosanquet and Bradley, appear to avoid it altogether. Indeed, unless one takes the notion of “religion” very thinly indeed, there is little evidence that idealism succeeds in defending a distinctively religious outlook. If religion is to be a platform for action, and able to explain (the reasonableness of) one’s commitments up to the point of self-sacrifice, then we need to show how to move from a metaphysical “is” to an ethical “ought”. As we have seen, Bosanquet and Bradley claim that this motive might be found in experience, but not in metaphysics or philosophical proof.178 Is a “God of Metaphysics” or an Idealist god a god in any significant sense? For Bosanquet and Bradley, the answer seems to be clearly in the negative—and attempts to save God as a finite or an infinite personality within an idealist metaphysics (for example, by Pringle-Pattison or by other personal idealists) seem to have failed. Of course, Bosanquet would say that we do not need a God to explain religious consciousness or the religious sense. But again, what Bosanquet means by religion is certainly narrower than, and very distant from, what most theists would require. And what is provided seems to be, as such, rather unhelpful in having us understand religions today. Again, it is not clear how far, if at all, Sprigge’s “God” or Absolute—or any idealist account of religion—would help address current debates concerning the relation of science and religion, or concerning the phenomenon of religious experience. For it is difficult to say how religion, on the idealist model, could ever engage the sciences, other than merely to claim that empirical science does not adequately account for all of experience. On issues of cosmology, or creation, or the nature and destiny of human beings, idealist accounts of religion seem to have little to contribute that would affect the conclusions of the scientist. All these concerns do not, of course, refute idealist analyses of religion as philosophies, and Sprigge’s many thoughtful and sustained reflections on religion merit careful study. The preceding concerns do, however, require one to press the question of how far these analyses are, in fact, relevant or helpful in understanding religion, religious traditions, or the concerns of believers. Idealist philosophies of religion do bear on and illuminate issues in ethics, politics, and aesthetics; if we review the various core elements of an idealist philosophy of religion, we can readily see that it has a valuable contribution to make. But even so, any claim that it is in the philosophy of religion—rather than, for example, in the logic—that we can find the genius or essence of idealism (as Muirhead suggests in the remark cited at the beginning of this paper), requires more argument than has been presented to date.

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Notes 1. Among Sprigge’s contributions, one might note: “Ideal Immortality”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 10, 1972, pp. 219-236; “Refined and Crass Supernaturalism”, in M. McGhee (ed.), Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 105-125; “Bradley and Christianity”, Bradley Studies, 1, 1995, pp. 69-85; “Pantheism”, Monist, 80, 1997, pp. 191-217; “Is Spinozism a Religion?”, Studia Spinozana, 11, 1995, pp. 137-162; “The God of the Philosophers”, Studies in World Christianity, 4, 1998, pp. 149172; “The Mind of Spinoza’s God”, Iyyun: Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, 50, 2001, pp. 253-272. 2. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 3. Ibid., p. 529, emphasis mine. 4. Ibid., p. 3, emphasis mine. 5. J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), p. 197; see A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 5. 6. On the use of the term “speculative philosophy” to replace “idealism”, see B. Bosanquet, “Realism and Metaphysic”, Philosophical Review, 26, 1917, pp. 4-15, reprinted in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, ed. W. Sweet (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003), Vol. 1, pp. 151-162. But see Bosanquet’s comments in “7 + 5 = 12”, Philosophical Review, 31, 1922, pp. 593-598. 7. See, for example, T. H. Green, quoted in A. S. Pringle-Pattison’s “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, Mind, 28, 1919, pp. 1-18, at p. 3. 8. R. B. Perry, “The Ego-Centric Predicament”, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7, 1910, pp. 5-14. 9. In literature, for example, we have the work of T. Carlyle and S. T. Coleridge. For a discussion of the important contributions here, see A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, op. cit., pp. 19ff. and K. Willis, “The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain, 1830-1900”, Victorian Studies, 32, 1988, pp. 85-111. 10. See, for example, D. Cupitt’s The Leap of Reason (London: Sheldon Press, 1976) and Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1980). 11. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 9. 12. B. Bosanquet, “Religion (Philosophy of)”, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. J. M. Baldwin (New York: Macmillan, 1901-1905), reprinted in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Social Policy, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 33; see also Selected Essays, in The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, ed. W. Sweet (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1999), Vol. 1, p. 33. 13. B. P. Bowne, Personalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908); G. H. Howison, The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (New York: Macmillan, 1901). See also Howison’s contribution in The Conception of God by J. Royce et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1897) and “In the Matter of Personal Idealism”, Mind, 12, 1903, pp. 225-234. Interestingly McTaggart reviewed both Howison’s The Limits of Evolution for Mind, 11, 1902, pp. 383-389, and Sturt’s Personal

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Idealism—which was influenced by James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism—for the International Journal of Ethics, 13, 1903, pp. 246-251. Other period authors who employed the term are W. R. Boyce Gibson, A Philosophical Introduction to Ethics: an advocacy of the spiritual principle in ethics from the point of view of personal idealism (1904), and W. R. Inge, Personal Idealism and Mysticism (1906). For a recent study of the school and the term, see J. O. Bengtsson, The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 14. In R. Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, tr. J. W. Harvey, T. E. Jessop, H. Stuart, ed. J. H. Muirhead (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 211; 383. 15. Possibly also C. C. J. Webb, who, Sell believes, saw the Absolute to be God (see A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, op. cit., p. 119). 16. H. Rashdall, “The Religious Philosophy of Professor Pringle-Pattison”, Mind, 27, 1918, pp. 261-283 and A. S. Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, Mind, 28, 1919, pp. 1-18. 17. See, e.g., H. Rashdall and A. Seth Pringle-Pattison’s views on McTaggart’s Some Dogmas of Religion. See the reviews by Pringle-Pattison in The Hibbert Journal, 5, 1906-7, pp. 195-204, and by Rashdall in Mind, 15, 1906, pp. 534-46, reprinted in Early Responses to British Idealism, ed. W. Sweet (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2004), Vol. 3, pp. 227-292. 18. Metz attributes this to many of these figures being more influenced by R. H. Lotze than by Hegel; R. Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, op. cit., p. 211. 19. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, Two Lectures on Theism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), p. 19. 20. See for example his comment that “the mind realizes the system of the whole and its own oneness with God”, in A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 333. 21. See A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., pp. 10-11; see also Supplementary Note E: “God and the Absolute”, in The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 383. 22. Here, the personal idealists saw themselves as inheriting some of the insights of the earlier idealist tradition. T. H. Green certainly seems to have thought that finite individuals had an ultimate value, and—despite his criticisms of Green—Pringle-Pattison seems to follow Green here. 23. W. Sweet, “Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison”, in Early Responses to British Idealism, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 147. 24. See A. Seth Pringle-Pattison’s contribution to the symposium on “Do finite individuals possess a substantive or an adjectival mode of being?”, in Life and Finite Individuality, ed. H. W. Carr, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. Vol. 1, 1918, pp. 75-194, at p. 106 (reprinted from Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XVIII, 1917-1918). See The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 282; see also W. Mander, “Life and Finite Individuality: The Bosanquet/Pringle-Pattison Debate”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13, 2005, pp. 111-130, at p. 122 and p. 127. 25. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., p. 12.

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26. See A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 80; cf. McTaggart’s review of The Idea of Immortality, reprinted in Early Responses to British Idealism, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 213. 27. A. S. Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., p. 6. 28. See J. M. E. McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence, Vol. II, ed. C. D. Broad (Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 479. See R. Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, op. cit., p. 378. 29. See B. Bosanquet’s “Review of The Idea of God”, in Early Responses to British Idealism, op. cit., p. 199; cf. Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Public Policy, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 65. 30. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., p. 6. 31. Ibid., p. 7. 32. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 100. 33. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., p. 7; cf. The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 70. 34. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 100; see also the discussion by A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, op. cit., p. 216. 35. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison writes: “it is none the less true that each Self is a unique existence, which is perfectly impervious, if I may so speak, to other selves impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue. The self, accordingly, resists invasion”; Hegelianism and Personality (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1887), p. 216. But see his The Idea of God, op. cit., note 3, pp. 389-90. 36. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 288. “It is of the very nature of a self that it thinks and acts and views the world from its own centre: each of us, as it has been said, dichotomizes the universe in a different place. No supposed result of speculative theory can override a certainty based on direct experience—the certainty, namely, that it is we who act and we who think”. 37. A. Seth Pringle Pattison, Life and Finite Individuality, op. cit., p. 104. See also his “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., note at p. 11. 38. See B. Bosanquet’s review of The Idea of God, Mind, 26, 1917, pp. 474-481 at p. 479, reprinted in Early Responses to British Idealism, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 202. Whether McTaggart himself was a “true pluralist” has been challenged. See J. Oman, “Review of The Idea of God”, in Early Responses to British Idealism, op. cit., Vol. 3. p. 209. 39. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 12. 40. Ibid., p. 302. 41. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., p. 11. 42. “It is impossible to get away from the conception of a natura rerum, whether we call it Nature, the Absolute, or God”; A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 155. 43. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., p. 9. 44. Ibid., pp. 13, 11.

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45. Ibid., p. 14. 46. Ibid., p. 11. 47. See A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, op. cit., p. 121. 48. In his “Personality, Human and Divine”, in H. Sturt (ed.), Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford (New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 392. 49. See A. Seth Pringle-Pattison’s discussion in “The Idea of God: A Reply to some Criticisms”, op. cit., pp. 15 and 17. 50. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 290. 51. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison writes: “We may believe in the ultimately constraining power of the Good, but a moral being cannot be commandeered; he must be persuaded, and the process may be long. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me.’ Even the divine importunity will not force an entrance”; The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 292. 52. See on this point, A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, op. cit., pp. 215-219. 53. J. Laird writes: “I was talking to Pringle-Pattison about his book on Immortality, and was assuming that it, the first series in a Gifford Lectureship, would be succeeded by a second series on the same theme. ‘You mean a metaphysical defence like McTaggart’s’ (smiling). ‘That is the last thing I would ever do.’ (Slowly and half-confidentially.) ‘Besides, Immortality is an unpleasant subject.’; J. Laird, “Review of The Balfour Lectures on Realism by A. Seth Pringle-Pattison”, Mind, 43, 1934, pp. 395-399, at p. 399. 54. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Philosophical Radicals (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1907), p. 289; see also The Development from Kant to Hegel: With Chapters on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882), p. 166. 55. See B. Bosanquet’s review of The Idea of God, in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Public Policy, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 70. 56. But see the remarks in Lecture 20: “no God, or Absolute, existing in solitary bliss and perfection, but a God who lives in the perpetual giving of himself, who shares the life of his finite creatures, bearing in and with them the whole burden of their finitude, their sinful wanderings and sorrows, and the suffering without which they cannot be made perfect.” (A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, op. cit., p. 411); “the eternal Redeemer of the world. This perpetual process is the very life of God, in which, besides the effort and the pain, He tastes, we must believe, the joy of victory won” (ibid., pp. 411-412). 57. See, for example, J. McKenzie at Elphinstone College in Bombay, A. G. Hogg at Madras Christian College, and W. S. Urquhart at the Scottish Churches College in Calcutta. 58. For a general discussion of Bradley’s views on religion, see, in addition to Sprigge’s article (cited at note 1), W. Mander’s “Bradley’s Philosophy of Religion”, Religious Studies, 31, 1995, pp. 285-301. 59. See his articles “Religion (philosophy of)”, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, op. cit.; “The Future of Religious Observance”, pp. 1-26; “Some Thoughts on the Transition from Paganism to Christianity”, pp. 27-62; “The Civilisation of Christendom”, pp. 63-99; “Old Problems under New Names”, pp. 100-126; “Are We Agnostic?”, pp. 127-159, The

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Civilization of Christendom and Other Studies (London: Sonnenschein, 1889); “How to Read the New Testament”, Essays and Addresses, 2nd edn. (London: Sonnenschein, 1891), pp. 131161; “The Evolution of Religion”, International Journal of Ethics, 5, 1895, pp. 432-444; “The Permanent Meaning of the Argument from Design”, “On the True Conception of Another World”, and “The Kingdom of God on Earth”, Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, eds. J. H. Muirhead and R. C. Bosanquet (London: Macmillan, 1927), his Gifford Lectures—The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912) and The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan, 1913), and What Religion Is (London: Macmillan, 1920). Some additional information is to be found in Bosanquet’s exchange of letters with C. C. J. Webb, recorded in Bernard Bosanquet and his Friends, ed. J. H. Muirhead (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935), pp. 237-247. 60. See the first 80 pages of T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A. C. Bradley (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1883; 5th edn., with a preface by E. Caird, 1929). 61. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 9th impression, corrected (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 236, 250. 62. B. Bosanquet, Science and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 324. 63. B. Bosanquet, The Essentials of Logic: Being Ten Lectures On Judgment and Inference (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897), p. 18. 64. J. M. E. McTaggart writes: “Almost every word that Dr. Bosanquet has written about the relations of Mind and Matter in this lecture might have been written by a complete Materialist”; “Review of The Principle of Individuality and Value”, Mind, 21, 1912, pp. 416-427, at p. 422. 65. See W. Sweet, Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 18. 66. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., p. xx. 67. See B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 154. 68. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), p. 246. 69. See F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, op. cit., pp. 239-240 and 468. 70. Though see the discussion in W. Mander, “Life and Finite Individuality”, op. cit. 71. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., p. 189. 72. Ibid., p. 157. 73. François Houang mistakenly sees Bosanquet as close to pantheism (De l’humanisme a l’absolutisme (Paris: Vrin, 1954), pp. 116-117); see Bosanquet’s own views on this in The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., pp. 82, 362-363. For more details on the issue of panpsychism, see my discussion in “F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet”, in J. Bradley (ed.), Philosophy after F.H. Bradley (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996), pp. 31-56, at p. 47 and in “‘Absolute Idealism’ and Finite Individuality”, Indian Philosophical Quarterly, 24, 1997, pp. 431-462. 74. B. Bosanquet, Science and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 2; Life and Finite Individuality, op. cit., p. 83. 75. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., p. 307.

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76. This is also reflected, for example, in Bosanquet’s emphasis on the notion of the “position” or station of a thing. 77. “The answer lies in the recognition of lateral as well as linear identity”. For a discussion of this, see R. E. Stedman, “An Examination of Bosanquet’s Doctrine of SelfTranscendence (II.)”, Mind, 40, 1931, pp. 297-309. 78. W. Mander, “Life and Finite Individuality”, op. cit., p. 120. 79. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., p. 321. 80. B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., pp. 282, 287. 81. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., pp. 232-233. 82. See the Postscript to W. James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902). See also J. H. Muirhead’s “Review of The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study of Human Nature”, International Journal of Ethics, 13, 1903, pp. 236246. 83. B. Bosanquet, “The Evolution of Religion”, op. cit., p. 443, reprinted in Bernard Bosanquet: Essays in Philosophy and Public Policy, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 26. 84. See F. H. Bradley’s essay “On God and the Absolute”, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., pp. 428-459. 85. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., p. 269; See B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 11. 86. B. Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom, op. cit., p. 149. 87. Ibid., p. 82. 88. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, op. cit., p. 551, but see Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., pp. 436-437. 89. B. Bosanquet, “On the True Conception of Another World”, op. cit., p. 325; cf. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., p. 437. 90. In a letter to C. C. J. Webb (20 April 1919; J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Bernard Bosanquet and his Friends, op. cit., p. 212; see A. P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, op. cit., p. 145). Bosanquet wrote: “Surely personal intercourse must be with what is one among others and ultimate reality must be what is all-inclusive”. Sell discusses this issue on pp. 119-120 and 144ff. 91. See F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., pp. 428-430. 92. B. Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom, op. cit., p. 115. 93. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 330. 94. See B. Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 96-97, 174-175. 95. B. Bosanquet, “How to Read the New Testament”, op. cit., p. 157. 96. Ibid., p. 153. 97. Perhaps these “superstitions” are those beliefs which, as Bradley puts it, focus on one’s “fears of the old savage spirit-world, with all its terror and all its cruelty”. See F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., p. 440.

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98. B. Bosanquet, “How to Read the New Testament”, op. cit., p. 157. 99. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., p. 438. 100. That Bosanquet is at least agnostic with regard to the existence of an afterlife is clear from his denial that an argument a contingentia mundi could ever “assure us of a new and disconnected experience, such as ‘Heaven’” (The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit. p. xxx). Similarly, Bosanquet understands the real value in an event such as “the Resurrection” as “not the recalling of a dead organism to life, but the elevation of an animal soul into membership of the supra-sensuous or spiritual world”. See The Civilization of Christendom, op. cit., p. 143. 101. B. Bosanquet, Life and Finite Individuality, op. cit., p. 102. 102. B. Bosanquet, “How to Read the New Testament”, op. cit., pp. 142-143. See also his “The Kingdom of God on Earth”, op. cit., pp. 338-339, 345, 350-351. For Bosanquet, “the Kingdom of God” is “the Kingdom of God on earth”—“the society of human beings who have a common life and are working for a common social good” (ibid., p. 343). 103. See B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 287. 104. Ibid., p. 288. 105. B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, op. cit., p. 378; see p. 270. 106. B. Bosanquet, Life and Finite Individuality, op. cit., p. 87. 107. B. Bosanquet, “The Kingdom of God on Earth”, op. cit., p. 338. Bosanquet describes the traditional Christian view of religious belief as being just a set of “neo-Platonic or mediaeval doctrines” and “dead logomancies that can have no possible value for life or conduct” (“On the True Conception of Another World”, op. cit., p. 329), and that “much in the Christianity of many churches is no longer intelligible to us” (The Civilization of Christendom, op. cit., p. 71). 108. B. Bosanquet, “Religion (philosophy of)”, op. cit., p. 35; see What Religion Is, op. cit., pp. 11-12. 109. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., p. 438. 110. Ibid. 111. “I cannot believe that a general remedy for our disease is to be found in the study of metaphysics” (ibid., p. 444). 112. See W. Mander, “Bradley’s Philosophy of Religion”, op. cit., p. 289. See also B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 256: “Religion... does not need to appeal to facts of separate being, or to endeavour to demonstrate them.” 113. See B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 229. 114. B. Bosanquet, “Religion (philosophy of)”, op. cit., p. 34. 115. See B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 256. 116. F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., p. 24. It is “more a matter of conduct than belief” (ibid., p. 428). 117. B. Bosanquet, “How to Read the New Testament”, op. cit., p. 151. 118. Indeed, B. Bosanquet writes that “Jesus may have had some ideas which we must pronounce quite unreasonable” (“How to Read the New Testament”, op. cit., p. 142) and that,

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given his “warnings against worldliness”, “Jesus had something to learn from Pericles” about the “life of dutiful citizenship” (ibid., p. 146). 119. B. Bosanquet, The Civilization of Christendom, op. cit., p. 95. 120. B. Bosanquet, “How to Read the New Testament”, op. cit., p. 144. Once again, Bosanquet is alluding to the Christian tradition for an illustration of a general point about religion. See Mt 10:39, 16:35, and some four other places in the Gospels. 121. This quotation and this theme recur throughout Bosanquet’s work. See also, for example, Some Suggestions in Ethics, op. cit., p. 161. 122. B. Bosanquet, What Religion Is, op. cit., p. 5. 123. B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 235. Recall his encyclopedia entry on “Philosophy of Religion”, cited earlier: that religion is “that set of objects, habits, and convictions, whatever it might prove to be, which [one] would rather die for than abandon, or at least would feel himself excommunicated from humanity if he did abandon.” 124. B. Bosanquet, “The Evolution of Religion”, op. cit., p. 444; see E. Caird, The Evolution of Religion (Gifford lectures 1890/1891-1891/1892), 2 Vols. (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1893). 125. Ibid., pp. 442ff. 126. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., pp. 9-11. Sprigge remarks “no one denies that Buddhism is a religion” (ibid., p. 9)—although, in fact, many Buddhists would. (If I might be anecdotal, I raised just this question with the Master of Studies at a Buddhist monastery in Haein-sa, Korea in June 2006; he replied that it was not a religion.) The general adequacy of Sprigge’s definition of religion will be discussed below. 127. Ibid., pp. 7-8. 128. Ibid., pp. 483-486. 129. Ibid., pp. 513-521. 130. Ibid., p. 3. 131. Ibid., p. 12. 132. Ibid., p. 8. 133. Ibid., pp. 486ff. 134. Ibid., p. 526. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., p. 487. 137. Ibid., p. 498. 138. Ibid., p. 7. 139. Ibid., p. 522. 140. Ibid., p. 527. 141. Ibid., p. 513. 142. Ibid., p. 529.

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143. Ibid., p. 527. 144. Sprigge does make one brief comment about how he would justify self sacrifice, but it is at best highly tentative (ibid., p. 515) (See his earlier mentions of the term on pp. 213, 263, 266, 326; the term seems not to be included in his Index.) 145. Ibid., p. 528. 146. Ibid., p. 11. 147. Ibid., p. 279. 148. Ibid., pp. 316-317. 149. “If I possessed myself entirely, I should be the Absolute”; B. Bosanquet, Life and Finite Individuality, op. cit., p. 88. 150. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 513. 151. Ibid., p. 514. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid., pp. 514-515. 154. Ibid., p. 516. 155. See B. Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, op. cit., p. 221, emphasis mine. 156. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 285. 157. Ibid., p. 517. 158. Ibid., p. 279. 159. Ibid., p. 282. 160. Ibid., p. 343. 161. Ibid., p. 285. 162. Ibid., p. 349. 163. Ibid., p. 339. 164. Ibid., p. 346. 165. Ibid., p. 519. 166. B. Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State and Related Essays by Bernard Bosanquet, eds. W. Sweet and G. F. Gaus (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2001), p. 286. 167. Ibid., p. 178. Bosanquet replies, this view ignores the interdependency between them and that the individual and society constitute “a single web of content” so that, strictly speaking, neither is the means to the other (ibid., p. 177). For a more complete discussion, see Chapter 4 of my Idealism and Rights (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997). 168. See J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Bernard Bosanquet and his Friends, op. cit., pp. 163-164. 169. Though whether this is a failure in one’s philosophy, or a failure at all, is a moot point. One might also note Bosanquet’s remark on the “want of love and compassion” in classical Greek thought (The Philosophical Theory of the State, op. cit., pp. 281-282).

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170. B. Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics, op. cit., p. 96. Bosanquet’s point is that evil is a fact of finite reality, but that one must seek to overcome it—as indeed, one has the confidence that it can, since it is not “absolutely real” (ibid., p. 96). 171. “Time, along with pain and evil, I certainly have held throughout to be as real as the finite world”. See “Idealism and the Reality of Time”, Essays in Philosophy and Public Policy, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 191-198. 172. For some remarks on this issue, see Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 517. 173. One is reminded of the remark of Henry Jones who, when asked whether he denied the divinity of Jesus, is said to have replied that he was “not prepared to deny the divinity of any man”. 174. See D. M. MacKinnon, “Some Aspects of the Treatment of Christianity by the British Idealists”, Religious Studies, 20, 1984, pp. 133-144, at p. 139. 175. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., pp. 525-526. 176. B. Bosanquet describes Sittlichkeit as “a halfway house to Religion” and as “almost equivalent to a form of religion”; see J. H. Muirhead (ed.), Bernard Bosanquet and his Friends, op. cit., pp. 238 and 241. 177. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 9. 178. Bradley writes: “a religious belief founded otherwise than on metaphysics, and a metaphysics able in some way to justify that creed, seem to me what is required to fulfil our wishes” (Essays on Truth and Reality, op. cit., pp. 446-447, emphasis mine). For Bosanquet “the speculative interpretation and justification of religious faith is quite another matter than the apparently immediate feeling itself”. See “Religion (philosophy of)”, op. cit., p. 34.

A Leibnizian God of Metaphysics?1 Pauline Phemister

1. Conditions for Religion In The God of Metaphysics, Sprigge examines the metaphysical systems of an impressive array of idealists, Spinoza, Hegel, Green, Bosanquet, Royce, process philosophers, Whitehead and Hartshorne, and his own pantheistic idealism, seeking in each case to determine whether and to what extent, the God or the Absolute found in their works might also be the subject of religious belief and the basis of a religion. He understands “religion” in a broad sense as embracing established, publicly recognised theistic religions, such as Judaism or Christianity, as well as apparently non-theistic religions such as Buddhism and religious beliefs and practices of a more private nature that may be expressed only within what he calls a “personal”, as opposed to a communally organised, religion. While recognising that in some instances, philosophers, himself included, have managed to incorporate their own metaphysical convictions within a particular organised religion, Sprigge believes that even in these cases, the person who grounds his religious beliefs in metaphysics is more than likely to hold even socially-established religious convictions in a very personalised form. Thus, the declared aim of The God of Metaphysics is, first and foremost, to determine “the religious implications of these metaphysical systems as possible personal religions”.2 At the outset, Sprigge lists certain key conditions which must be satisfied for a system of belief and practice to count as a religion.3 For the God of metaphysics to have religious significance within a good personal religion, belief in such a God must be essential to the fulfillment of five conditions. The religion must: (i) be regarded as true by its followers and affect the way in which its adherents live their lives; (ii) be “intrinsically associated with emotions which can be called “religious”, interpreted as “directed towards the nature of things in general” and as “forming a spiritual whole” that cannot be completely described empirically or scientifically; (iii) offer a system of moral precepts which the belief system and emotions encourage its adherents to live by; (iv) offer the hope of “some kind of salvation”; and (v) promote ethically desirable behaviour. Sprigge details eight further points, outlining the human benefits believed to arise from religious adherence, whether personal or communal. Religion is thought to: (a) provide an “eternal object of love” which in turn provides “a kind of ultimate safety”; (b) promote the idea that “ultimately the good is more pow-

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erful than the bad”; (c) be a source of “comfort when the world look bleak”; (d) banish some people’s sense of “cosmic loneliness”; (e) promise “a life after death”; (f) “promote ethically desirable behaviour”; (g) place “moral demands upon us”; and (h) “give practical guidance as to how to behave”.4 In a brief footnote in chapter one, Sprigge justifies his exclusion of Leibniz from the group of philosophers discussed in his excellent book on the grounds that Leibniz’s “religious outlook is much less an option for us today… than are the positions of the thinkers examined here”.5 This judgment is not without justification. When we look to the details of Leibniz’s life, we find that Leibniz did not himself make any public religious observances, and took no part even in the central Sacraments of Christianity. Leibniz’s metaphysics, and in particular his doctrine of pre-established harmony with its denial of all forms of interactive causation, seems fantastical to many people in today’s scientific age. Moreover, with respect to the grounding of a personal religion, the extramundane God of Leibniz’s metaphysics, standing apart from the world of created things, is perhaps less favourable to the establishment of a highly personalised form of human-divine relation than is, for instance, the immanent God of Spinoza’s philosophy. However, Sprigge’s assessment of Leibniz is, in my opinion, too harsh and I hope that he might be persuaded to reconsider the case for a religious Leibnizianism. First, we cannot draw any conclusions as to Leibniz’s personal religious convictions from his aversion to public religious observances. Leibniz, as Carr notes, “had a purely philosophical interest in theology, but it was profound and earnest. His ideal was the realization of a rational theology”.6 He was not disinclined towards organised religions per se, but the Thirty Years War and its aftermath left him and his contemporaries in no doubt as to the horrendous effects disputes among religious sects could engender. Throughout his life he strove to use his own metaphysics and the God to which it appeals as a way of reconciling Catholicism and Protestantism, proposing that his own metaphysical system could provide common ground upon which the two Churches could be shown to be in fundamental agreement. Second, while it is true that Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony seems far-fetched today, this is not in itself a reason against either its truth or its being part of a metaphysic capable of grounding a religion. And, to his great credit, Sprigge is not averse to unfashionable ideas when he thinks there is some merit in them. He himself proposes that a kind of pre-established harmony may hold between divine ideas and the lower-level ideas characteristic of living things. He even employs the characteristically Leibnizian example of a symphony to illustrate the point, though he also notes that a passacaglia might be more apt.7 The doctrine of pre-established harmony was not considered fantastic in Leibniz’s own age, being understood then in the context of Cartesian interactionism and Malebranchean occasionalism. Although he regarded it as a

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consequence of the nature of truth8 and as perfectly consistent with physical descriptions of bodily interactions, it making no discernible difference whether we say the action and reaction occur within each body separately or through a transference of force from one to the other, Leibniz nevertheless usually refers to his doctrine of pre-established harmony only as a “hypothesis”.9 As such, and in light of the fact that debate on the nature of the relation of the soul and the body is still ongoing, the hypothesis does not deserve to be discarded without further hearing. Certainly, to one who believes in the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God, it is not beyond credence that this God might have created all things knowing exactly how each would act, despite there being no interaction among them. As for the extramundane or transcendent nature of Leibniz’s God, although this is probably less suited to a personalised religion, there is no logical inconsistency in the notion of a personal religion that postulates such a deity. And in the public arena, the notion of a transcendent God has far greater prominence than that of an immanent God in the main organised religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. To return to Sprigge’s criteria for a personal religion and the corresponding list of benefits a religion is thought to bestow on the believer, arguably, Leibniz’s philosophy is quite capable of satisfying all of them. It is not unreasonable to suppose that deeply-held metaphysical convictions influence an individual’s moral beliefs and consequent decisions and actions. Certainly, Leibniz, alongside Descartes and Spinoza, conceived the end of philosophical enquiry as the pursuit of wisdom and the development of a true moral science of happiness. The study of metaphysics, epistemology and natural science is subsidiary to this goal. All knowledge is useful in the promotion of human happiness, but the knowledge had by finite creatures inevitably falls short of absolute certainty and when it does so, he advises us to act on God-given innate moral instincts and to follow the models contained in the holy books, particularly the Bible and the Koran.10 However, Leibniz does not rest content here. His writings evince a developed system of ethics that in many respects bears a close affinity to that found in Spinoza’s Ethics, in which distinct and adequate perceptions give rise to an appreciation of the beauty and order of God’s creation—a creation, incidentally, which cannot be “completely described empirically or scientifically” since it comprises not only the world of physical things but also a kingdom of grace in which self-conscious beings form a society with God as Father and Sovereign and where a perfect moral order is brought about as the interdependent kingdoms of grace and nature work together—and a corresponding love of the Creator and in which virtue and freedom consist in the aligning of our volitions with God’s Will. In this way, even though the God of Leibniz’s metaphysics is not the immanent God found in the works of Spinoza and the absolute idealists,

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He is still, in Leibniz’s opinion, an “eternal object of love”, an inspiration to religious emotion and an ideal to which we aspire. Moreover, Leibniz offers practical advice as to how we can overcome our destructive tendencies and increase the distinctness of our perceptions of the true goods,11 which goods, Leibniz believes, will become the objects of our volitions once they are distinctly perceived. Leibniz’s writings therefore not only promote “ethically desirable behaviour”, they also “place moral demands upon us” and offer “moral precepts” and contain practical advice as to how we should live. On the negative side, Leibniz’s famous—some would say “infamous”— doctrine of the “windowlessness” of monads, far from dispelling a sense of “cosmic loneliness”, might easily be thought to incur it. After all, does not Leibniz advance the idea that God could have created only one monad yet leaving all its perceptions and appetites exactly as they are? How are we to know that this is not in fact what God has done? Perhaps indeed this is a solipsistic universe. But such a characterisation of Leibniz’s metaphysics is, in my opinion, a caricature. It does not touch the heart of his philosophy. The solipsistic nightmare is a far greater threat for the Cartesian than it ever could be for the Leibnizian. In Leibniz’s philosophy, the proposal is nothing more than an extravagant and imaginative example used to underscore the causal independence of one being from another. In fact, the Leibnizian universe is far from empty. On the contrary, Leibniz’s God has filled it to capacity with an infinity of living creatures in even the smallest of its parts.12 We have no reason to feel lonely. In the place of causal interaction, each monad is a living mirror of the whole universe. Its representative nature relates it to all God’s creation, ensuring that any change in one of the parts is reflected in all the others. There is one condition a religion must fulfill that I have yet to mention.13 Sprigge claims that religion must offer the hope of salvation. I touch briefly on the question of salvation in the following discussion of Leibniz’s opinion as to whether the world is improving.

2. Leibnizian Progress: the Case Against In and of itself, the issues as to whether and how the world is improving are tangential to the question whether or not a particular metaphysical system is capable of grounding a personal religion. It is quite possible that a metaphysic that denies that the world is on an upward trend can nevertheless provide ground for a viable religious or spiritual system. It might even be capable of sustaining a belief or hope in the ultimate salvation of the human race. All the same, a metaphysic that does propose the possibility of worldly improvement may be able to perform these functions more readily, particularly if the improvement in question is conceived in terms of an improvement in moral sensibilities.

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Towards the end of The God of Metaphysics, Sprigge addresses the question whether the world is improving.14 Sprigge believes that the world is improving. Moreover, he believes that such improvement is manifested as the moral improvement of the human race. While this position follows from Sprigge’s own version of pantheistic idealism, it links also to his discussion of what he calls Spinoza’s “optimistic determinism”. As Sprigge notes, Spinoza’s God or Nature is perfect, sub specie aeternitatis, but it is also improving, sub specie temporis, and indeed, it has to be continually improving if Spinoza’s God is to reach full self-consciousness. The question whether the world is improving relates also to Sprigge’s discussion of T. H. Green’s contention that the Eternal Consciousness is guiding the human race towards greater moral perfection. I will argue below that Leibniz’s metaphysics can also sustain a belief in the moral progress of human beings and, furthermore, that other living creatures, presently nonconscious or conscious, may also in due course attain full self-consciousness. My claims are not uncontested. Nor is it immediately evident that they are consistent with certain features of Leibniz’s own worldview, in particular, with his dynamics. Lloyd Strickland15 has argued recently that Leibniz believed the world does not improve. Rather, its perfection remains the same from one moment to the next. Accordingly, Strickland reads Leibniz’s pronouncements that there is progress or development only as claims that the world changes, and not as asserting that there is any increase in the world’s perfection through these changes. His position is strengthened by Leibniz’s example in the Essais de Theodicée in which he comments that an individual may enjoy listening to music and shortly afterwards enjoy looking at a piece of art. Even though there is change, there need be no increase in the overall pleasure experienced at each moment.16 Undoubtedly, Leibniz conceives the overall perfection of the world as static. Taken as a given whole, the world’s perfection is fixed. Leibniz’s God is supposed to survey all possible worlds, choosing to create that one that is the best, that is to say, the one that has the greatest overall perfection. In the language of Spinoza, Leibniz’s best possible world has a fixed degree of perfection, sub specie aeternitatis. And there is strong evidence that up to the middle of the 1690s, Leibniz also believed that the perfection of the world remains the same sub specie temporis. In the early 1690s, Leibniz appears to deny the progress to perfection of the world, both sub specie aeternitatis and sub specie temporis. In a short paper appropriately entitled, An mundus perfectione crescat,17 probably dating from the period 1694-1696, Leibniz makes clear his inclination to believe that the world “always maintains the same degree of perfection”. This is possible, he believes, even though there is variation in the degrees of perfection of the parts of the world: “different parts alter their perfection variously among themselves as one thing becomes another”.18 His thought is more readily understood when read in

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conjunction with a second paper from the same period, De progressu in infinitum.19 There, he proposes that an individual substance may be said to increase in perfection so long as future decreases in perfection do not go below the lowest point previously reached. A substance may appear to be increasing in perfection when in fact there is no real progress made. An increase in perfection will not be a true increase if, at some future time, the individual’s perfection decreases to a level below the point from which the apparent increase began. The notion that some individuals’ levels of perfection may fluctuate both upwards and downwards, allows that there may be real increases in the perfection of some individuals without a corresponding increase in the degree of perfection of the world as a whole from moment to moment. So long as these increases in the perfection of an individual, whether real or apparent, are matched by corresponding decreases in the perfection of at least one other individual, the instantaneous balance of overall perfection in the whole can be maintained from one moment to the next. We may now better understand Leibniz’s observation in An mundus perfectione crescat that if the perfection of the world is to remain the same, then certain substances can only be perpetually increasing in perfection if other substances are perpetually decreasing in perfection.20 Mutual accommodations amongst the individual substances that comprise the Leibnizian world are required in order to maintain the same degree of worldly perfection from moment to moment. That the level of perfection of the world as a whole is constant from moment to moment fits snugly with the doctrine of the conservation of derivative physical force in Leibniz’s dynamics and provides further reason to attribute this view to Leibniz. The conserved derivative force of the physical sciences is grounded in the metaphysical primitive forces of the individual substances that comprise the ultimate constituents of the Leibnizian universe. Individual substances, or monads as Leibniz would later call them, are combinations of primitive active and passive forces. The derivative active forces that underpin the motion of bodies are, alongside perceptions and appetitions, temporary modifications of individuals’ primitive active forces. Leibniz likens these modifications to individual terms in the series dictated by the individual’s primitive active force.21 The derivative passive forces that give rise to the inertia and impenetrability of bodies are modifications of individuals’ primitive passive forces. The amount of primitive active force in the individual substance correlates directly with its degree of perfection. When modified as the individual’s perceptions, it leads to the individual’s distinct perceptions and, in advanced forms, to knowledge of the true moral goods. Modified as appetitions, greater primitive active force, in its advanced form as rational appetite, manifests as the will to bring about true goods. Modified as derivative active force in the body, the individual’s primitive active force supplies the individual substance with the power to move its organic body in ways appropriate to the attainment of these

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willed goods. Since primitive active force is the law that expresses the individual’s essence, we may understand Leibniz’s most general definition of perfection as “quantity of essence” as the claim that the more primitive active force in the individual, the greater its perfection.22 A progressive increase in the primitive active force and the perfection of an individual manifests as its having more distinct perceptions, more rational appetitions and greater physical mobility. Together, these features signal an increase in the individual’s power and freedom, which in rational beings, signifies also an increase in moral perfection. Given that Leibniz’s dynamics postulates that the derivative forces in bodies throughout the world are conserved from moment to moment, and given the direct correlation between the primitive active forces and their modification as physical derivative active forces, together with the correlation between primitive active force and the individual’s perfection, it follows that if the one is conserved, so too is the other. In effect, the doctrine of the conservation of derivative force, together with the dependence of the derivative forces of bodies on the primitive forces of simple substances, suggests that the combined primitive forces of the individual substances is also conserved from moment to moment and that there is no increase in the perfection of the world even from moment to moment. In line with An mundus perfectione crescat, any increase in the primitive and derivative forces in any individual substance must be matched by a corresponding decrease in the primitive and derivative forces in others. While this model allows for the continuing progress towards greater perfection of some individual substances, it cannot allow for universal progress towards perfection in all substances. As one individual’s perfection increases, that of at least one other must decrease in order to keep the balance of perfection the same across the universe from one moment to the next. It seems then that at the time of writing An Mundus Perfectione Crescat, Leibniz believed both that the perfection of the world remains the same sub specie aeternitatis and that its perfection sub specie temporis remains constant. But in what follows, I will suggest that he soon afterwards revised his opinion with respect to the perfection of the world from moment to moment and that the increasing perfection of the world sub specie temporis can be understood in a manner consistent with the doctrine of the conservation of force.

3. Leibnizian Progress: the Case in Favour Our analysis of An mundus perfectione crescat rests upon a purely quantitative understanding of perfection as quantity of essence and the quantitative conservation of primitive and derivative active force. But Leibniz’s notion of perfection invokes non-quantifiable, qualitative features too, notably the ideas of virtue and happiness of individual beings and a conception of moral order within

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a natural kingdom of grace populated by rational moral beings, acting through considerations of good and bad. These citizens of the City of God are free agents, held responsible for their actions and rewarded and punished accordingly by means of physical pleasure and pain brought about through the mechanical operation of bodies that make up the correlative kingdom of nature. Leibniz classifies individuals as bare, feeling monads, conscious animals and self-conscious, rational beings such as humans. He insists that all the individuals in the world were created at the first moment, but not that all were created in their conscious or self-conscious states. They become so through undergoing a series of transformations, not unlike the reincarnations that Plato describes in the Phaedo, except that in the Leibnizian case, the soul is never detached from its physical body. What we understand as the birth of an individual creature is merely a transformation or augmentation of what was already present as a seed. The process by which what was potential becomes actual testifies to his commitment to the increasing perfection of individuals over time. As they become more perfect, individuals’ perceptions—their representations of themselves and the universe itself—become ever more distinct, rising from bare feeling, to conscious awareness and eventually, self-consciousness. Such increases might not be permanent. The individuals in question will at death revert back to a confused state of bare monadic being. If they then fall back to a level of perfection that is less than that from which they began, the progress of perfection will have been merely apparent.23 The transition from sentient soul to rational soul is one Leibniz thought difficult to explain by natural means. At §91 of his Essais de Theodicée, he proposes the transformation from sentience to reason as miraculous. This offends against his deeply held Principle of Continuity and later in the Theodicée, at §397, he admits he would prefer to regard it as natural, invoking the pre-established harmony to underpin the idea that some souls are destined from the beginning to become rational souls. In the same passage and again in the Monadologie, §75, he restricts the transition to the status of rational soul to a small number of Elect substances, namely, those destined to become members of the moral City of God.24 But if the process from sentience to reason is natural, then, given that all the living creatures that comprise the universe have the same basic nature—as primitive forces—there is in principle nothing to prevent each and every soul from one day reaching the higher degrees of awareness. It is ruled out in practice, however, through Leibniz’s opinion that every soul in the best possible world, whether rational or not, always possesses an organic body. There must always be some non-rational souls that belong to the living creatures that comprise these organic bodies. That some individuals may increase in perfection over time does not necessarily imply that the universe as whole, as the aggregate of all individual creatures, is also increasing in perfection. It may be that any increase in one individual is

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matched by a corresponding decrease in the perfection of another so as to maintain the overall degree of perfection of the universe the same at each instant. This is the possibility Leibniz entertained in An mundus perfectione crescat and which I have already noted. However, it leads to the unwelcome consequence that true increases in the perfection of some can be had only at the expense of others whose development must in turn be set back or overturned so as to maintain the same overall degree of perfection in the universe as a whole. Far from encouraging our own moral development, such a position surely advises us to become less moral, less perfect, in order that others might progress in our stead. It is clear, however, that were Leibniz to allow a real increase in the overall perfection of the universe over time, this could be effected through the increases over time in the perfection of the individuals that comprise the universe. And, as I will suggest below, if the increases in perfection are qualitative rather than quantitative, such progress may obtain even while force in the universe is conserved. Even if Leibniz himself did not endorse progress of the world through time, just as Spinozism can adopt an environmental ethics that Spinoza himself did not uphold,25 a contemporary Leibnizianism may conceive a general progression in the world towards greater perfection, so long as this is consistent with the central Leibnizian tenet of the embodiment of all souls. There is even some evidence that Leibniz himself came to embrace the view that the perfection of the universe actually increases over time.26 By 1697, in De rerum originatione radicali, Leibniz had revised the position adopted in An mundus perfectione crescat. The later paper retains the notion that the perfection of the world as a whole neither increases nor decreases: the existing universe is simply the best possible series of events “through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence”.27 The actual series achieves maximum variety through the consistent application of the simplest rule (maximum order), so that the actual world contains the greatest possible number of creatures, “just like tiles laid down so as to contain as many as possible in a given area”.28 But now Leibniz combines the unchanging perfection of the world regarded as a complete whole from beginning to end, with the claim that there is continual increase of perfection or progress from moment to moment, reversing the view in An mundus perfectione crescat that the perfection of the world remains constant from one stage to the next. In De rerum originatione radicali, he proposes a progression or development in the successive stages of the universe’s unfolding. In the continual sequence of events that makes up the world, the earlier states are less perfect than the later ones. The highest possible perfection is no longer restricted to some creatures in order to maintain the balance of the perfection of the universe from moment to moment. Leibniz now considers it an a priori truth that all creatures in time obtain the highest degree of perfection possible29 and that there may be “a certain constant and unbounded progress in the whole universe, so that it always proceeds to greater development [cultus]”.30

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Much of the world is already developed or “cultured” and Leibniz’s optimistic view is that this process is ongoing.31 Whereas before decreases in the perfection of individuals were justified by the need to maintain the overall balance of the universe as a whole from moment to moment, now they are seen as necessary for the development of each individual substance towards greater perfection. Suffering and pain are steps in the development of the individual, just as the breaking of a seed is required so that the plant may flower. Painful losses and afflictions give rise to greater goods. Furthermore, Leibniz now appears to regard all individual substances as capable of progress or increase in perfection, thereby allowing a general and overall progression of the universe towards a more perfect end state.32 All creatures have the potential for increased individual perfection, although the infinite division of matter ensures that the progression towards perfection of the world is never completed and there will always be some creatures for whom the process of development has yet to begin.33 Thus, it seems that between An mundus perfectione crescat and the composition of De rerum originatione radicali, Leibniz abandoned the view that the perfection of the universe remains the same at all times. In its place, he conceives the universe becoming successively more perfect and extends at least the potential for increased perfection to all individual substances. Allison Coudert attributes Leibniz’s change of mind to his conversations with van Helmont during a visit from the wandering “scholar-gipsy” to Hanover in 1696, during which it is believed Leibniz was introduced to the work of the English philosopher, Anne Conway.34 For Conway, minds and bodies have essentially the same nature. Both are divisible substances, existing within a continuum that stretches from the less aethereal (gross material bodies) to the more aethereal (minds or spirits). As such, each is capable of being transformed into the other. Spirits may take on a bodily existence and bodies may become more spiritual. In human beings “food and drink are first changed into chyle and then into blood, and afterwards into spirits, which are nothing but blood brought to perfection”.35 Rocks and metals may become living bodies and ultimately may pass to a more spiritual existence as their matter becomes increasingly less dense. With no radical distinction in kind between inanimate bodies, animals and human beings, Conway admits transformations of individuals from one species to another: if an individual horse is to surpass the level of perfection specific to horses, it must be transformed into a higher animal, such as a human being.36 In principle, all individuals may in time become more subtle, spiritual and hence more perfect.37 Accordingly, she awards some degree of moral status to each and every individual being.38 Although the transformations across species may proceed either towards higher species or towards the lower—no spiritual creature is immune from taking on a more material way of being—Conway is optimistic that the overall

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progression of the world is towards the perfecting of creation and increasingly higher degrees of consciousness and self-consciousness of the creatures of which it is composed. She claims, as would Leibniz in De rerum originatione radicali, that transformations that tend towards lesser perfection are ultimately for the creature’s greater good. Pain and suffering have an ameliorative purpose: hardship leads to moral improvement.39 All the same, even though all creatures are becoming more perfect and more spiritual, none will reach the highest degree of perfection. The progression towards perfection is unending and each creature must continue to greater perfection to infinity.40 Leibniz never endorsed Conway’s opinion as to the divisible nature of the soul. He remains firm in his conviction that the indivisible mind and the divisible organic body always co-exist within the unitary individual substance, but he did endorse her intuition that all substances share the same basic nature and the possibility of transformation of substances across species that this permits. Other of the views presented in De rerum originatione radicali also accord well with Conway’s, including the ameliorative function of pain and suffering, the commitment to universal salvation (understood as the salvation of all creatures, not only those that are rational) and the successive, albeit unending, progression towards more perfect states of the world.41 However, Leibniz never accepted Conway’s explicit thesis that all substances are actually increasing in perfection. One reason for this will become apparent in the next section.

4. Quantitative and Qualitative Perfection I have been suggesting that the idea that the world is in process of becoming ever more perfect is consistent with core features of the Leibnizian metaphysics and even that he himself may be read as advancing this view in De rerum perfectione radicali. But we have also seen that Leibniz’s earlier conception in An mundus perfectione crescat of a world whose perfection remains the same at each successive moment is supported by his dynamical doctrine of the conservation of derivative force and the consequent conservation of individuals’ primitive forces in which derivative forces are grounded. Does it follow that, within the system of Leibnizian metaphysics, adherence to the principle that the perfection of the world is increasing through time jeopardises the physical doctrine of the conservation of force? I suggested earlier that Leibniz may be able to hold consistently to the doctrine of the conservation of force, both primitive and derivative, while at the same time conceiving the perfecting of the world qualitatively rather than quantitatively. If Leibniz were to distinguish qualitative moral perfection and perfection as quantity of essence, he may then be able to claim that the quantity of essence in the universe remains constant even from moment to moment,

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thereby conforming to the requirements of the doctrine of conservation of force, while at the same time introducing the idea that the universe is increasing in moral perfection as time proceeds. An increase in the perfection of the world from moment to moment might be an increase only in its moral perfection and not also an increase in its physical perfection. Leibniz’s use of the term “cultus” to describe the kind of perfecting that he conceives in De rerum originatione radicali suggests that he is thinking of the increasing perfection of the world in terms of the development of civilisation or culture, as a perfecting of the moral kingdom of grace. Moreover, he writes of morally free agents as standing “beyond the revolutions of matter”.42 Can they be said to stand outside the material realm in such a way that increases in their perfections do not adversely affect the conservation of derivative forces in bodies? However, Leibniz does not think that moral beings are free from the revolutions of matter because they are freed from material existence, as Conway conceived. Conway’s view entails a gradual progression towards the more spiritual and a corresponding decrease in materiality in the universe as time goes on. But Leibniz insists that all monads always possess organic bodies. For him, moral creatures are free from the revolutions of matter because they can control their bodies and use them to effect changes in the world. Their moral freedom is manifested not only as a mental freedom to control the minds’ perceptions but also as a physical power over their own and other bodies. Their organic bodies are not “eliminated” as Corse and Coudert state in their introduction to Conway’s treatise.43 Whatever form increases in an individual’s perfection may take for Leibniz, it does not entail any dissipation of the substance’s organic body. Moral perfection and physical perfection must go hand in hand with one other for Leibniz—pre-established harmony demands as much. In fact, moral perfection cannot be divorced from the quantitative perfection that is measured in terms of essence or force and the maximisation of variety and order. As Gregory Brown has shown, beauty and virtue are inextricably linked to the quantity of essence as variety and order.44 Besides, Leibniz regards distinct perceptions and rational appetites—key factors in substances’ moral perfection—as grounded in monadic primitive active forces. Increases in a creature’s distinct perceptions and rational appetites are due to increases in the individual’s primitive active force. It follows that even an increase in the moral perfection of the universe from moment to moment (due to the increases in the moral perfections of the individuals that comprise the universe), should entail an increase in the modification of primitive force and consequently a corresponding increase in the derivative forces of bodies. The doctrine of the conservation of force still threatens the idea of increasingly perfect successive states of the universe, even when these are interpreted as qualitative increases. Although Leibniz comes to share Conway’s optimistic view that all the individuals in the universe will one day attain perfection, understood as their

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salvation and ultimate happiness, unlike Conway, he did not hold that every individual creature in the universe is actually increasing in perfection or has embarked on the upward spiral towards ever greater spiritual existence. The two philosophers agree that the perfection of the creatures increases to infinity (and the end goal of truly universal salvation is never actually attained), but they disagree insofar as Conway believes that the process of perfection is ongoing in all creatures whereas Leibniz must insist that the process for some creatures has not yet begun. Thus, at the end of De rerum originatione radicali, he refers to the infinity of substances in the “abyss”. These are the bare monads of Monadology (§24, §71) that comprise the matter of our world and whose confused perceptions constitute only a meagre feeling of the world they inhabit. Their presence allows Leibniz to assert that there are always some parts of matter that have “yet to be advanced”.45 Progress is not denied them in due course, but as yet, the process by which their primitive active force will grow stronger, leading in turn to their perceiving the world more distinctly, has not been activated. Might Leibniz appeal to the infinity of bare monads in the abyss in order to maintain a balance of forces compatible with the conservation of physical force? I believe he can. By invoking the substances in the abyss that have “yet to be advanced”, he can maintain that a quantitative balance of perfection as essence or force remains the same at all times in the course of the universe’s unfolding. And while retaining the direct correlation between increases in an individual’s active force and increases in its moral perfection, he can also give credence to the notion of qualitative increase in the perfection of the universe from moment to moment. Qualitative moral perfection of the universe will be increased by the successive increase in moral perfection of some of the individuals that comprise the universe, while the quantitative perfection of the substances in the abyss decreases in order to keep the quantitative balance of perfection in the universe as a whole the same from moment to moment. Distinguishing the quantitative characterisation of perfection in terms of positive reality or essence or in terms of variety and order and the qualitative characterisation of perfection as moral perfection, Leibniz is able simultaneously to maintain that the world does not quantitatively increase in perfection even from moment to moment, but that it does progress qualitatively over time. Leibniz can reconcile successive progress of the world with the conservation of its force only by appealing to the substances in the abyss for whom the process of perfecting has yet to begin. Leibniz can admit that there is progress only at the cost of some creatures decreasing in perfection so as to redress the overall balance upset by the increase in primitive force that underpins the freedom and moral status of the more perfect beings. In this way, although Leibniz gestures towards universal salvation as an ideal, he limits its scope in actuality by retaining some creatures who have not yet started to progress but whose salvation is postponed until some later period in an (infinite) temporal series.

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Let us now return to the question whether Leibniz’s metaphysics offers any hope of salvation. It seems that at least under some interpretations of his thought, his metaphysics does offer the hope of individual salvation, understood as the happiness and virtue that comes from the pursuit of wisdom, founded upon distinct perceptions of the true good and volitions aligned with God’s. Moreover, at least during some periods, Leibniz was prepared to accept a doctrine of universal salvation, extending the hope of salvation to all living creatures and placing on us the moral obligation to grant to all living things at least the rights we might award to the embryonic form of any living thing, to those that have not yet begun the process of advancement. This last point has environmental implications, but, taking my lead from Sprigge himself,46 I will leave this issue for another occasion.

5. Concluding Remarks We have now, albeit briefly, considered all of the conditions Sprigge sets out for a metaphysics to serve as the ground of a religion and have seen that Leibniz’s system can offer some response in relation to each. This is not an altogether unsurprising result. Leibniz’s philosophy bears many similarities to Spinoza’s and indeed to Sprigge’s. Although Leibniz spurns their immanent God in favour of a transcendent God, Leibniz’s account of individual substances is remarkably akin to Spinoza’s understanding of the one Divine Substance. Admittedly, Leibniz does not conceive individual substances within one larger whole, but he does admit real relations among individual things—or at least he insists that all relations among things must have a real grounding in relational qualities in the relata47 and there is a strong sense in which Leibniz’s individual substances, like Sprigge’s individuals, contain both self and not-self, even to the point that the whole universe is contained within each. But perhaps more to the point, Leibniz agrees wholeheartedly with Spinoza and with Sprigge on the central role of pleasure and pain in motivating our moral choices and decisions. As I noted earlier, Leibniz’s moral theory bears many of the hallmarks of Spinoza’s system, despite Leibniz’s adherence to final causes and a belief in the importance of contingency for freedom. And he is closer to Spinoza than to Sprigge insofar as he grounds the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain in others on the distinct or adequate, but egoistic, recognition that the pursuit of others’ pleasure is advantageous to one’s own happiness.48 Given that many of Sprigge’s conditions of religion concern the construction of a moral system underpinned by the love of God, it seems to me that so long as a transcendent God can be regarded as an object of love, Leibniz’s God is at least a strong contender as a base on which to build a personal religion which promotes respect for the

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world God created and a system of morals by which we can live in harmony with our fellow human beings and with other living things.

Notes 1. An earlier version of parts of this paper was presented at the VIII. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress, Hannover, 2006 and published in the conference proceedings, Einheit in der Vielheit, eds. H. Breger, J. Herbst and S. Erdner, 2 Vols. (Hannover: G. W. Leibniz Gesellschaft, 2006), Vol. II, pp. 805-812. 2. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 10. 3. These are repeated in the penultimate chapter; see Ibid, pp. 525-526. 4. Ibid., pp. 9-11. 5. Ibid., p. 16, note 1. 6. H. W. Carr, Leibniz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 21. 7. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 498; see also p. 500. 8. G. W. Leibniz, The Nature of Truth, in Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz, ed. L. Couturat (Paris: Alcan, 1903), pp. 401-403. 9. G. W. Leibniz, Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances, in Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, 7 Vols., ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-90), Vol. IV, p. 485. Translated in R. Ariew and D. Garber (trs. and eds.), G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1989), p. 144. 10. G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement, in G. W. Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923-), series VI, Vol. VI, p. 92. 11. See P. Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), Chap. 10. 12. G. W. Leibniz, Monadologie, §66, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VI, p. 618. 13. Nor have I addressed whether Leibniz’s metaphysics shows that (i) good overcomes evil; (ii) provides comfort in adversity; (iii) advocates that God is a source of safety; nor (iv) whether his metaphysics contains the promise of life after death. His philosophy certainly fulfils (i), (ii) and (iv). I am uncertain about (iii), unless the condition is amended as Sprigge proposes to mean that it provides a “reconciliation” or a “way of coming to terms with the nature of things” (Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 526). In this case, Leibniz’s philosophy, with its notion of a perfect God creating the best possible world, can prove most helpful. 14. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., pp. 521-522. 15. L. Strickland, “Leibniz on Whether the World Increases in Perfection”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14, 2006, pp. 51-68. See also, Leibniz Reinterpreted (London: Continuum, 2006), Chap. 7. 16. G. W. Leibniz, Essais de Theodicée, §202, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VI, p. 237.

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17. G. W. Leibniz, Leibniz: Textes Inédits, 2 Vols., ed. G. Grua (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), Vol. I, p. 95. 18. “Quaeritur an totus mundus perfectione crescat aut decrescat, an vero eandem semper perfectionem servet, quod potius puto, tametsi diversae partes perfectionem inter se varie permutent, ut invicem transferatur”: Leibniz: Textes Inédits, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 95; Leibniz and the Kabbalah, tr. A. Coudert (Dordrecht, Boston and London: Springer, 1995), p. 127. 19. G. W. Leibniz, Leibniz: Textes Inédits, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 94-95. 20. “Si eadem manet mundi perfectio, non possunt quaedam substantiae perfectione perpetuo crescere, quin aliae perfectione perpetuo decrescant”: Leibniz: Textes Inédits, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 95. The idea resonates with that advanced by Van Helmont in his 1685 Paradoxal Discourses that “the corruption of one thing is the generation of another, the fields must die and lie fallow before they can bring forth corn again” (quoted from C. Merchant: “The Vitalism of Francis Mercury van Helmont: its influence on Leibniz”, Ambix, 26. 3, 1979, pp. 170183, p. 176). In Leibniz’s case, the influence is probably Thomist. 21. G. W. Leibniz, letter to De Volder, 21 January 1704, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 262. 22. G. W. Leibniz, De rerum originatione radicali, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 303. 23. It is not entirely clear whether Leibniz believed that this reversal to confused states occurs on the death of rational beings. 24. G. W. Leibniz, Monadologie, §82, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VI, p. 621. 25. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 95, note 44. 26. Strickland argues persuasively that Leibniz held to the view that the world increases in overall perfection over time only for the decade from 1696-1706; Strickland, Leibniz Reinterpreted, op. cit., pp. 121-123. 27. “per quam plurimum essentiae seu possibilitatis perducitur ad existendum”: Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 303; translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber (trs. and eds.), G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, op. cit., p. 150. 28. “quemadmodum ita componuntur tessellae ut in proposita area quam plurimae capiantur”: Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 304; translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber (trs. and eds.), G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, op. cit., p. 151. On the equivalence of quantity of essence and ordered variety, see G. Brown: “Leibniz’s Theodicy and the Confluence of Worldly Goods”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26. 4, 1988, pp. 571591, pp. 587-589. 29. G. W. Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 306. 30. “progressus quidam perpetuus liberrimusque totius Universi est agnoscendus, ita ut ad majorem semper cultum procedat”: Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 308; translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber (trs. and eds.), G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, op. cit., p. 154. 31. I here side with Wilson against Strickland in reading “cultus”, not as signifying mere change, but as signifying moral, or even spiritual, progress.

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32. That Leibniz accepted the idea of universal salvation is hotly disputed, however. Hotson argues that Leibniz was sympathetic to the doctrine but ultimately does not accept it. See H. Hotson, “Leibniz and Millenarianism”, in Alsted and Leibniz: on God, the Magistrate and the Millennium, eds. M. R. Antognazza and H. Hotson (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), pp. 127-214, pp. 184-187, 196-198. Also see L. Strickland, Leibniz Reinterpreted, op. cit., pp. 136-138. M. Fichant (ed. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: De l’horizon de la doctrine humaine (Paris: Vrin, 1991), pp. 22-24, 200) and A. Coudert (Leibniz and the Kabbalah, op. cit., pp. 109-111) are more inclined to attribute the doctrine to Leibniz. Irrespective of the historical fact of Leibniz’s actual belief, however, it seems indisputable that a Leibnizian metaphysics is capable of incorporating a doctrine of universal salvation. 33. G. W. Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 308; translated in R. Ariew and D. Garber (trs. and eds.), G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, op. cit., p. 155. 34. See A. Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah, op. cit., pp. 116-117. 35. Ibid., pp. 62-63. 36. Ibid, p. 33. 37. Ibid, p. 61. 38. Ibid, p. 35. 39. Ibid, p. 38 and pp. 42-43. 40. Ibid, p. 33. 41. Coudert and Corse draw attention to a number of points on which the two philosophers agree, including the centrality of the notion of infinity, the idea that all creatures are of the same basic type, and that they exist on a continuum ranging from the more material to the more spiritual. Anne Conway: the Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, edited and translated by A. Coudert and T. Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xxxi. 42. “au dessus des revolutions de la matiere”: Système Nouveau, in Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. IV, p. 480; edited and translated by L. Loemker, G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969, 2nd edn.), p. 455. 43. A. Coudert and T. Corse (eds. and trs.), Anne Conway: the Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, op. cit., p. xxxi. 44. G. Brown, “Leibniz’s Theodicy and the Confluence of Worldly Goods”, op. cit. 45. “semper in abysso rerum superesse partes sopitas adhuc excitandas et ad majus meliusque et ut verbo dicam, ad meliorem cultum provehendas”: Die Philosophischen Schriften, op. cit., Vol. VII, p. 308; G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, op. cit., p. 155. 46. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., pp. 561-562. 47. But see ibid., p. 511. 48. Ibid., p. 59. Cp. p. 507.

God and Evil: A Process Perspective Marcus P. Ford

1. Introduction All of us who take metaphysics seriously, especially those of us who have adopted some kind of theistic panpsychism, are indebted to the philosophical work of Timothy Sprigge. He has produced a most impressive body of scholarly writing, both interpretive and creative, that has advanced the argument that it is possible to speak meaningfully, if speculatively, about reality as a whole and not just human experience or, more narrowly still, human language. The antimetaphysical trend that dominated the twentieth century has limited the kinds of issues that most contemporary philosophers have been willing to consider. It has also tended to color the way past philosophers have been interpreted. Sprigge’s life work kept alive the option of thinking seriously about reality itself in all of its likely complexity and he has explained the thinking of past philosophers to a contemporary audience in a manner that is faithful to these philosophers. To give but one example of how recent trends in modern-day philosophy have tended to distort the work of earlier philosophers, current Jamesian scholarship, on the whole, gives little or no attention to either James’s repeated endorsements of a panpsychic view of reality or to his life-long interest in parapsychology. Presumably the reason for this is the interpreter’s own judgment regarding the validity of these philosophic doctrines. Best not to acknowledge a position that does not fit well with those of the commentator. Sprigge’s own treatment of James has been much more faithful to James’s position overall. As someone who has been involved in Jamesian scholarship, I am deeply appreciative of this aspect of Sprigge’s career. In the same manner, Sprigge has explicated the work of many other philosophers who also engaged in speculative metaphysics, including Royce, Green, Bradley, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. But Sprigge’s work is not limited to helping us understand the thinking of past philosophers. He has also developed his own views on topics such as God, time and space, the nature of reality, epistemology, and the existence of evil in a theistic world. He has, in short, created his own metaphysical explanation of reality. His views on these matters, indeed his conviction that these matters deserve philosophical reflection, put him very much on the margin of contemporary academic philosophy. But if he is on the margins of academic philosophy, his own thinking takes seriously the very issues that many non-philosophers— thoughtful amateurs if you will—judge to be important. To the extent that aca-

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demic philosophy is content to isolate itself from such people, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant and being merely academic. Sprigge’s life-long work has moved in just the opposite direction. Rather than isolating philosophy from nonphilosophers, and non-philosophers from philosophy, he has sought to bring philosophic clarity to the very issues that deeply concern many individuals. The focus of this essay is Sprigge’s interpretation of Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s views on God, especially as they pertain to the problem of evil. Because it is likely that Sprigge’s interpretation of Whitehead and Hartshorne will be regarded by many to be authoritative, it is important to correct any misunderstanding or errors he might have made on this topic.

2. Sprigge’s Analysis of the Process Doctrine of Evil In his most recent book, The God of Metaphysics, Sprigge briefly discusses Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s (and James’s) understanding of God and how each of them, and especially Whitehead, deals with the problem of evil. He then offers a series of criticisms in regard to their theodicies. Some of his criticisms are more serious than others. His most serious criticisms—that process philosophy envisions a God that either participates in evil or willingly allows it to occur—I will argue, is mistaken. Sprigge’s claim that Whitehead understood God in a Nietzschean sense, interested only in maximal intensity of experience, is not supported by a fair reading of Whitehead’s (or Hartshorne’s) writings. Sprigge is exactly right in acknowledging that Whitehead, Hartshorne, and James are able to reconcile the goodness of God with the presence of real evil, both moral and natural, because they understand God to be limited in power. According to these process philosophers, God does not have the kind of power that would prevent acts of evil from occurring. This lack of omnipotence in the usual sense of the term is not, as Sprigge notes, based on some decision by God to limit God’s power in order to make room for human freedom, a decision that God might reverse or suspend. Rather, it is a metaphysical principle that cannot be otherwise. As Whitehead put it: “The categories governing the determinations of things are the reasons why there should be evil”.1 Following Plato, process philosophers contend that to be anything at all is to have some power of self-determination. Since reality is pluralistic, composed of many entities in addition to God, God’s power is always less than total. Omnipotence is metaphysically impossible in a pluralistic world. Sprigge also correctly notes the relationship between Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s understanding of God as one force among countless others, and their rejection of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing. He writes:

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The traditional Judaeo-Christian and, I believe, Islamic view is that God created the world ex nihilo at the beginning (whether of time or of the universe). Before that... there was nothing but God. But so far as I can see, neither of our process philosophers [Whitehead and Hartshorne] went along with this. Rather, God and the actual occasions have always been there, way back through an infinite past.2

To maintain that God did not create reality out of sheer nothingness and that God is not the sole force in the cosmos is, of course, not to say that God is just another being. For Whitehead and Hartshorne, God is unique insofar as God is eternal and orders the cosmos by providing every actual occasion—each individual actuality—with an ideal aim that is its best possible future. Regardless of whether the actual occasion decides to realize this future or chooses, instead, some less ideal possibility, without this ideal aim, there would be chaos. God is the reason why the world has any order at all. Sprigge writes: God is, of course, intensely creative according to both philosophers. For at every moment he is doing his best (which must be the best, or equal best) to bring all the plurality of what is going on—that is, all that is going on in and between actual occasions, and all that has gone on—into the most harmonious whole he can manage. And this is not settled deterministically, but is an exercise more like that of artistic creation. Also, as a means to this, he is feeding each actual occasion as it first comes into existence (or becomes, as process philosophers say) with a subjective aim by which it can create something out of itself.3

For Whitehead and Hartshorne, God’s influence is limited to presenting actual occasions with possibilities, possibilities which they are free to actualize or not. God’s power is the power to persuade—to coax, and to lure—not to coerce or causally determine. This position, as Sprigge rightly acknowledges, puts process theology out of the mainstream of Western theology. Most of Christian theology has emphasized both God’s omnipotence and creation ex nihilo—the doctrine that both assumes and illustrates God’s omnipotence. This, in spite of the fact that the process position that God created the world out of chaos has as much, or more, biblical support as the orthodox view. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo, and hence God’s absolute omnipotence, rests not on biblical authority, but rather on a decision made by theologians in the second century. This doctrine was developed in response to Marcion’s teaching that the God of creation—the God of the Old Testament—was not the Christian God of salvation—the God of the New Testament. Marcion’s position, which was judged to be Christian heresy, was that matter, having been created by the God of the Old Testament, was itself evil. The orthodox response was to affirm that there was only one God and to assert that this God created the world out of nothing.4 The ultimate explanation for the existence of evil, then, for Whitehead and Hartshorne (and James) is that God is not in complete control of the universe.

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According to Whitehead, “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization”.5 Evil is the result of free beings choosing something less than what is best— sometimes much less than what is best—and the randomness that is the result of many beings making decisions independently of each other. As Sprigge states: According to Whitehead and Hartshorne, God has to leave it to some extent to actual occasions what they do and thereby may mold the world in a way not the best in God’s opinion. Nor is this because he voluntarily renounced his complete control of things so that humans could have the gift of freedom; rather, it is something which could not have been otherwise.6

Hartshorne put it this way in his book, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism: Naturally any view which ascribes ethical perfection and yet the “greatest possible power” to God must face the problem of evil. In its appeal to the imagination this problem will no doubt always be the most troublesome one in theology. But in pure logic it is not true that there is sheer contradiction between the joint admission of divine perfection of goodness and divine perfection of power, on the one hand, and the fact of real evil on the other, for the simple reason that the greatest possible power (which by definition is “perfect” power) may not be the same as “all power that exists united into one individual power”. For such union of “all” power may be impossible. Had God “all the power there is”, he must be responsible for all that happens. But why assume that all real power could possibly belong to one individual? If it could not—and there is ground for this negative—then even the perfect or (by definition) greatest possible power is not all-power... The minimal solution of the problem of evil is to affirm the necessity of division of powers, hence of responsibilities, as binding even upon maximal power.7

Having correctly presented a process understanding of God and evil, Sprigge goes on to raise concerns and objections to this position. On the whole, he makes the judgment that process philosophy’s account of the existence of evil in the world is inadequate. This is a very serious judgment and one that, if correct, would dramatically undercut its viability as a way of understanding God and the world. Sprigge raises the following issues: (1) Whitehead and Hartshorne pay insufficient attention to the problem of evil;8 (2) they tend to deal with the subject too abstractly;9 (3) they are overly optimistic; they do not properly acknowledge the amount or scale of evil that exists;10 (4) they understand God as insufficiently powerful or good;11 (5) they tend to see evil primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of intensity of personal experience and the fact that some goods rule out the possibility of other goods.12

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The first two of these claims are less serious than the second two as they are basically a matter of literary style. The third claim is a judgment based in part on an empirical matter—how much chaos and evil is there relative to the amount of order and goodness? The fourth and fifth claims are the most serious in that they go to the heart of process philosophy’s explanation of evil. Sprigge’s claim that “both Whitehead and Hartshorne pay insufficient attention to the problem of evil”13 has some merit to it, especially if it means that neither philosopher made this topic the focus of any single work. Whitehead’s thoughts on God and evil are scattered throughout his writings. Sprigge cites various statements in Religion in the Making and Process and Reality, but he could also have looked to statements in Science and the Modern World, Symbolism, and Adventures of Ideas. Hartshorne also addresses these issues in many places, but did not make it a focus of any of his many books. However, it should be acknowledged that David Griffin, one of the chief interpreters of Whitehead and Hartshorne, has sought to address this lack of systematic attention to the problem of evil in process philosophy by writing two books on the subject: God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy, in 1976, and then Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations, in 1991. The fact that David Griffin, John Cobb and others have written on this topic does not, of course, speak directly to the charge that neither Whitehead nor Hartshorne devoted sufficient attention to this issue—indeed, the fact that other process thinkers have found it necessary to devote attention to this issue supports this claim. Still, Sprigge tends to imply that process philosophers in general have neglected this topic, and that is not the case. In fact, process philosophers, drawing on the work of Whitehead and Hartshorne, have been at the forefront of the discussion for the past thirty years. His second objection is that both philosophers, when they are dealing with the issue of evil, do so in a manner that is too abstract. “Evil”, he says, “surely needs a more agonized treatment than either of our process philosophers offers us”.14 Leaving aside the claim that evil requires an “agonized treatment” in order to be adequate, Sprigge is clearly correct that, on many occasions, Whitehead and Hartshorne deal with the problem of evil in a detached, philosophical, manner. Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s comments quoted above are an excellent example. However there are other places in which both writers speak in a much more vivid manner. For example, when speaking about the evils associated with religion, Whitehead writes: history, down to the present day, is a melancholy record of the horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifice, and in particular the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at its charge. Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. Religion can be, and has been, the main instrument for progress. But if we survey the whole race, we must pronounce that generally it has not been so.15

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Even this listing of some of the world’s evil, it could be argued, is not sufficiently detailed and agonized. It does, however, suggest that Whitehead was fully aware of the horrors of human history. The fact that both Whitehead and Hartshorne decided to explain the existence of evil in general terms, the same way that they addressed issues such as human freedom, causation, and consciousness, does not invalidate their explanation. Sprigge himself, it should be noted, offers an intellectual solution to the problem of evil, thus granting to himself what he seems to deny process philosophers. He writes, “If it is true that the world is necessary in its every detail, then this goes some way to solving intellectually (if not emotionally) the problem of evil”.16 Sprigge’s more serious criticisms of process philosophy are that it does not give evil its full due (and this in a number of ways): it sees God as allowing evil that could have been prevented to happen, and it tends to see God as essentially uninterested in morality and goodness and interested instead mainly in intensity of experience. Any one of these criticisms, if true, would be extremely serious. If all three of these claims are true, it could reasonably be said that process philosophy has no viable theodicy. Sprigge claims that “there seems to be an element of somewhat facile optimism about the world in these process philosophers”, by which he means, that they do not take evil sufficiently seriously.17 Elsewhere he says, that for Whitehead, evil is not bad in itself; it is simply something good in the wrong place.18 Although he is able to cite certain passages that give support to these claims, on the whole, I would suggest that this is not a fair interpretation of either Whitehead or Hartshorne. In Religion in the Making, for example, Whitehead writes: “No religion which faces facts can minimize the evil in the world, not merely the moral evil, but the pain and the suffering”19 and then follows with his list of the many horrors that religion has supported over the course of history. Likewise, his famous remark that “life is robbery”, meaning that all life requires depriving other beings of life, strongly suggests that he is fully aware of the tragic nature of the universe.20 Sprigge’s contention that Whitehead does not fully appreciate the reality of evil or its extent is probably best understood in light of his criticism that Whitehead did not make evil the subject of any one book and that he almost always dealt with evil as a problem of philosophy rather than as an existential problem. The more serious charge is that process philosophers do not recognize evil as evil, but see it rather as something good in the wrong place and time. Whitehead’s assertion that “Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far good in itself”, can be read to support this view, but this is not the thrust of the passage that Sprigge quotes in full: Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far good in itself; but beyond itself it is evil in its character of a destructive agent among things greater than itself. In the summation of the more complete fact it has secured a descent toward nothingness, in contrast to the creativeness of

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what can without qualification be termed good. Evil is positive and destructive; what is good is positive and creative.21

Whitehead’s claim is that everything actual has some value for itself and therefore even an “evil experience” has some value and is, to that extent, good. But it is not sufficient to evaluate something only in terms of itself. Everything actual has some effect on everything else, and when those effects are destructive, then, “in the summation of the more complete fact”, it is evil. For process philosophers, because each event (each actual occasion) influences every subsequent event, it is not possible to ascertain the full value of any single event without considering its effects on everything else. The instrumental value of an event is no less important than its value for itself, its intrinsic value. But Sprigge maintains that Whitehead is more interested in the intrinsic value of an actual occasion, especially its intensity, than its instrumental value. According to Sprigge, Whitehead’s position that all things have some value for themselves and are in this respect good means that “the job of a Hitler is good in itself, and even the pleasure of a torturer only bad in their consequences”.22 But what does the word “only” mean here and how is it possible to think of “the job of a Hitler” without reference to its horrible consequences for millions upon millions of innocent human beings? Indeed, the Nazi holocaust is one of the premier examples in the twentieth century that “evil is positive and destructive”. Some torturers may derive some sick pleasure from their activities, but this does not make such actions good. The pain and suffering and the loss that is the result of their activity far outweigh whatever pleasure may be derived. For as Whitehead maintained, “the summation of the more complete fact” must be considered, not simply the value that accrues to the individual. Sprigge is also concerned that Whitehead’s understanding of God undermines God’s goodness in one of two ways: God either encourages evil or God allows evil to occur that could have been prevented. Again, using the example of the Nazi Holocaust, Sprigge contends that either God is partly responsible for these evils by providing Nazi soldiers with an initial aim that included murdering and torturing innocent people, or that at the very least, God allowed these activities to take place (suggesting that God could have stopped them). Sprigge writes: But what of the thoughts of those who crammed Jews or Gypsies into cattle trucks en route to the gas chambers? Did God really feed them with something serving this end? It may be said that he fed them with the best that their data allowed. But could he not have fed them with the decision to do everything they could to stop the activity in which they were engaged? Did God perhaps offer them alternative subjective aims, suggesting the best, but allowing them to choose the worst?23

Sprigge is concerned by the “sheer amount of both moral and natural evil which God is apparently prepared to put up with”.24

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These are serious allegations that must be carefully considered. Although Sprigge presents them in the most polemical way imaginable, his claim that Whitehead saw God as responsible for the existence of some kinds of evil, has some validity. From a process perspective, without God there would be nothing—no earth, no humans, no Jews, no homosexuals, no communists, and no Nazis. This is not to say that, in the beginning, God sought to make this particular world or that God created this world so that this particular tragedy could occur or that this tragedy had to occur, but only that without God, there would be nothing but low-level chaos. The very structures that allow for the existence of life, including life at the high level of mammals such as ourselves, are the necessary preconditions for the kinds of evil so evident in the Nazi holocaust. For Whitehead, evolution cannot be explained apart from God, and insofar as human-caused evil requires humans, then God is in this respect responsible for human evil. But this is the extent to which God is responsible and it falls far short of being morally indictable. Great evil is a risk that is unavoidable if there is to be the possibility of great goodness. Had the creative advance ended with atoms and molecules, the amount of moral and physical evil in the universe would be significantly inhibited. And if the creative advance had ended with single-celled organisms, again, the amount of pain, suffering and loss would be limited (with the exception of the loss of what might have been and was not). Had evolution ended with macro-molecules or with single-celled organisms, there could not have been a Nazi holocaust, but neither could there have been a Plato, a Mozart, or a Mother Theresa. The evolution of complex living organisms brings with it the potentiality for both great goodness and great evil. But here Sprigge’s concerns are more ethical and theological than metaphysical. Based on Whitehead’s statement that “God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities”, Sprigge maintains that Whitehead’s view is closely related to Nietzsche’s view “that what matters is a maximally vibrant way of living”25 even when it is achieved by killing innocent human beings. According to Sprigge, because God acts to encourage aesthetic pleasure, and because intensity of experience is the only measure of aesthetic pleasure, then God must have encouraged Himmler to do whatever resulted in the maximum amount of pleasure, for Himmler and for God, regardless of its consequences for others: “when Himmler thinks out speedier ways of exterminating Jews and Gypsies and hesitates for a moment between alternatives”, Sprigge maintains, “God beckons him toward the one which will give both Himmler and God himself the more intense experience”.26 Sprigge then uses words such as “frightening”,27 “dangerous”,28 and “terrifying”,29 to describe what he takes to be Whitehead’s position, words that would be merited if he were correct.

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But this is not Whitehead’s position. Sprigge’s claim that, for a Whiteheadian, all beings, including God, are interested only in intensity of experience is simply mistaken. While it is true that Whitehead understood God as seeking to increase the amount of aesthetic value in the world, intensity of experience is not the sole criterion for beauty. As anyone who has ever experienced intense pain can testify to, the fact that an experience is vivid does not make it enjoyable.30 Beauty is the coming together of intensity of feeling and of harmony. Where there is little or no harmony, then intensity only magnifies the discord. God is that force in the world that seeks ever more complex forms of harmony and coordination, not just intensity. “God’s role”, Whitehead writes, “lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization”.31 The tragic events of the Holocaust were undeniably intense—for the victims, for their loved ones, no doubt for some of the perpetrators, and for God. This did not make them either beautiful or good. Just the opposite; their intensity only augmented their evilness. From a process perspective, God is working to maximize beauty in all things. To suggest that this promotes genocide and other acts against humanity is to seriously misread Whitehead. But what of Sprigge’s accusation that the process God can be faulted for allowing evil that could have otherwise been prevented? Sprigge asks, “Did God perhaps offer them [the Nazi soldiers] alternative subjective aims, suggesting the best, but allowing them to choose the worst?”32 This criticism is only valid if it is metaphysically possible for God to prevent free beings, in this case Nazi soldiers, from exercising their freedom. If there is something that God could have done to prevent these evil acts from occurring, and God did not do so, then God is indeed morally flawed. But if reality is such that God cannot prevent free beings from choosing to do evil, then things are otherwise. As previously noted, both Whitehead and Hartshorne contend that God does not possess all of the power that exists. Everything actual has some power, and that power can be used for good or evil. As Hartshorne has argued repeatedly, the idea that there is a single being who has all the power that exists, makes no logical sense. It has become customary to say that we must limit divine power to save human freedom and to avoid making deity responsible for evil. But to speak of limiting a concept seems to imply that the concept, without limitation, makes sense. The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. They could result in no world: for a world must consist of local agents making their own decisions. Instead of saying that God’s power is limited, suggesting that it is less than some conceivable power, we should rather say: his power is absolutely maximal, the greatest possible, but even the greatest possible power is still one power among others, is not the only power. God can do everything that a God can do, everything that could be done by “a being with no possible superior”.33

Although Sprigge seems to accept the logic behind the claim that God cannot be omnipotent in the traditional sense of the term, he nonetheless criticizes process

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philosophy for offering a God who willingly stands back, “putting up with” and “allowing”, evil to occur. But if it is metaphysically impossible, in a pluralistic universe, for one being to have all the power, and hence to determine everything that happens, then it makes no sense to fault God for allowing something to happen over which God has no control. Sprigge’s treatment of Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s understanding of the problem of evil is only a brief overview and therefore cannot be expected to be fully adequate. For example it does not deal with how the past influences the present, an important factor in discussing human choices. Nor does it consider the degree to which human experience is only passing and partially conscious, another relevant factor. Evil is not always the result of individuals consciously deciding to commit horrible acts of violence for no reason other than their own immediate satisfaction. And even in cases where this seems to be the whole explanation, it is often more complicated than that. From a process perspective, present events arise out of the past. The many facts of the past come together in a single novel occasion—“The many become one, and are increased by one”.34 Past facts do not strictly determine the new fact, but the new fact must somehow take account of its environment; it must make its decisions in light of its inheritance. Sprigge’s account of how process thinkers explain how events come to be focuses on the initial aim given by God and the decision made by the event and not the environment of past facts that also contribute to the event. From a process perspective all of the many facts that helped to produce Nazi Germany play some role in the decisions made by various individuals. Each of us is, in part, and sometimes in very large part, a product of time and place. The decisions that we make, both consciously and unconsciously, are colored by facts we do not choose. This does not free individuals from responsibility for their actions, but it places that responsibility within a particular context. The fact that a repeat of the Nazi holocaust is extremely unlikely today cannot simply be explained in terms of the moral superiority of modern-day Germans or in terms of God’s influence upon German psyches. The full explanation includes the historical conditions that prevailed in 1930’s and those that reign today. Any fully adequate explanation for evil must include not only the kinds of events that Sprigge considers—the conscious acts of human beings to inflict suffering and death upon other human beings—but all of the instances where no conscious decisions were involved. Hartshorne explains the randomness of events this way: All multiple freedom involves risk. X decides A, Y decides B; so far as both are successful what happens is A and B. And this combination neither has decided. Bring in God and C, and we have ABC; this combination too no one has decided. It simply happens. And it may be inharmonious, unfortunate. There is no way to eliminate the element of chance and risk from decision-making.35

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From a process perspective, some evil is simply the result of the randomness that is the necessary consequence of a plurality of free beings. Although Sprigge does give some attention to the randomness that is the result of a multiplicity of free beings, independently making decisions, he is particularly concerned with explaining the evil that is the direct action of conscious individuals. Such acts, important though they are, do not exhaust the cause of human pain and suffering. An earthquake along an unknown fault line may result in great suffering and loss of human life; the love of two people may result in the birth of a genetically flawed child; the eruption of a volcano can lead to the extinction of a species; a mosquito bite can result in disease or death; a moment of carelessness can have horrible consequences. The list of events that could be added to this list of unintended evil is limitless. There is literally no one to blame for much of the suffering that characterizes human existence. Historically, Christians have often explained such events in terms of God’s punishment for misdeeds or as the actions of a malevolent agent such as Satan. Some of the evil in the world is, by these accounts, the acts of a just and loving God, meeting out justice or seeking to correct sinful ways, or they are the work of God’s rival, Satan. Process philosophers reject both of these options and instead attribute such evils to the chaos associated with real freedom. Here is how Hartshorne explains why process philosophy need not posit a satanic being in order to explain the disorder of the universe. That order requires a preeminent power in one soul to order the others, and that the only such power we can conceive is in the form of a supreme soul, is a great Platonic discovery... That disorder and confusion require no single power (no Satan) to explain them, but only a multiplicity of agents able to get in each other’s way, is another sound point. Confused, disorderly collective activity requires no leader; orderly collective activity does require one.36

Some evil is unintended by anyone. This is generally the case in respect to “natural” evil, but it is also true regarding much of the “moral” evil that arises out of the welter of past facts that are human history. Just as one can give too little heed to the amount of strife and destruction in the world—both intentional and unintentional—it is also possible to give too little attention to the amount of coordination and beauty in the world. The task of any metaphysics is to be equally adequate to both facts. Even in the midst of all of the horror of the Nazi holocaust, there were instances of bravery and decency on the part of some. For process philosophers, God is that factor in the world by which there is order and beauty. In a pluralistic world there will be competing interests. What is desirable in the short term may not be best in the long run, and what is desirable for one individual may not be best for another. Insofar as God’s perspective is universal, God is able to offer the best possible future, all things considered.

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God is that function in the world by reason of which our purposes are directed to ends which in our own consciousness are impartial to our own interests... He is that element in virtue of which our purposes extend beyond values for ourselves to values for others.37

In a pluralistic world there will always be some tension between individuals, but in a universe of temporal events in which each event is affected by all other events, these differences are not absolute. Ultimately, the individual interest and the general interest can be reconciled, when the individual interest is what is in the general interest. The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good, thus exemplifying the loss of the minor intensities in order to find them again with the finer composition in a wider sweep of interest.38

For Whitehead, the greatest imaginable good is a world in which ever new forms of harmony arise out of the coordination of ever more complex individuals who have come to identify their personal interests with the interest of the whole.

3. Conclusion Many people have rejected any theistic account of the universe because they are unable to reconcile the evil in the world with the existence of a morally good divine being. It is therefore critical to show how process philosophers have sought to do just that and thus to correct Sprigge’s mischaracterization of some aspects of process philosophy. Sprigge’s own explanation for the existence of evil differs considerably from the one offered by process philosophers. For him, reality is a single whole and everything is as it must be. In his words: I incline somewhat uneasily to the view that there was really no alternative to the cosmos and its history just as it has unfolded and will continue to do so: that for reasons largely beyond us, it was just bound to be that way; and that in spite of its being that way and containing so much that is vile, it is still on balance better than nothing, in fact, on balance very good.39

Unlike the philosophy of Whitehead and Hartshorne, for Sprigge there is no alternative to history in all of its details. Things could not be otherwise. He writes: So my position is quite different from the view that all apparent evil is really good. There is real unmitigated evil in the world, and it would be better if it was not there. My suggestion, rather is that for some inscrutable reason it had to be there, though as something to be gradually overcome.40

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The position that makes the most sense to Sprigge is one similar to Royce’s, that evil is necessary to the world and that without evil, it would be impossible for some kinds of good to exist. “Royce”, he says, “is of enduring significance for having provided what, certain assumptions made, is the best solution to the problem of evil from a theistic or pantheistic point of view”.41 What he means by the important qualification, “certain assumptions made”, includes the assumption that the universe is one whole fact, not made up of a plurality of free beings, each making its own decisions. This is an assumption that process philosophers do not make and this is likely part of the reason why Sprigge finds their account of the problem of evil so plagued with inadequacy. For Whitehead and Hartshorne, reality is made up of many individual psychic units, each with its own degree of freedom (sometimes trivial and sometimes profound), making its own decisions. In such a universe tragedy is virtually inevitable. The universe, however, is not only tragic. There is also real beauty and real goodness. On this Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Sprigge agree. And although there are differences here as well, for Whitehead and Hartshorne, the beauty of the world cannot be explained apart from God. God is always at work in the universe seeking both to preserve all that is of value and increasing value, seeking to increase both the amount of harmony in the world and the intensity with which it is experienced. Although the subject of this contribution is critical, it should be read as a tribute to a philosopher, an individual who has spent his life helping others to understand the complex writings of important thinkers as well as developing his own metaphysical account of reality. Timothy Sprigge’s life-long commitment to addressing the complex questions that are of real importance to many thoughtful people (and some philosophers) stands as a wonderful example of what is good in the world.

Notes 1. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, corr. edn., eds. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 34. 2. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 446. 3. Ibid. 4. See J. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1998) and G. May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in early Christian Thought (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1994). See also, “The Divine and the Demonic”, Chap. 8, in D. Griffin’s Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 (New York: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). 5. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 346. 6. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 448.

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7. C. Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Handen, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964), p. 30. 8. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, cit, pp. 454, 458. 9. Ibid., p. 457. 10. Ibid., pp. 454, 458. 11. Ibid., pp. 456, 457. 12. Ibid., p. 457. 13. Ibid., p. 454. 14. Ibid., p. 457. 15. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1926), p. 36. 16. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 521. 17. Ibid., p. 458, see also p. 454: “both Whitehead and Hartshorne pay insufficient attention to the problem of evil, and tend to give an overly optimistic picture of human consciousness.” 18. Ibid., p. 454. 19. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, op. cit., p. 36. 20. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 105. 21. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, op. cit., p. 93. 22. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 456. 23. Ibid., p. 455, emphasis added. 24. Ibid., p. 457, emphasis added. Elsewhere he says, “there is a certain Nietzschean quality which is quietly present in Whitehead’s thought: namely, that since intensity of experience is the greatest value, it may sometimes override what is commonly called ‘morality’; this tugs in a somewhat contra-Christian direction” (p. 540). 25. Ibid., p. 456. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Sprigge, it should be noted, earlier stated that for process philosophers God is always at work in the world, seeking not only to maximize felt experience, but also to harmonize conflicting aims. “God is”, he says, “…intensely creative according to both philosophers [Whitehead and Hartshorne]. For at every moment he is doing his best (which must be the best or equal best) to bring all of the plurality of what is going on—that is, all that is going on in and between actual occasions, and all that has gone on—into the most harmonious whole he can manage” (ibid., p. 446). Surely the Nazi Holocaust and other acts of evil involving the senseless torture and murder of innocent human beings is not the “most harmonious whole” God can envision.

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31. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 346, emphasis added. 32. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 455, emphasis added. 33. C. Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 138. 34. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 21. 35. C. Hartshorne, “God as Composer-Director, Enjoyer, and, in a Sense, Player of the Cosmic Drama”, Process Studies, 30, 2001, p. 248. 36. C. Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 36. 37. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, op. cit., p. 152. 38. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 23. 39. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 521. 40. Ibid., p. 520. 41. Ibid., p. 540, emphasis added.

How Alien Are Animals?1 Stephen R. L. Clark

1. Hidden Lives According to Chesterton, humans and turkeys—for example—are “ships that pass in the night”, whose interests and ideas are entirely opaque to each other. “A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels”.2 He makes the claim in opposition to humanitarians who wished us to treat turkeys rather better—at the expense, as he supposed, of the human poor who certainly got enjoyment from occasional feasts, of turkeys or of herring. It is not a human thing, it is not a humane thing, when you see a poor woman staring hungrily at a bloater [a smoked herring], to think, not of the obvious feelings of the woman, but of the unimaginable feelings of the deceased bloater… The anti-Christmas humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no man can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he already has with the happiness of millions of the poor.3

Interestingly, he attributed something like the same inhumane, falsely utilitarian abstraction to vivisectionists: Similarly, it is not human, it is not humane, when you look at a dog to think about what theoretic discoveries you might possibly make if you were allowed to bore a hole in his head. Both the humanitarian’s fancy about the feelings concealed within the bloater, and the vivisectionists’ fancy about the knowledge concealed inside the dog, are unhealthy fancies, because they upset a human sanity that is certain for the sake of something that is of necessity uncertain. The vivisectionist, for the sake of doing something that may or may not be useful, does something that certainly is horrible.4

But my present concern is his first point: the supposedly hidden nature of turkeys, or all other non-human animals. It is not a position which Chesterton held consistently. More often, he was commonsensically inclined to suppose that we can know very well what other creatures feel and wish. In other contexts, he would have recognized that the claim of ignorance is almost always voiced by those with an interest in doing things to animals that they certainly don’t like. His proof that humanity is fallen, interestingly again, is our cruelty to animals: If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.5

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Chesterton’s inconsistencies, and essentially humane instincts, are not my present concern. In speaking of animals (non-human animals) as alien, their feelings as unknown, the nature of animal happiness as hid from us, he voiced what is a strangely common claim. There are certainly imaginable contexts in which it would be an appropriate one. Chesterton again: Suppose that in some convulsion of the planets there fell upon this earth from Mars, a creature of a shape totally unfamiliar, a creature about whose actual structure we were of necessity so dark that we could not tell which was creature and which was clothes. We could see that it had, say, six red tufts on its head, but we should not know whether they were a highly respectable headcovering or simply a head. We should see that the tail ended in three yellow stars, but it would be difficult for us to know whether this was part of a ritual or simply a tail.6

We might even have some doubts about whether it has a head or tail, or which is which. Such a genuinely alien being would also be quite difficult to understand, even if it seemed to be making noises of an irregularly regular sort. But ordinarily familiar animals are not like this. Even the seemingly strange beasts of the Burgess Shale, which at one time seemed to be built quite differently from anything now extant, have turned out, on closer inspection, to be fairly familiar arthropods.7 Even modern arthropods, as unlike us vertebrates as we can easily imagine, turn out to operate on very similar systems. It’s true that to understand them we must often put aside our first and easiest thoughts, and remember just how different they are. Washburn’s level-headed and unjustly neglected study of “the animal mind” raised the serious question “what is it like to be a wasp?” back in 1917: Anger, in our own experience, is largely composed of quickened heart beat, of altered breathing, of muscular tension, of increased blood pressure in the head and face. The circulation of a wasp is fundamentally different from that of any vertebrate. The wasp does not breathe through lungs, it wears its skeleton on the outside, and it has the muscles attached to the inside of the skeleton. What is anger like in the wasp’s consciousness? We can form no adequate idea of it.8

But that wasps are sometimes angry, in some sense not wholly alien to our own, primate anger, is at least a useful thought! And primates like chimpanzees at least show the “full picture of human anger in its three main forms: anger (i.e., aggressive action), sulking, and the temper tantrum”.9 But critics continue to claim the contrary, that animals—whether the oddities of the Burgess Shale or modern beagles—are entirely alien, and any sense we have of “understanding” them, or being members of the same moral universe, is false. Quite how this could have happened, granted that we are members of a primate and mammalian lineage that goes back many million years, and that modern biologists are rarely “species-essentialists”, I do not know. Even if the human species began with some sudden, drastic mutation (which is unlikely), this would not have created an entirely different nature. Chesterton yet again:

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We stand as chiefs and champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose cognisance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual mother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic chivalry of the dog, the humour and perversity of cats, the affection of the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion.10

The natural virtues or characters he here imputes to selected animals, of course, may owe more to symbol, to the roles that the animals play in our lives, than to any clear-headed inspection of the roles they play in theirs. But the underlying axiom is clear: we do in fact understand “them” very well, because we are close cousins, however it happened, long ago, that we grew different. No doubt, as he also observed, only human beings really notice that they resemble other creatures, and so differ from them even in their similarity. “The fish does not trace the fishbone pattern in the fowls of the air; or the elephant and the emu compare skeletons”.11 But this does not mean that we are not similar enough to understand each other: Not only fellow humans, but also animals, as presented to our sight, are signs of distinct worlds of feeling. We can know at least something of what is good and bad within those worlds and recognize it as something of which we should take account as we could not help doing if we were confronted with it more fully. And we may sense that some of the higher animals have forms of life which make a distinctive contribution to the value present in the world as a whole and should be cherished just as a variety of different human forms of life should be.12

2. Proofs and Sane Belief One explanation for the repeated claim that we don’t understand them, or understand them far less well than we suppose, is indeed that it helps to assuage any guilt we have in—apparently—mistreating them. If we don’t know that they are miserable, since we don’t know what misery is like for them, then (or so it is supposed) we need not trouble ourselves to imagine that they are, or change the way we treat them. Quite what evidence it is that we are lacking always seems obscure: experimentalists who require that it be proved that an experimental animal is miserable before they take that misery into account, are usually strangely coy when asked what proof they would accept, what it is to prove this or any other story. When all the common sense criteria of misery are present, what else is supposed to be required? My most charitable suspicion is that the demand is metaphysical—but experimental scientists have been taught to believe that “metaphysics” is a dirty word, and must therefore pretend that they have some experimental proofs in mind, without being able to specify them. As any first-year philosopher could tell us, there must always be a logical gap between even the most rigorous and compelling of experimental or experiential proofs and the truth that they purport to demonstrate. Maybe even our dearest friends are “really” programmed automata, or delusions. Maybe the whole world

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began no longer ago than Tuesday, complete with all the “evidence” of longer life. Anti-realists who imagine that they avoid the problem by equating, say, the reality of the past simply with the present evidence, or the reality of our friends with our impressions of them, have given up the game: they are Pyrrhonian sceptics, or social idealists like Orwell’s O’Brien,13 or solipsists. Realists acknowledge that there is no logically necessary step even from the most complete collection of empirical, experiential or intuited evidence to the truth of the claim that it confirms. Sane realists still believe Chesterton’s version of the unprovable axioms of human life:14 (a) Every sane man believes that the world around him and the people in it are real, and not his own delusion or dream. No man starts burning London in the belief that his servant will soon wake him for breakfast. But that I, at any given moment, am not in a dream, is unproved and unprovable. That anything exists except myself is unproved and unprovable. (b) All sane men believe that this world not only exists, but matters. Every man believes there is a sort of obligation on us to interest ourselves in this vision or panorama of life. He would think a man wrong who said, “I did not ask for this farce and it bores me. I am aware that an old lady is being murdered downstairs, but I am going to sleep”. That there is any such duty to improve the things we did not make is a thing unproved and unprovable. (c) All sane men believe that there is such a thing as a self, or ego, which is continuous. There is no inch of my brain matter the same as it was ten years ago. But if I have saved a man in battle ten years ago, I am proud; if I have run away, I am ashamed. That there is such a paramount “I” is unproved and unprovable. But it is more than unproved and unprovable; it is definitely disputed by many metaphysicians. (d) Lastly, most sane men believe, and all sane men in practice assume, that they have a power of choice and responsibility for action.15 These precepts of common sense, or sanity, and the “common notions” on which past philosophers, from the Stoics to Edward Herbert and beyond, have consciously relied, can of course be challenged—but every real or reasonable challenge must take place within a rational frame. If we really disbelieved them all we would have no rational recourse. We cannot simultaneously challenge reason and claim the rational high ground! It is true that we might be living in a merely virtual reality (devised by creatures, maybe descended from the creatures that we think we are, living in the last days of the cosmos). We might be surrounded solely by automata or zombies—or conversely by guardian angels, courteously disguised. But we have good moral as well as metaphysical reasons for accepting the rules as we know them. If we cannot prove that we have companions, it is still better to live as if we did—and utterly absurd to believe, just as unprovably, that we do not. As Sprigge has suggested in an only slightly different context,

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The proper attitude to embryos and foetuses is to be determined not only by considering the effect on their feelings, if they have them, but by considering the felt value of the way of life in which we experience them as having a certain sort of value. Thus we must ask whether investing them with the value with which we invest humans once they have been born (and which it would vastly impoverish our lives not to do so) makes for a life world which is literally better to live in than any alternative to which we might move.16

It is better to recognize the lives of others, in a way that transcends the merely verbal. John Paul, in Evangelium Vitae, makes the point, in rebuking the mentality which tends to equate personal dignity with the capacity for verbal and explicit, or at least perceptible, communication. It is clear that on the basis of these presuppositions there is no place in the world for anyone who, like the unborn or the dying, is a weak element in the social structure, or for anyone who appears completely at the mercy of others and radically dependent on them, and can only communicate through the silent language of a profound sharing of affection.17

Unfortunately John Paul—though there are more “animal-friendly” remarks in his texts than might be expected—was here writing solely of those humans who cannot make their wishes known in clear and explicit language, and reminding us that there is more to human life than words. But this is to touch on a particular reason that has been advanced for thinking animals are alien—that they cannot, literally, talk to us. Lacking the words, it is said, they also lack the thoughts and feelings—an argument that long preceded Descartes as well as modern Wittgensteinians.18 This very bad argument has helped to divert us from ancient common sense, that animals are as much inhabitants of the world as we, and our close relatives. Descartes at least had a metaphysics that made sense: humans were amphibia, of a rational soul and an animal body subsisting. How it could possibly happen, in a naturalistic and evolutionary universe, that thought and language could arrive together, without precedent or warning, remains—to me—obscure. How a human infant could possibly learn to talk without already thinking and feeling is still more obscure. It is for these reasons, amongst others, that I won’t waste time on this. It’s a waste of time especially since those who claim that we have no “proof” that animals think or feel (or what their thoughts and feelings are) would certainly not accept their telling us what they thought or felt as proof. An animal that seemed to speak might only be mouthing symbols without meaning, just as an ape manipulating symbols or signing, as it seems, in Ameslan, is only adding a little more “behaviour” to a lengthy list. In other words, it is not that animals don’t feel because they cannot talk: nothing that they do will count as “talking” because it is already a dogma that they do not feel.

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3. Mind and the Mindless Oddly, I know of no neo-Cartesian or Wittgensteinian who recognizes that there is then a problem about consciousness: namely, how it could evolve. If there is a distinction, as there is, between being really conscious and displaying the behavioural characteristics that such critics will deny prove consciousness, feeling, thought, then how could such a feature be selected by neo-Darwinian nature? Standard evolutionary theory seems to have no room for the very inwardness which is the foundation of all Cartesian certainty. Either being conscious is after all identical with some behavioural character (call it, being alert) that can be selected, or it is—for no reason anyone can see—a necessary side-effect of other features that can be selected (but having itself no manifest effects), or else it is, absurdly, an illusion (absurdly, because “illusion” is itself an effect of consciousness). None of these supposed solutions seems reasonable to me. Being conscious—or to give it its more ancient label, Soul—is something other than the things that Soul enlivens. Let every soul first consider this, that it made all living things itself, breathing life into them… Let not only its encompassing body and the body’s raging sea be quiet, but all its environment: the earth quiet, and the sea and air quiet, and the heaven itself at peace. Into this heaven at rest let it imagine soul as if flowing in from outside, pouring in and entering it everywhere and illuminating it: as the rays of the sun light up a dark cloud, and make it shine and give it a golden look, so soul entering into the body of heaven gives it life and gives it immortality and wakes what lies inert… Before soul it was a dead body, earth and water, or rather the darkness of matter and nonexistence, and “what the gods hate”, as a poet says.19

Or as another, later philosopher remarked, commenting on the strange belief that it is the “soul-less” (and so wholly unexperienced) world that is more “real”, more causally important, We may, if we like, by our reasonings, unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulating strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish or crab!20

Plotinus, it seems to me, was more accurate (or at any rate more consistent) than William James in denying any character to the imagined darkness “before” soul. Every attempt really to imagine what the world would have to have been like “before” or “without” soul ends in confusion, though there are various popular stopping points along the way. Some imagine the “jointless continuity of space and moving atoms”; others a plenum without centre, size or separation. The im-

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ages may sometimes have a salutary effect, a reminder that we at least are not the centre of the world, our concepts not the only way of cutting up reality. But there is a downside to the imagery. In The Poet and the Lunatics, one of Chesterton’s heroes comments on the character of a certain sort of scientist, one who wanted to be outside everything; to see everything hung in a vacuum, simply its own dead self… Don’t you see that that dreadful dry light shed on things must at last wither up the moral mysteries as illusions, respect for age, respect for property, and that the sanctity of life will be a superstition? The men in the street are only organisms, with their organs more or less displayed. For such a one there is no longer any terror in the touch of human flesh, nor does he see God watching him out of the eyes of a man.21

On the one hand, seeing things only “from the outside”, and pretending that we thereby see their real being, leads step by step to destruction. On the other, to see them inwardly—with an eye, that is, to their inwardness—is to see how strange, how beautiful, and how terrible they are. For there is a final reason to be cautious in our common sense: we do, too easily, attribute thoughts and feelings to other animals—and other humans too. Sometimes it is good to practice a deliberate economy of imagination, and not suppose that others see and feel things just like us. It is important especially for the sake of “animal welfare” to discover what the animals themselves prefer, rather than relying on our own judgment of what we would like if we were in their situation.22 The error is in supposing that those visible preferences are merely mechanical. It is wise to empty others of the significance we easily give them—but only if we thereby open ourselves to the significance they give themselves. Amorous young persons, to use an example I have used many times before, will do well to remember that the objects of their intention may not themselves feel amorous—but it would be just as bad to treat those “objects” as if they had no feelings. Both errors amount to solipsistic selfregard. Awakening, by contrast, to the power of soul to see and to communicate is to discover strangeness.

4. Moral and Political Conclusions And where should we go from here? In nature, or from the point of view of a genuinely impartial God, who “hates nothing that He has made”,23 there may be no difference between a human and a non-human life. But it is difficult to conceive of a satisfactory human society in which a human corpse beside the road evokes no more than the mild regret that we feel for a dead hedgehog. We are mutually bound, we human beings, to mind about each other more than we mind about the non-human. This need not be taken as an absolute or arbitrary divide. We mind, or at least perhaps we Britons mind, more about dead dogs than dead hedgehogs, because the dogs are part of our society in a way that hedgehogs aren’t. Even those

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of us who are strongly opposed to the use of non-humans on farms or in laboratories do not actually feel the same concern as we would for human victims of organised oppression. A fully committed “anti-speciesist” like Joan Dunayer24 would condemn the speciesist confusion that makes the difference. But it is not clear that this distinction is absurd or wrong, nor that we could eliminate it without appalling cost. It is hard enough to mind about other humans, ones outside the normal boundaries of kinship and national fellowship. We do not leap to protect, still less to avenge, members of other households or other states. This is partly because we recognize that liberty for those very putative victims often depends on not being interfered with by distant self-selected authority, but also because we do not mind so much about them. We have managed in the last century to begin to create a network of international law, and to dream of some global authority. We have taken steps to create some form of welfare state (even the most libertarian among us do not cheerfully suppose that our fellow citizens should be left to starve or die of some preventable or curable disease), but are also anxious not to extend such benefits beyond what we can bear to pay. All this is to say that the creation of legal rights, and the concomitant apparatus of protection and revenge, does not follow so easily even from the abstract agreement that an impartial God would not accord more value to the lives of people than of dogs or rats or honeybees. The very existence of those creatures, of all mortal sentient beings, depends on their not being impartial. They will prefer, most obviously, to mate with creatures of their own kind. They will usually feel more sympathy for conspecifics than for their more distant relatives. They will more easily consider creatures outside their species prey. It is also possible for creatures of different species to cooperate or even like each other: our own species, despite Dunayer’s accurate assessment of the damage that we have done to others, is able to admire, befriend and care for creatures of other kinds. But it remains doubtful that we could construct a genuinely non-speciesist system, one in which all sentient individuals would have their rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness endorsed, protected and avenged, and in which the sight of a human corpse would mean no more than the sight of a dead dog or hedgehog or honeybee. The historical evidence is that in such a society no-one’s rights would be protected or avenged. But this is not to endorse all our old ways, and still leaves us with a problem. The world we all inhabit has been built by living things, both materially and inwardly, and not just by the recent lineage of hominids we call the human species. There are capacities that, as far as we can tell, are found only within that lineage, but even these occur within the context of capacities and achievements shared with other living things. It is ever clearer, indeed, that this Earth has been built by, is sustained by, the bacterial population (within which talk of distinct species is not very helpful), and all multicellular, eukaryotic life is carried along in that. Speciation is a habit found only amongst sexual creatures, a device

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which permits the propagation and preservation of novel genetic traits that would otherwise be dissipated. “Without isolation [that is, without speciation] all organic beings would have been nearly uniform, and all would have belonged to a single type, which would be the one best fitted to getting food and for propagating its race: a half-animal, half-vegetable, and a ruthless cannibal”.25 Speciation allows many more creatures to share the world, by diversifying their talents and tastes, and cooperating in the construction of a living world more diversely beautiful, and more stable, than the uniform world imagined by Hutton. The price is that everyone has a primary commitment towards, and sentiment in favour of their own particular species-life and their very own conspecifics. But this isn’t all that matters, even to us. Species-essentialism was not a ridiculous theory (and incidentally not an Aristotelian or Platonic theory either26), but its time is past: modern biologists have returned to Aristotle’s own actual practice, regarding “species boundaries” as permeable and ever changing. It has even recently been suggested that the lineages we now identify respectively as human and chimpanzee (hominid and pongid) actually re-merged at some point in their history before separating out again.27 It is perhaps not surprising that this suggestion has been made at the same time as genetic engineers prepare to transfer genes from one species to another, remarking that genomes are much more like loose-leaf folders than bound volumes. Freeman Dyson, a famous speculative physicist, has even suggested that the age of speciation is, for us, now over: in future genes will be exchanged, new organisms constructed, very much as they are within the bacterial, prokaryotic population. “We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal”.28 In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

I am less attracted by this idea than Dyson. Even (or especially?) professionals engaged in genetic engineering may create monsters (that is, creatures painfully ill-adapted to their lives): this is not a game for children or amateurish adults. There is a yet more sinister application. Chesterton yet again: The sub-conscious popular instinct against Darwinism was... that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular instinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and hunch-backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and systematically will

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mostly be done by a successful class and almost solely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of unhuman hybrids and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau… The rich man may come to be breeding a tribe of dwarfs to be his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters.29

This, after all, is the sort of thing we have routinely done with “animals”—and if humans are only a partly separated lineage of animals we shall doubtless do (that is, the successful class will do) the same to humans. It is understandable that those, like Chesterton, who wish to protect the human poor deplore attempts to blur the boundaries between animal and human. It is understandable, but I think, in the long run, hopeless. There are metaphysical and epistemological arguments against pervasive evolutionary naturalism. In the first place, as before, it is impossible to see how consciousness could emerge from what, by definition, is essentially unconscious (an argument which has led Timothy Sprigge to adopt a form of panpsychism). In the second, it is incredible that merely Darwinian selection should produce a species capable of learning about the world at large, or believing its results. But though these arguments seem to me compelling, they do not reestablish the Cartesian or even the Scholastic barrier between animals and humans. We might as well and as usefully, as Plato observed, divide animals into cranes and non-cranes, as humans and non-humans.30 So neo-Darwinian and neoPlatonist alike have to try to face up to the problem otherwise. One strand in the Western philosophical and theological tradition has been an insistence that humans and animals are of different sorts—or at the least, that humans have a rational soul in addition to the animal soul we share with animals. It has been dogma that “animals” only have a sense of their immediate surroundings, and are moved only by desire and fear. Arguing that human beings are animals has therefore been a piece of crude psychology, and even cruder politics. In practice it is always other people (and especially the poor) who have such simple motives. Those who speak of them take it for granted that they themselves have an eye for truth, a disillusioned power of reasoning. I therefore wholly endorse Chesterton’s insistence that humans aren’t just “animals”. But there has also been another strand, acknowledging that animals aren’t entirely animal either. Most of them are social beings, not just “wild beasts”. Most of them—unsurprisingly—operate within a richly imagined world, not just as stimulus response machines. Many display the ethical restraints and impulses that good humans also feel, even if—it is probably fair to say—they do not reason about them (any more than most humans do), nor grasp that parochial or personal affections can be generalized into a concern for other creatures very much like our immediate kin. Unprejudiced observation strongly suggests that animals—especially but perhaps not only vertebrates—can be self-aware, responsible, and forward-looking. They can also display the very same vices as ourselves: ambition, greed and ill-temper. “The sense of affinity one may have with a horse is not an illusion, nor a matter of some vague similarity”: at the

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very least, we all inhabit a three dimensional space.31 This is not to say that they are just the same as us, nor that they should be. The truth there is in speciesessentialism, it may be, is indeed that there are different forms of beauty, different goals, and different worlds extracted from the single world that underpins us all. “The whole object of history”, Chesterton assured us, “is to make us realize that humanity can be great and glorious, under conditions quite different and even contrary to our own”.32 The object of a similarly conscientious zoology is to help us realize that life can be glorious under conditions quite different and even contrary to our own. We are all, as it were, experiments in living, all seeking to unfold some particular version of the larger beauty. How alien are animals? As alien as our next-door neighbour, as much the same as angels and archangels.

Notes 1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a conference on Christianity and Animal Welfare, at the University of Chester, in September 2006, and at a conference on Christianity and the Imagination, at Baylor University Texas, in November 2006. 2. G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered (Methuen: London, 1908), p. 220. I have discussed more of Chesterton’s opinions and arguments in G. K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006). 3. Ibid., p. 216. 4. Ibid. 5. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: London, 1961; 1st edn. 1908), p. 15. 6. “The Philosophy of Islands” (1903), reprinted in The Spice of Life, ed. D. Collins (Beaconsfield: Finlayson, 1964), and taken from . 7. See S. C. Morris, The Crucible of Creation: the Burgess Shale and the Explosion of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 8. A. L. Washburn, The Animal Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1917, 2nd edn.), 3ff. Cf. Sprigge, “Final Causes”, in Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 45, 1971, pp. 149170, introducing the notion “what it is like to be something”. 9. D. O. Hebb, Textbook of Psychology (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1972, 3rd edn.), p. 202. 10. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World? (London: Cassell, 1912), p. 264. 11. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), p. 307. 12. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 270. The extent to which individuals of particular species make distinctive contributions to the world, the extent to which their individual points of view are different, is perhaps the largest and most difficult question of all. I myself suspect that even individual crabs, cuttlefish and caterpillars are more distinct than we most easily suppose. At any rate, they probably think they are. See also Sprigge, “Consciousness”, Synthese, 98, 1994, pp. 73-93.

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13. See my “Orwell and the Anti-Realists”, Philosophy, 67, 1992, pp. 141-154. 14. Daily News, June 22, 1907: a reference I owe to Martin Ward, . 15. See A. Hannay, “Comments on Honderich, Sprigge, Dreyfus and Rubin, and Elster”, Synthese, 98, 1994, pp. 95-112, at p. 99: “But if I should ever deny the existence of consciousness or begin to agree that the presently extant theories, including all extant versions of functionalism, provide adequate accounts of all we ever need to know or imply by saying we are conscious, I trust there will be some independent evidence that I have lost my mind.” 16. Sprigge, Foundations, op. cit., p. 211. 17. Evangelium Vitae, 25th March 1995 at . 18. Wittgenstein’s own view of animals is more unsettled than most of his followers suppose: see N. Pleasants, “Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein, Ethics, and the Lives of Animals”, Inquiry, 49, 2006, pp. 314-336. 19. Plotinus, Ennead V.1 [10].2, 1, 13-23, 26-28 (quoting the Homeric description of Hades, in Iliad 20.65): A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus’ Enneads, Vol. 5 (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 15-17. 20. W. James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1890), Vol. 1, pp. 288ff. 21. G. K. Chesterton, The Poet and the Lunatics [1929] (Darwen Finlayson: London, 1962), p. 70. Later in the same book, Chesterton identifies the true honour and probity of science, in the willingness to admit that one is wrong. 22. See M. S. Dawkins, Animal Suffering: the Science of Animal Welfare (London: Chapman and Hall, 1980). Dawkins has found ways of allowing chickens, for example, to prioritize their wants, thereby showing that their priorities are not always what we would expect. 23. Wisdom of Solomon, 11.24 24. J. Dunayer, Speciesism (Derwood, Maryland: Ryce Publishing, 2004); see my reviewarticle “Respecting Sentient Beings”, Organization and Environment, 19. 2, 2006, pp. 280283. 25. F. W. Hutton, Darwinism and Lamarkism (London: Duckworth, 1899), p. 105. 26. See my “Is Humanity a Natural Kind?”, in What is an Animal?, ed. T. Ingold (Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 17-34, reprinted in The Political Animal (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 40-58. 27. See reporting N. Patterson, D. J. Richter, S. Gnerre, E. S. Lander, D. Reich, “Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees”, Nature, 441, pp. 1103-1108 (29 June 2006: published online 17 May 2006): “Our analysis also shows that human-chimpanzee speciation occurred less than 6.3 million years ago and probably more recently, conflicting with some interpretations of ancient fossils. Most strikingly, chromosome X shows an extremely young genetic divergence time, close to the genome minimum along nearly its entire length. These unexpected features would be explained if the human and chimpanzee lineages initially diverged, then later ex-

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changed genes before separating permanently” (, accessed 20 September 2006). 28. F. Dyson, “The Darwinian Interlude”, Technology Review, March 2005: , accessed 3 September 2006. Dyson takes his cue from C. Woese’s “A New Biology for a New Century”, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2004, 68. 2, pp. 173-186, , accessed 3 Sept. 2006. 29. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (Cassell: London, 1910), p. 259. 30. Plato, Statesman, 263d: “This kind of classification might be undertaken by any other creature capable of rational thought—for instance cranes are reputed to be rational in this way and there may be others. They might invest themselves with a unique and proper dignity and classify the race of cranes as being distinct from all other creatures; the rest they might well lump together, men included, giving them the common appellation of ‘the beasts’. So let us try to be on the watch against mistakes of that kind.” 31. Sprigge, Foundations, op. cit., p. 266. 32. G. K. Chesterton, Fancies versus Fads (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 176.

Ecosophy, Sophophily and Philotheria John Llewelyn

1. Introductory Once upon a time I did a trek with a group along a network of valleys to the base camp of the 1970 British expedition to the South summit of Annapurna. Although our final destination was merely the edge of the Hiunchuli glacier, our sirdar Yong Tenzing agreed to my request that I might proceed on my own to a cairn a little higher up. On top of the cairn was a Norwegian 10 øre coin. Had this been placed there, I mused, by the philosopher and mountaineer Arne Naess with some of whose writings I was familiar? If not, had it been put there by his nephew and namesake, the Arne Naess who has sponsored Himalayan climbs, supporting them financially to the tune of rather more than 10 øre? Before proceeding much further in this essay I shall have reason to return to the head of another valley of the Indian subcontinent. But before doing that I should mention Timothy Sprigge’s fascination by that subcontinent. This is not the only point of contact my essay makes with his work. Much of that is preoccupied with questions regarding the environment, in particular with questions concerning the relationship between humans and animals. In the course of the present small addition to the literature on these topics I touch on (only touch on) more general subjects which he has treated at length with perspicacity, namely, the logic of internal and external relations, the relation of wholes and parts and the relation of the creation to God.

2. Subwholes and Singularity In his Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy Arne Naess senior describes how each thing belongs to a whole and to a plurality of subwholes according to an indefinite range of possible Gestalten in which it may appear as a figure or ground.1 That belonging is not the belonging only of an instance that falls under a concept. Belonging as the belonging of an instance that falls under a concept, the belonging in terms of which rights and justice are defined, itself falls within a notion of justice as concordance that is closer to the idea of justice as expounded in Plato’s Republic and to Anaximander’s notion of dikê as expounded in Heidegger’s “The Anaximander Fragment”2 than it is to the Enlightenment and Kantian idea of justice and injustice determined as cases

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or maxims falling under or falling foul of a natural or moral law by which they are taken to be covered. However, in the Critical system of Kant this hierarchical idea of justice falls under the regulative Idea of orderedness in an organic whole that has more in common with the Platonic conception of justice as synergic harmony. Instead of prescribing principles entailing conclusions unidimensionally, this conception of justice as balance within a multidimensional whole offers guidelines. Deductive rigour makes way for persuasion, as in the cosmogony outlined in the Timaeus. Instead of a blueprint we have a recipe, instead of a tracing a map. A recipe leaves room for practical judgment and imagination. It therefore leaves room for their misuse. The difference between use and misuse is a difference of phronèsis, practical understanding in our ways of conducting ourselves in the regional ecologies of the world. From this willingness to invoke Aristotle’s notion of phronèsis it must not be inferred that the conception of ecology referred to here is an endorsement of his doctrine that each of the elements composing an ecology has a natural directionality of movement. What the conception of ecology referred to here does endorse is more like what is described in the following paragraphs from Aloo Dastur’s Man and His Environment. They capture something of what is important in the conception of ecology articulated by Arne Naess. And they take us back to the mountains at the head of a valley, where this essay began. A river, in its journey from its source to its mouth exhibits, as it were, a section of our civilisation. At its source among mountains or hills are found stone and rocks and minerals; hence, man can live there and maintain himself by mining. Adjoining this part of the valley section are woodlands where man can fell trees, while his neighbour in the forest is essentially a hunter. On the expansive grasslands the shepherd and his sheep can thrive with advantage. As we enter the lower slopes of the valley we see the crofts of the crofter, while further down on fertile plains the farmer and the gardener. Of course, at the mouth of the river the fisherman plies his boat and/or casts his nets and baits. Thus does each part of the valley section represent a unit of environmental advantages for some specific human activities and difficulties for some others. Each has its own possibilities, its own specific fundamental occupation and along with it its subsidiary occupations. To these eight typical occupations can be traced the several occupations and professions of the present day world. In each part springs up a distinctive culture with its characteristic arts, crafts, sciences, ideas and ideals, beliefs and religions, and even its super-social and anti-social representatives. The valley section is a corrective on the hypothesis of geographical determinism because of its occupational bias and ecological approach. It classifies regions not merely in terms of climate or location or size, but with special reference to the possibilities which every region offers to its inhabitants for specific, fundamental pursuits. Each of its parts is the smallest regional unit from which all inquiry pertaining to regional surveys should proceed. The various divisions of the earth into zones, climatic or botanico-zoological, given by geographers are unsatisfactory by themselves and there is no regular, scientific basis of division adopted by them. Each of their final regional units can be further sub-divided into several regions... Moreover, the typical problems of “transitional” or “pocket” regions are wholly ignored in these earlier divisions.

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The various parts of the valley section are not conceived as isolated, water-tight compartments. Rather, they are so many necessary links in a chain having points of contact with and/or divergence from each other. Each part is related not merely to its immediate neighbours but also to every other; and these linkages are not casual but causal. This enables us to view a world of linked valley sections as one co-ordinate whole with life and activities, plant, animal and human, continually going through different processes of transformation and change. It thus offers the widest scope for the study of relationships between man and his environment not only analytically in each region but also synthetically along the entire valley, not only statically but also dynamically.3

Aristotle studied the interactions between organisms and their environment, but it was not until 1866 that the term “oecology” [sic] was introduced as a name for such a study in Ernst Haeckel’s General Morphology of Organisms.4 An oikos is a house, an inhabited place. But unless it is specifically to animal or human ecology that reference is being made, I shall understand by the term ecology either any inhabited place or the study of any inhabited place, with the unlimited universality that the word oecumenical implies, not the limited universality such as that which the Greeks imposed when they restricted the oikoumenè to that part of the world inhabited by them as contrasted with those they called barbarians, or which the Christian church laid down when oecumenism extended no further than Christendom. Although this uncircumscribed universality does not exclude any inhabited region from its scope, it allows for regional ecologies and ecologies of ecologies like those which, following Patrick Geddes, Dastur calls a valley section. The question as to what constitutes a regional ecology is a descendent of the Platonic question about separating at the joints, but we must follow Dastur and Geddes in allowing for pockets, limitrophes, interregna and change. Who or what are to count as inhabitants? Organisms at least, according to practitioners of the science of ecology going back to Haeckel and beyond to Aristotle. According to Aristotle an organ is something living that performs a work, an ergon, something with which we toil (ergazomai). If it is also Aristotle’s view that an organ is a tool (ergaleion) and that an organic body (soma organikon) like the human body is a kit of tools, we have a problem on our hands, indeed a problem posed by our hands. For there is a vital difference between the way work is performed by the hand that holds a hammer and the way work is performed by the hammer itself. My hand can work like a hammer when it is taken in my other hand or in the hand of someone else and brought down heavily on a lump of clay in order to flatten it out. Only when it is used in such a manner does it function instrumentally. Only then is my hand handy or unhandy. So something seems to be going wrong right from the beginning of the history of the word organism, already in the work of the thinker who set out to provide an organon, an ordered classification of whatever there is, logical, biological,

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physiological, psychological, anthropological, cosmological, theological, ecological. The last-mentioned of these domains is the concern of this essay in respect of its ethological and ethnological dimension, but its concern is above all ecology considered from the, broadly speaking, ethical point of view. Common to the ethological, the ethnological and the ethical is the idea of the habitual expressed in the Greek term ethò. So there is a connection here with our question as to who is to count as inhabitants. An ethnos was for the Greeks a people and a nation. For the authors of the Bible the nations were the Gentiles understood either as non-Jews, goyim, or as those who were neither Jews nor Christians. It is as though the Biblical use of the words ethnos and èthea inherited the force it had already in some contexts for the Greeks when it was used of herds and flocks and the places occupied by them. That force is ambiguous. It could be either exclusive or inclusive. It permitted the word to be used to connote either cohabitation and inclusion or alienation and exclusion. In our exemplary paragraphs from Dastur the inclusive force of ethnos has become absorbed into what she understands by ecology, just as ethology as understood by Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris is the study of what they claim non-human animals and human beings have in common. Their claim implies that animals like humans inhabit, inherit and transmit non-genetic social and cultural structures. Ethology as Lorenz and Morris understand it is part of ecology as understood by Geddes and Dastur. This is evident from the paragraphs cited from her. In each part of the valley there arises, she writes, “a distinctive culture with its characteristic arts, crafts, sciences, ideas and ideals, beliefs and religions, and even supersocial and anti-social representatives”, and, she goes on to say, we are able “to view a world of linked valley sections as one co-ordinate whole with life and activities, plant, animal and human, continually going through different processes of transformation and change”. Transformation and change are undergone by the view of the world and the words through which that view is constituted and expressed. A Gestalt switch of worldview is often a Gestalt switch of wordview. That this is so needs saying because the linguistic èthos we inhabit at any one time is a habit, so it conspires to conceal from our view that a given word belongs to a history of the mutations it has undergone and will go on undergoing. This holds for the words oikos and “ecology” and èthos and “ethics”. Ethics, hence ecological ethics, is unethical unless it is simultaneously undergoing and transmitting an education, hence an education about its own name. Dastur’s and my definition of ecology will embrace human and non-human animals, and plants. Such a definition is not altogether uncontroversial, since the ecological is sometimes equated with the natural and opposed to the human in line with the tendency to oppose the human to nature, even to prize the human because it is anti-natural. This tendency is manifest, for example, in the context

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of an interpretation of Genesis impressed by the idea that the human being is created in the image of God. This tendency is reinforced by the seemingly axiomatic status of the idea that the God at least of Judaism, Christianity and Islam must be extra-ecological. How can he not be that if he is extra-territorial, extraterrestrial, the ET by whom the earth is created? If God or the gods are excluded from the natural, is He, are they, to be included in the super-social that is yet included within the ecosystem as defined by Geddes and Dastur? How could the Good God be intra-systematic, any more than the Good could be other than beyond being, epekeina tès ousias? How can the one that is responsible for creating and organizing the cosmos be part of the cosmos itself? How can the transcendent be immanent? The answer toward which this essay has so far been tending learns something from the way in which in the context of those ancient questions, as in the not so ancient context of secular Enlightenment, we find that our thinking turns on analogy and equivocation. But in the response towards which the present essay would progress the notions of analogy and equivocation are invoked in a manner that seeks not to beg theological questions either way. It tries to remain neutral with regard to the tradition of positive theology, negative theology and their secular competitors. It would aim to outline a conception of ecology that does justice both to the whole and the singular existents within it. As indicated above, it would attempt to do justice to a notion of justice that is, in the terms of the distinction made by Arne Naess, holistic but not totalistic. This distinction between holism and totalism can be developed with the assistance of what Emmanuel Levinas writes about the difference between infinity and totality.5 Readers of his works will perceive that I have learned something from what he writes about the face. Some will say that I have not learned enough from what he says about this. For he is very resistant to the thought that a human being can be face to face with anything other than another human being, allowance made for the eventuality that in the face of the other human being we are being looked at by God. Leaving that eventuality on one side, and without ruling out or ruling in the eventuality that God is an existent, I ask my reader to consider each and every existent, as an existent, as ipso facto also a face. That is to say, each existent is ipso facto not just a fact or a constituent of a fact. Not to acknowledge a responsibility to an existent as a sheer existent is to be irresponsible. Not to consider it as putting me under a prima facie obligation is to be inconsiderate. Not to want, other things being equal, to support its existence— and to support it not only because it supports us—is to be wanton. I shall not repeat here what I have said on this subject elsewhere.6 The totalizing justice of cases falling under laws falls under the ecological justice of wholeness, but the latter justice as synergic harmony within a nontotalized ecological whole in turn falls. The whole is itself a singular existent. However, it loses any automatic autonomy its wholeness may appear to confer

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on it when a response is made to the appeal of every thing in the singularity of its incomparable existence as such. It may seem that an ecology cannot tolerate singularity except in so far as the contained singular existent is internally related to the containing singular existent, every thing being internally related to everything. Does not the very notion of an ecology imply a systematic relationship between the whole and the items within the whole? And what else could a systematic relationship be than one in which the terms are defined in terms of each other? This conception of internal relations is far stricter than the gestaltist notion of internal relations appealed to by Arne Naess. It is too strict because too conceptual. It is too procrustean to serve as a basis of our understanding of how the parts of an ecological system participate in the whole. This does not mean that one must adopt a notion of ecology in which all relations are loose and external. This is why Dastur says that the relations are causal, not casual. A relation that is external to a subecology will usually be internal to another. In which relation a thing stands will depend on the “valley section”. That expression implies differences of location, higher up and lower down. But Dastur’s description makes it clear that the series of sections also represent different historical stages. Practices that fit well in an earlier way of life in the uplands may be a misfit in the valley plain. And vice-versa. For what is earlier in the life of society may not correspond to what is earlier in the course of a river. The region surrounding a port is likely to be settled before the less accessible hinterland near the source. But because when a people grows older in the same place or migrates its history stays with it, memory may exert upon it pressures conducing to a retention of ancient practices in a later age when very ingenious arguments indeed have to be invoked to justify the continuance. I want now to show how this holds for the ancient practice of hunting mentioned by Dastur as it is defended in José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting and Roger Scruton’s On Hunting.7

3. A Shabby Sophism I choose the two texts just mentioned because what is written in them is so contrary to my own feelings about hunting in self-styled civilized societies and because they demonstrate the extent to which what is fitting is a matter of that with which we feel comfortable. However, I shall preface my samplings of those texts by citing an author who began with a view close to that of Ortega and Scruton, but became converted to the view I find it easier to share. The scene about to be described in my first citation may cause you some distress. Nevertheless, please do not look away. One day, stationed on the edge of the forest, while beaters were driving the game, with a gunshot I bring down a wolf, then I run up in order to dispatch him with a huge stick prepared for

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this purpose. I hit him at the base of the nose, the most sensitive part of the animal, and he looks at me right in the eyes and at each blow a stifled sigh escapes him. Soon his paws are convulsed, they draw themselves up, a slight shudder runs through them, they grow stiff. I return briskly to my place, quite stirred up, and hide myself behind my tree to lie in wait for a new victim... But little by little a kind of trouble took possession of me; then, suddenly, I understood, by means of the heart and not by reason, that this murder was in itself a wicked action and that worse than the action even was the pleasure that it procured, and worse still was the dishonesty with which I sought to justify myself. Only then did reason show me the emptiness of my previous arguments in favour of hunting. I understood that the pretext with which I had provided myself was false, and that the wolf could with the same justification say that in eating the hares, he was saving the insects swallowed with the grass, the hare would be able to reason in the same way, and the insects in their turn.8

Thus Tolstoy in an essay entitled “The Hunt”, after reporting his “shabby sophism” that every animal, beast of prey or not, destroys other living beings, so why should not human beings follow suit, for in doing so they would be saving the life of the being on which the hunted animal lives?

4. Judgments and Adjustments Promising to come back to the issue raised here by Tolstoy’s distinction between heart and head, we can turn away now from this bloody scene to the safety of the abstractness of the general topic of deep ecology. What we think of as the attitude of what Arne Naess calls deep ecology is manifested as vividly by the views of Ortega and Scruton as it is by the views I share with those who are against hunting that entails a chase and the hope of a kill where this kill cannot be defended on the grounds that without it someone would go hungry. Deep ecological attitudes may be expressed both by those who are for hunting, the philotheriasts, and those who are against it. And the depth will be in part a depth of feeling. This does not mean that these feelings are not backed by beliefs concerning matters of empirical or metaphysical or theological fact. These beliefs may not be blind. But they may be biased, and biased either way; that is to say, the pressure of habituation may be so great that, in contrast to Tolstoy’s experience, one’s belief continues unchanged under its own momentum in the face of evidence and arguments against it. This is why the most persuasive evidence is either that of first-hand experience or that of first-hand experience mediated by someone with filmic, literary or other artistic skill. That Scruton has such literary skill in no little measure is manifest in the descriptions of the more or less immediate pleasures of closeness to the natural world he discovered through his being introduced to fox-hunting, “an involvement” he writes, “which changed my life”.9 Closeness, for instance, to Dumbo, his first horse, who was initially as unfitted to join the smart hunting set as his rider makes it clear he felt himself to be. More at home on that society is another horse, Bob. Of him Scruton engag-

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ingly writes: “Each field he entered he scanned at once to find the points of exit and if, in the distance, he saw that a horse was jumping, he would smile all over his body and make for the place”.10 Then there is Barney, who inspires the final paragraph of the book’s Epilogue. But let me give the last word to Heidegger, for whom “care” is the relation to the world that distinguishes you and me. He defines care thus: “ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in as Beingalongside”. And that, more or less, is what it feels like, jumping hedges on Barney. The being-alongside is mine; the ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in is Barney’s. Hunting gives sense to everything—even to Heidegger.11

With rather more humour than Heidegger is able to muster, Scruton nonetheless shares with him the respect for roots that can easily, but not necessarily, lead to a lack of respect for those whose roots grow elsewhere than our own, those who are torn from their roots or those who never had any roots at all. He believes that the fox is better served by hunting because it causes the fox less suffering than any other form of cull; yet he grants that only a very small number of foxes are killed by hunting with dogs; and anyway (“anyway” is often the sign of what Freud calls an argument from the kettle, that is to say, one argument too many) the maintenance of fox hunts leads to the maintenance of foxes. He considers that because other species nowadays depend upon us for their survival we have a duty to preserve these species, but that unless the animal is one we have undertaken to care for as a pet or on a farm, there is no room for grief at its death. This view that there is room for grief over the death of an animal only when the animal is for instance a pet dog, would seem to exclude the possibility of grief over the death of someone who has undertaken to care for us, for instance a human guardian or a god. Or, in order to keep open this possibility, are we to take Scruton to be saying that it is sufficient in order for there to be room for grief that the grief be for a being we have loved? He does say that grieving is the offshoot of love, so, “unless the rabbit is our loved companion, we must not grieve for him”. (Is our guardian or our god a loved companion?) Yet he cites the following words from Sir William Bromley Davenport’s confession “that when alone I have come across the hiding place of a ‘beaten’ fox, and he has, so to speak, confided his secret to me with big upturned and indescribably appealing eye, it has been sacred to me; I have retired softly, and rejoiced with huge joy when the huntsman at last calls away his baffled pack”. According to Scruton, Sir William’s pity should not be allowed to betray the relation between huntsman and hounds. If the hounds are called off too often they will be so baffled that they will lose all gusto for the chase and in due course the hunters will lose their hunting. Scruton’s most fundamental reason for thinking that this would be a great loss sometimes seems to be that the practice of hunting is the essence of Old England. He allows that fox-hunting has been the essence of Old England only since

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the seventeenth century, when it began as an aristocratic pursuit. The hunting for the continuing practice of which Ortega argues has a more ancient history, for it is not only of fox-hunting that his book treats. Scruton and he stress that hunting did not remain the diversion of only one class. It is, along with racing, dancing and conversation, says Ortega, among the most enjoyable occupations of “the normal man”. It belongs to “the repertory of the purest forms of human happiness”. Why? One of his answers to this is ingenious. Natural to the wolf is the feeling that it is a prey. Wolves “by nature, count on an ‘ideal’ hunter”. Now “The only adequate response to a being that lives obsessed with avoiding capture is to try to catch it”. We are doing it a favour in pursuing it to its death. And—English sentimentalists note well—pursuit that ends not in a kill but in a photograph is a cheat; it cheats both the hunted and the hunter. Or, rather, it is the destruction of hunting altogether. Although the hunter’s goal may not be the kill, the goal of authentic hunting itself is the kill. Scruton writes: “The kill is the goal of hunting.” Ortega writes: “the killing of the animal is the natural end of the hunt and the goal of hunting itself, not of the hunter”. Yet for Scruton the kill is the goal of the hounds, their “single-minded motive”. Scruton and Ortega are agreed on what the word “hunting” means. Among other things it means that its end is the end of the wolf or the fox, even if that death is not what interests the hunter, what interests him being what he has to do in order that this death will ensue. As Ortega puts the matter apothegmatically: “one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted”. He is enlightening us as to the meaning of a word. Let us let Ortega have that meaning. But let us add that the most likely reason why it has that meaning is that, in earlier valley sections or others contemporary with that in which hunting is a sport, hunting was necessary to the sustenance of human life, as necessary as it still sometimes is, we are told, for the maintenance of wild animal life. Ortega himself says, “the general lines of the hunt are identical today with those of five thousand years ago”. They are identical in particular, he explains, in that whatever rules may have been introduced to assure that the hunted creature is fair game, the inequality of hunter and hunted not being allowed to become too great, when it comes to the moment when the hunt gets underway, “reason does not intervene in any greater degree than it did in primitive times, when it was no more than an elemental substitute for the instincts”. Too true. But in the valley section in which hunting is a way in which human beings disport themselves it is not as locked in to its ecology as it was five thousand years ago. It no longer fits so tightly into its regional ecosystem that it would be much missed if it were acknowledged to be a relic of the past. It is not so locked in that it cannot be reconceived in such a way that its goal is not a kill but a click of a camera or simply a delight to the naked eye.

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No less ingenious is Ortega’s second answer to the question why hunting is one of the purest sources of human happiness. It is one of the purest sources of human happiness because it lowers the human to the animal. It does something “more spiritual”, he says, than raising the animal to the level of man. Without assuming an equality between humankind and animalkind, the ethics of hunting requires that restrictions be imposed on the hunters that give the hunted animal a chance to escape. This is tantamount to “a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority”. I have said “religious”, and the word does not seem excessive to me... a fascinating mystery of Nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous. Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotions in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, in the laws of Nature.12

The least that can be said about this is that it acknowledges the animal in man without implying that he is contaminated by his animality. This humbling of man through his dim recognition of his own animality and “the equivocal nature of man’s relationship with animals” leads every hunter to experience a certain uneasiness “when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal”. Why does it not lead him to stay his hand, thereby demonstrating that the humbling of man is consistent with recognition of the human component in the ambivalence of his relationship with animals and animality? There are other ways of paying homage to what is divine in the laws of nature than killing the enchanting animal, other ways of recognizing their charm when the animal is hunted for sport, not out of a need for food. The ambivalence in question is double. It is the ambivalence between feeling (pity, for instance) and reason and an ambivalence between reason and the capacity for language. This second ambivalence is literally an equivocality, but it is one that relates back to the first ambivalence, since language is the vehicle not only of propositions and inferences but also of feelings. Whereas Scruton argues that we should not give the last word to pity but to reason in the circumstances described by Sir William Davenport—though Sir William too could have been acting out of both reason and pity—Ortega is perhaps a little too ready to luxuriate in the grandiosity of the conflict in which the human being finds himself. He appears to welcome the opportunity to plunge into and remain mesmerized by the “formidable mystery” of the dilemma with which the hunt is said to confront men—and, presumably, women, though he is quieter about them than Scruton is about “the hunting harpie”. Ortega is less sanguine (if that is the right word) about the scope of reason than is Scruton. At one of the few places where Ortega does refer to a woman explicitly it is to chide her for her presumption. The woman in question, “an

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Englishwoman, or a woman raised in England”, had donated money for the wounded in the Spanish civil war. It turned out that by the wounded she meant injured dogs, for, she observed, “It is men who make war, and dogs are not to blame for the injuries they themselves suffer”. Stopping short of saying that the dogs may be responsible for the injuries the soldiers suffer, Ortega scolds her for supposing she can be so sure that men are ultimately to blame for war. “Why does this woman, who manipulates the apothegm like one of Plutarch’s philosophers, have enough perceptiveness to discover the blamelessness of the dog and yet be completely blind to the ultimately doggish in man, lost in an existence that he does not dominate and cudgelled from the one side and another by the most impenetrable Destiny?” Ortega is for letting be what is “absolutely or for the present, indiscernible”. So although he is careful to distinguish hunting from the bullfight, on the grounds that the latter is characterized by a reciprocity while the former is not, and although he allows himself to be impressed by “the frightening mystery of blood” in which blood is seen as sullying whatever it spills on, he allows that there is one exception to this, to wit “when it spurts from the nape of a bull that has been lanced well (picado) and spills down both sides of the animal. In the sun, the crimson of the brilliant liquid takes on a refulgence that turns it into a jewel. This exception, the only one that I know of, is as strange as the rule that it breaks”. This piety challenges us not to lose the propensity for strangeness, for what Keats calls the negative capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact & reason”.13 But we had better not send reason off on permanent sabbatical leave. It is a question of balance and a question of judgment, where judgment is not to be confused with a judgment in the sense of a verdict. In my judgment Ortega errs on the side of giving himself and advocating for his readers a vacation from the human condition, a vacation so vacated of reason as to be atavistic. His reason for remaining paralyzed by the mystery of the relationship between the human being and the animal being, including the animal being whose mystery the human being senses in himself, is tilted so much in favour of the human being that his apparently deep ecology may after all be a shallow one, that is to say, one in which care for the nonhuman has become no more than a means of caring for the human. Awestruck by the charm of animals we should be, but we should not be struck dumb in regard to their own needs.

5. Responsive Responsibility Scruton too recognizes the wonder and charm of animals. We have seen that he also admits that we have duties to animals, for instance a duty to preserve animal species. But, following Kant, he advances an argument, not obviously

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consistent with that admission and certainly inconsistent in itself, to the effect that we can have direct moral obligations only to beings that can have obligations to us. From the fact that animals are not moral beings he seems to infer that they are not appropriate subjects of moral regard. “If they were moral beings, then Kant’s categorical imperative would apply to them: it would be wrong to kill them, capture them, confine them, harm them, or curtail their freedom”. But many of the people who live in my valley section think it is wrong to do many or all of these things except under certain circumstances such as would constitute exceptions also in our treatment of human beings. Not to see this is not to see that Kant’s categorical imperative is a less comprehensive account of the nature of morality than human inhabitants of our post-Enlightenment valley sections tend to think, and that it is time to move back or forward a section or more. Even if the formal moral law or its categorically imperative version straddles the entire valley or series of valleys, the maxims to which it applies do not. And if the application of the maxims to the circumstances of each section or neighbourhood is to be ethical rather than merely legalistic, it must be effected not simply with responsibility as defined by the law and the maxim, but also with responsiveness to the singular inhabitants, with tact. Tact is the aesthetic aspect of ethics, but in a sense of aesthetic that implies not that the subject of our ethical response be regarded as an object, an objet d’art, to be passively enjoyed, but that he, she or it be approached in the way an artist relates to the work being made. Ethical behaviour is also in this sense aesthetic behaviour. Responsiveness to the singularity of the work of art underway, meaning by singularity not its numerical singleness but its uniqueness, is matched by the responsiveness to the singularity of the recipient of our ethical regard. Furthermore, it is our responsibility to make ourselves responsive in this way. Only then do we open ourselves to the eventuality that the maxims to which we appeal as guidelines or rules of thumb may call to be adjusted, to be made more just, from time to time, from place to place, in one valley section or another. This crossing of responsibility with responsiveness and the interdependence between compassion and justice in wisdom (combining the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love, crossing philosophy with sophophily) may be illuminated by reference to what, following Derrida, I carefully call “something like the middle voice”.14 The middle voice is not so devoid of strangeness that its equivocality does not itself require to be spoken of in something like the middle voice. So equivocal is it that I must express my delight in finding a footnote on the topic in Meditations on Hunting in which Ortega points out that the notion of hunting itself is expressed in Latin by the verb venor, which is a deponent verb, a verb whose passive form nevertheless voices an activity, and whose deponence is something like the middle voice of Greek and of Sanskrit, a language of the Indian valleys we have been visiting.

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Since hunting is not just an action, but one of the most transitive actions one can imagine, how is it that Latin employs a passive form, or more exactly, a “middle voice”? The middle voice is that which announces an activity which affects the very subject that performs it; therefore a reflexive action. “To fall asleep”, “to move oneself”, would be then “middle voice”. But, venari, could it have meant “to hunt oneself”? That way, the game would be its own hunter in the hunt... Or perhaps venor means “I hunt partridges for myself”?15

It could mean this, but there are more revealing ways of analysing the middle voice that hit off better the semiotics of the relationship where reason and feeling meet in the practical exercise of the ecological imagination.16 For example, meditation on the middle voice could help to make sense of the experience of a reversal of aspect where the word Weltanschauung takes on the meaning that what we look at is imagined not only as were the roses of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” that “Had the look of flowers that are looked at”, but imagined as looking at or looking to us. Ortega goes on to inform us that in Greek thereuò, “to hunt”, is a normal verb, but that Plato and Aristotle use it in the middle voice. Alas, here for once Ortega calls off the hunt. As too must I, but not before passing on one more remark of Ortega’s the implications of which for an aesthetics of the ecological imagination I whole-heartedly and whole-headedly welcome. There is greater confusion than ever with regard to the norms which ought to govern the relationships between men, to say nothing of those which could orient and regulate our treatment of the other realities present in our environment: the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal. There are people who believe in good faith that we have no obligations towards the rocks and therefore have tolerated advertisers’ smearing with pitch or white lead the venerable rocks of the mountain ranges, on which over the millenia the rains have woven prodigious covering of lichen and fungi.17

This transports us again to the rocks and minerals at the source of Aloo Dastur’s river. And it returns me to the mountains at the head of the valley where a ten øre piece led me to think of Arne Naess, thanks to my being trusted to climb to a slightly higher section of the valley by our sirdar, Yong Tenzing. Chris Bonington, a recipient of the financial patronage of Arne Naess junior, describes Yong Tenzing as one of his best Sherpas.18 Yong Tenzing is a Buddhist, hence not able to bring himself to kill any sentient creature. Therefore by returning to him we are reminded of an ecological pattern extremely different from that in which hunting, whether for food or for fun, is a norm, whether clear or confused. It behooves me to add, however, reminding ourselves of Dastur’s reference to ecological pockets and overlaps, that while our sirdar saw to it that the vegetarian members of his party were well cared for, for the carnivore members of the party slaughtering duties were assigned to Hindus. This is not the first time in the course of these meditations on ecology and hunting that there has been occasion to remark on the anthropocentric ingenuity of humankind.

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6. Other-wise than Properties and Relations It is however on anthropomorphism that I wish to make my final remark. It may be objected that I was guilty of anthropomorphism when I proposed that each and every existent as an existent might be regarded also as a face, that is to say, not just as a fact or a constituent of a fact but as facing me in the way another human being faces me when he or she addresses me, or in a way analogous to that. Objectors will deny that there is an analogy between the face of a human being and the face of an animal, let alone between the face of a human being and a tree or a stone. One might begin by asking these objectors whether they therefore find meaningless any analogy between the human being and God. This might lead them at least to keep open the question whether there might be an analogy between the two analogies, that between human beings and a divine being and that between human beings and beings that are neither human nor divine. However, analogy turns on predicates and relations. My proposal has to do with sheer existence, and it assumes that existence is neither a one-place nor a pluri-place predicate. It is not a relation. Nor is the face to face, as this is understood by Levinas, whom I am following here up to a certain point, as he follows Kierkegaard up to a certain point, the point at which he turns inside out what the Dane calls the inwardness of subjective thinking.19 The face to face is the non-predicative and non-relational condition of predication and relationality because it is the addressing of the other’s regard toward me and mine toward the other. Here there is more than an analogy with the performance of a speech act, which is not to be confused with anything that is constatively said. Because the face to face is not a relation, it is not an internal or an external relation. Nor does it make sense to ask of it whether it is a part or a whole. Of course, problems about the internality and externality of relations and parts and wholes are raised once we ask what counts as an existent. It may well be too that questions as to what (ti estin) have to be answered before we can answer questions as to that (hoti estin). They remain questions for philosophy as the hunt for wisdom. But philosophy itself remains a question for sophophily, the practical wisdom of love. It begs the question to suppose that the charge of anthropomorphism immediately puts an end to the question whether we can be, in our special sense of the phrase, face to face with beings other than humans, as Levinas himself was reluctant to allow. At the very least we must put to the test whether we can become educated into seeing the question-begging nature of the charge of anthropomorphism by exposing our imagination to ways of thinking and feeling that may be more common in Buddhist, Jainist and other “valley sections” than our own, as has been done by Timothy Sprigge.

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Notes 1. A. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, tr. D. Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), see esp. Chaps. 2, 3 and 4. 2. M. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment”, Early Greek Thinking, tr. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 13-58. 3. A. J. Dastur, Man and His Environment (Bombay: The Popular Book Depot, 1954), pp. 8-9. 4. E. Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866). 5. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. A. Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969). 6. For instance in J. Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (London and New York: Macmillan, 1991) and Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 7. J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, tr. H. B. Westcott (New York: Scribner’s, 1986); R. Scruton, On Hunting (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1999). 8. L. Tolstoy, “The Hunt”, Resurgence, 131, 1988, pp. 28-32, at p. 30. 9. R. Scruton, On Hunting, op. cit., p. xii. 10. Ibid., p. 153. 11. Ibid., p. 161. 12. J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, op. cit., pp. 97-98. 13. J. Keats, The Letters of John Keats: A Selection, ed. R. Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 43, letter of Keats to his brothers dated December 21, 1817. See also J. Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience, op. cit., Chap. 9, entitled “The Feeling Intellect”, and D. Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics After Deconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), esp. the Introduction. 14. J. Derrida, “Différance”, Margins of Philosophy, tr. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-27, at p. 9. 15. J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, op. cit., p. 83n. 16. See J. Llewelyn, The Hypocritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), see esp. Chaps. 2, 3 and 15. 17. J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, op. cit., p. 89. 18. C. Bonington, The Everest Years: A Climber’s Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986) p. 41. See p. 206 and elsewhere for references to Arne Naess junior and Arne Naess senior, “a professor of philosophy... the father figure of Norwegian mountaineering who had made many new routes in Norway and led the first Norwegian expedition to the Himalayas”. 19. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), Book II, Part II, Chap. II. See also Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), Chap. 4.

The Principle of Humanity and the Principle of Utility Ted Honderich

1. Philosophy and Timothy Sprigge Philosophy when it is any good as philosophy is a real concentration on the ordinary logic of intelligence. That is to say that it is inquiry more given than any other kind of inquiry to clarity, most importantly analysis, and to consistency and validity, and to completeness. It is also more given than other inquiries to truth in general as against the various forms of desire, in particular to all the kinds and sides of truth in its premises. It is therefore not convention of any sort, but the antithesis of it. Those who engage in philosophy should fall under some suspicion when they are members of mutual admiration societies, support groups, and citation circles. So too if they restrict their research-habits to authors from the more distinguished universities. It may not be the logic of philosophy that brings them together. Timothy Sprigge does not fall under suspicion. He goes where his own logic leads him. I do not only mean logic by his own lights. His own logic, rather, stands in some decent connection with the general logic of intelligence. He is in fact unique among English and Scottish philosophers now at work, probably about as unique when American and other philosophers are added in. His uniqueness is not only his being an exemplar of the philosopher, however, but in the judgments to which he comes. Several are unique in being heard now. If they have been propounded before in the history of philosophy, indeed had ascendancies, they are now taken by at least many of our fellow workers to be as dead as a doornail. Perhaps we confuse news and truth. If we can wonder about Sprigge’s relation to great thinkers of the past, his resolute summarizing of them, and his infinite distance from the idea that philosophy should cast off its history in the way of science, an idea to which I am inclined, nothing takes away from the fact that he follows Socrates and lesser successors in being his own man. Another side of this, in addition to his defence of the past, is that he brings together judgments never brought together in that past.

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2. His Utilitarianism Sprigge’s moral philosophy, the concern of this paper, is in the line of the utilitarianisms of Jeremy Bentham and to some unfortunate extent John Stuart Mill. It is what might still be called classical utilitarianism. As Sprigge defines it at the beginning of The Rational Foundations of Ethics, which defining is no more than an indicating, it is that “actions are right or wrong according to whether they increase or decrease the amount of happiness in the world”.1 Sprigge’s own utilitarianism, whatever it comes to in fact, is not distinguished from this when he says in The God of Metaphysics that “it claims only that what fundamentally matters is the spread of happiness and the prevention of likely unhappiness”.2 Questions arise, of which I will quickly mention three groups. In asking what Sprigge’s utilitarianism is to be taken as coming to, as we shall in a moment, it is a good idea to begin with his lines of reflection for it, its sources for him. But those lines of reflection, in effect the argument for this morality, are of course a matter of importance in themselves. They raise the first group of questions. One line of reflection, perhaps unprecedented, begins with Absolute Idealism, in fact Sprigge’s preoccupation in philosophy. This metaphysics is somehow to the effect, of course, that everything that exists, reality, is one thing, somehow mental, in fact one somehow conscious thing. It is one Eternal Mind, one Eternal Consciousness.3 This monism none the less has to be related to panpsychism, the doctrine of numerous, minute, individual consciousnesses, with which Sprigge has also been concerned. Absolute Idealism also has to be brought into consistency with other lesser things than the Absolute—“personal essences”, these being or including ourselves. A second line of reflection towards utilitarianism has to do with hedonism, or rather several things that can have the name. One, psychological hedonism, is to the effect that what we seek is always pleasure. It is akin to a one-sided determinism that characterizes the causes of our thinking, feeling and acting in terms of pleasure. A second hedonism has to do with value, with what is good. The reality of the attitude that something is good is that the attitude is a pleasurable experience. Desire itself, it seems, is this pleasurable experience. From these two sources, Absolute Idealism and the hedonisms, we are to come to the utilitarianism. Is it made clear how this is to come about? Attempts are made to explain. That is to say that attempts are made to show that Absolute Idealism and the hedonisms, both true, commit us to the utilitarianism. What is it that we are to come to be committed to? Here we have my second group of questions. What you have heard, that it has to do with the increase or decrease of happiness, together with its sources in Absolute Idealism and the hedonisms, do

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suggest that this utilitarianism is about states of consciousness—pleasure and pain. In a sentence, this happiness-utilitarianism is to the effect that we must so act as to maximize a kind of consciousness. That is what it is right to do. There certainly are problems here. One is the characterization of happiness. Another, much larger, to put it one way, is the Happiness Box, a staple of introductory lectures on utilitarianism well before it was taken up by Robert Nozick as the Experience Machine in Anarchy, State and Utopia.4 Can it be that this utilitarianism has the consequence that all of us should, if we could, depart from real life as we know it, and get into the boxes where our neural systems are so stimulated as to produce more happiness in total than would be produced by any other course of action? That speculation, although certainly not absurd in terms of argument, can be replaced by something more realistic. Are we really to suppose that the recommendation of courses of action in real life, including feeding ourselves and others, say feeding the starving, is just the accruing happiness, what might be called the attendant consciousness? More generally, is it not evident that the truth of the propositional content of the happiness, the fact that people are not starving to death, is somehow absolutely constitutive or internal or integral or fundamental to the value of a course of action? No doubt Sprigge may here hope to depend on his Absolute Idealism to turn the starving themselves, the food, and the property of being well-fed, and so on, into states of consciousness themselves. Follow him if you can.5 Follow too, if you can, a recent rediscovery of utilitarianism by an economist, goodintentioned, that may suggest that we should partly try to deal with injustice in the world by getting people to feel better about it.6 There are alternative understandings of utilitarianism, of course, alternatives to happiness-utilitarianism. Sprigge sometimes may speak in ways that suggest them even if he does not officially embrace them. They are to the effect that what we must maximize is the satisfaction of desire. Conceivably our desire that people be saved from starving, to which desire Sprigge pays astonishingly much attention, but also, presumably overwhelmingly more important, their desire to be saved from starving—as distinct, of course, from merely their pleasure in a certain belief, whether or not it is true. There are also difficulties with this satisfaction-utilitarianism or preferenceutilitarianism. It seems conceivable that we humans could be moved by a common desire that if satisfied would maximize satisfaction but would end the human race. But there is a much more substantial objection, which is also an objection to happiness-utilitarianism. There is obscurity everywhere here that is deepened by Sprigge’s tendency in the direction of John Stuart Mill’s hopeless complicating of utilitarianism by adding quality of happiness to quantity of it.7 There is also the complication of Mill’s concern with individuality and Sprigge’s thinking of individual self-

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realization.8 To that has to be added his tendency in the direction of ruleutilitarianism or indirect utilitarianism, in effect a contradiction of the first and fundamental impulse of utilitarianism.9 It can in fact be objected that there is no prescription, direction or instruction worth the name in this happiness-utilitarianism or satisfaction-utilitarianism. It is what utilitarianism was supposed not to be—vague at best.10 Consider also Sprigge’s most recent summary of his doctrine. As opposed to calculative utilitarianism, I favour what may be called “way of life utilitarianism”. It is not a good way of living to be constantly doing calculations as to what course of action will yield either you, or all sentient individuals affected by an action, the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. Better to adopt a way of living which is likely to be as happy moment by moment for all concerned (you and those affected by what you do) as circumstances allow. And happiness at a moment is the moment’s overall hedonic character, not a sum of individual pleasures it contains.11

In general what is the course of action or whatever that will maximize happiness, or the course of action or whatever that will maximize happiness or satisfaction? We need something a lot more contentful, a lot more determinative, a lot more decisive. It is notable, for a start, and of the greatest relevance, that every political tradition, the most opposed political traditions, conservatism and socialism for a start, not to mention communism and fascism, and also stuff about the common good and the like in liberalism, have as their fundamental claim that they serve the utilitarian end or something close to it. It would certainly be a good idea, and indeed it seems to me necessary, if utilitarianism is to be clear, to have the political and other consequences of the doctrine. You actually find out about a generalization by learning of its particular consequences. For utilitarianism or any reflective morality there is no point in gesturing towards customary moral rules, whether or not taken as rules of thumb—it is a self-defeating gesture for utilitarianism since its principle is of course exactly what is to judge such customary moral rules. It comes back to mind, incidentally, that Mill in On Liberty laid out a supposedly utilitarian principle of individual liberty. In fact something that collapses into a principle of utility. Also, it allows the state to intervene to prevent one individual harming another, in a certain sense, but does not allow the state to intervene to help individuals, or at least is silent on the matter.12 But now put aside the questions having to do with the advocacy or defence of the utilitarianism in question, where we get the Absolute Idealism and the hedonisms, and also the questions having to do with the clarity and what might be called the initial recommendation of the doctrine. There have been ephemeral objections to utilitarianism. One, to my mind, is that of Bernard Williams, having to do with the value of personal integrity.13 There has also been the merely circular if widely-discussed argument of

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Rawls.14 As against these, there has long been a fundamental objection to utilitarianism, a fundamental kind of objection. In one sentence, it is that the possible society with the greatest total of happiness or satisfaction could be the society with a slave-class in it. In another sentence, the objection is that it could be that the most utilitarianly effective action open to a judge in his courtroom, say in connection with preventing offences consisting in the sexual torture of children, would be the victimization, the so-called punishment, of a wholly innocent man.15 Utilitarianism has been defended against this sort of thing by being said to be somehow true to justice or humanity or equality or the like—implicitly true to them, or somehow entailing them, or productive of them by the addition of further unexceptionable premises, and so on. I shall not pursue the argument, which has mainly to do with the general utility of justice or humanity and with considerations of decreasing marginal utility. Even if there were no more than some considerable doubt about the grim consequences of utilitarian principles, it would be a good idea to take up something else, about which there is not a doubt at all. It is not as if we knew in advance that there is some special virtue in utilitarianism, not having to do with justice or humanity, which cannot be preserved in a more explicit principle. There is a related consideration. Even if there were no doubt, which there certainly is, that the fundamental principle of utility, say by way of various true minor premises, did preserve what we want of justice or humanity, it would still be unsatisfactory. This has to do with the fact that general answers to the question of right and wrong cannot be regarded as fully articulated major premises to be connected by tight reasoning with conclusions about particular political, social, and economic policies or any other particular conclusions. In this world as it is, what may be called the merely logical properties of these general answers are not of the first importance. This is so because there is enough complexity in our situation that the best that can be done is to make judgments directed or guided, as distinct from strictly entailed, by a general answer to the question of right and wrong. An answer can only be a kind of directive. If all possible precision is important, so is force and emphasis. Principles of utility, as expressed, do not give a good place, let alone prominence, to their supposed content of justice or humanity. A good flag is not of uncertain colour. There have been many less plausible forms of the argument from justice or humanity, having to do with utilitarianism’s inconsistency with such rights or liberties, as, say, certain rights to hold private property.16 The stronger forms of the argument, exemplified by the reflections on the possible society and the judge, evidently stand in connection with the impulse to think and feel that there is something more important than pleasure, happiness or satisfaction, which is pain, distress or frustration. Sprigge follows Mill in what can seem to be that

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splendid philosopher’s greatest failing, greater than the introduction of talk of quality of happiness and greater than the failing of his own argument for utilitarianism. That greatest failing was his riding over the objection of justice or humanity to utilitarianism.17 So much for a few quick words on three groups of questions about utilitarianism. Let me add some still quicker positive recommendations of it. The first is that it assumes a realistic attitude to moral judgments in general, which is that they are expressions of attitudes, these being in part a matter of various forms of feeling, at bottom desire. The second is that it is a consequentialism. It judges the rightness of actions, as is usually said, by their consequences. A third recommendation is that it does actually seek to advance a principle. It does not purport to tell us what to do by some means, say a collecting of inconsistent values in something called liberalism, or an indefinite enumeration of virtues, that does not come up to the level of being considered as a possibly effective guide to action. A fourth recommendation, already alluded to, is that Sprigge’s utilitarianism can indeed be seen to be in some accord with the project of philosophy. It is in some accord with that concentration on the logic of intelligence. To put this differently, and perhaps more usefully, it is not a morality of convention. If utilitarianism is gestured towards by common-sense moralities and by the stuff of politicians, it is not to be confused with those things. To return now to the three groups of questions, it has been Sprigge’s way of proceeding not to engage closely and persistently with them. Rather, it has been his way to lay out his moral attitude in a general way, in the context of his metaphysics, and to trust, so to speak, to its recommendation as a whole as a means of dealing with doubt about particular matters. Certainly there is something to be said for this way of proceeding. If a doctrine or theory can be shown, in general terms, to have a great or considerable recommendation, that goes some way at least to weakening the force of particular problems. That the devil is always in the detail—that a doctrine or theory recommends itself finally by its particular parts—is not an absolute rule of argument and inquiry. The most useful thing I can do on the present occasion is something similar. It is to offer a comparison between Sprigge’s utilitarianism and another morality, related but very different. It is a comparison that may itself be instructive in the ordinary way. That has to do with the other thing’s claimed superiority. The comparison may also be instructive in giving the support of a context to the three groups of objections made against utilitarianism having to do with its supposed origin, basis or justification, its content, and the objection having to do with victimization and the like. A proposition of objection, you can think, as I have already implied, is well judged not only by itself but in the context of a whole which, if persuasive, may give more strength to the objection.

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Further, my comparison of utilitarianism and another morality will make clearer the recommendations of utilitarianism that have been mentioned, consequentialism in particular. Finally, let me remark that my way of proceeding will also be true to an imperative of the other morality. It is wrong for us to omit to say what we take to be right, wrong not to take an opportunity. This world of early 2007, this world of the war on Iraq by the wretched Bush and Blair, and of their complicity with the viciousness of the exploitation of Africa, and their active support of neoZionism, the latter being the taking from the Palestinians at least their freedom in the remaining one-fifth of their historic homeland—this world of 2007 is such that judgment on it is urgent.18

3. Great Goods and Bad Lives There is a moral principle which concerns and whose justification partly rests on two things. The first is the great goods of our lives, the objects of our great desires—which great goods issue in each of us making and being certain of moral judgments about our having them ourselves. The other thing that enters into the justification of this morality is our minimal rationality, just the fact of our having reasons, including moral reasons necessarily as general as any other reasons. In short we are committed to a morality of good consequences by our human nature. We all desire the great good of going on existing, where that does not mean a lot more than just being conscious, being in the world. As you can also say, to the same effect, we want a personal world to go on longer. We have the same desire for those close to us, our children first. This desire can sometimes be defeated by others. It comes to mind that a lot of American men and women would have ended their own worlds, carried out suicide missions, to prevent the 2,800 deaths on 9/11. Nonetheless, despite exceptions, this existence is something almost all of us crave. We crave a decent length of life. Say 75 years rather than 35. A second desire we all have is for a quality of life in a certain sense. This is a kind of existence that has a lot to do with our bodies. We want not to be in pain, to have satisfactions of food, drink, shelter, safety, sleep, maybe sex. As that implies, and as is also the case with the first desire, we also want the material means to the end in question, the material means to this bodily quality of life. Some of the means are some of the consumer-goods, so-called, easier to be superior about if you have them. You are likely to lack these means if you are in poverty. A third thing we all want is freedom and power. We do not want to be coerced by personal circumstances arranged by others, bullied, subjected to

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compulsion, unable to run our own lives, weakened. We want this voluntariness and strength in a range of settings, from a house, neighbourhood and place of work to the greatest and maybe most important setting, a society in a homeland. It is no oddity that freedom from something is what is promised by every political or national tradition or movement without exception—and secured to some extent if it is in control. Another of our shared desires is for goods of relationship to those around us. We want kinds of connections with these other people. Each of us wants the unique loyalty and if possible the love of one other person, maybe two or three. We also want to be members of larger groups. No one wants to be cut off by his or her own feelings from the surrounding society or cut off from it by others’ feelings. This was a considerable part of why it was no good being a nigger or a Jew or a Paki in places where those words were spoken as they were. A fifth desire, not far away from the one for relationship, is for respect and self-respect. No one wants to feel worthless. No one is untouched by disdain, even stupid disdain. No one wants humiliation. Persons kill themselves, and others, because of it. We do not want humiliation for our people either. As in the case of all these great desires, this one for respect and self-respect extends to others close to us, and in ways to other people, and it goes with desires for the means to the ends. Finally, we want the goods of culture. All of us want at least some of them. Many of us want the practice and reassurance of a religion, or the custom of a people, or indeed a kind of society. We may want not to live in what we take to be a degraded society, maybe one that gives an ascendancy to buying and selling in its social policies and has a public preoccupation with sex. All of us with a glimmer of knowledge want the good of knowledge and thus of education. All with a glimmer of what is written down want to be able to read. We also want diversion if not art. These, by one way of counting them, are our fundamental desires for the great goods. Certainly they are interrelated goods. If the first is necessary to all the others, and several are in other relations of necessity, there is no great point in trying to rank them. You may if you want speak of these fundamental desires as needs. But the usage obscures a little the plain fact of them. The desires are a premise of fact for other things, a premise in which no disputable moral standard has a part, or such an uncertain idea as what is called flourishing, the result of having needs satisfied. A bad life, we take it, is to be defined in terms of the deprivation of some or all of these goods, the frustration of some or all of these desires. A good life is defined in terms of satisfaction of them. There is a need for decision here as to bad lives and good lives, as well as the registering of facts. That is what you would expect in the formulation or stating of a moral principle, which is what we are now engaged in. A bad life, we will take it, quickly here, is one that lacks

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one or more of the first three goods—subsistence, a bodily quality of life, all freedom and power—or a life of subsistence that is only minimally satisfied with respect to the other five goods. Good lives are had by all other persons.

4. The Principle of Humanity The Principle of Humanity has to do with bad lives. It is not well-expressed, indeed not expressed at all, as the truistic principle that we should rescue those with bad lives, those who are badly off. It is the principle that we must actually take rational steps to the end of getting and keeping people out of bad lives. That is, we should take steps that are rational in the ordinary sense of actually having a good probability of securing the consequence. These are not steps that are pieces of self-deception, pretence or speechifying, but steps that you can actually reasonably believe will be effective, will serve the end. In being rational in the ordinary way, of course, they will also be something else in addition to being effective, quite as important. They will have to be well-judged, sensible or economical in terms of well-being, not be likely to cause more distress than they prevent, not be self-defeating in that way. The Principle of Humanity, to state it a bit more fully, is that the right or justified thing as distinct from others—the right action, practice, institution, government, society or possible world—is the one that according to the best judgment and information is the rational one in the sense of being effective and not self-defeating with respect to the end of getting and keeping people out of bad lives.

5. Acts and Omissions The principle covers positive acts or commissions and the like—detonating the bomb, firing the missile from the helicopter gunship, financing ethnic cleansing, taking over the airliner, hunting killers, starting a war, lying about it, fighting back against occupiers, blowing up yourself and the people in the subway train, guarding the city against more attacks. The principle also covers those other actions that are omissions—not stopping the bomber you can stop, not stopping the helicopter pilot, not doing what could be done to make a world not so unjust or vicious that it provides a context for such horrific acts as the flying of airliners into towers, not being vigilant, not doing what would make war less likely, not trying to improve your hierarchic democracy, not calling the police or saying something about racism. That is to say that the principle is about actions or conduct in general and the things into which they enter. It is about our behaviour that is intentional in some

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way and degree. Acts and omissions, which shade into one another rather than fall into two categories, are distinguished by their intentions. Acts are likely to be fully intentional—they are behaviour whose natures and consequences are represented and desired in the intentions of the agents. What we call omissions, in contrast, may be actions that are partly intentional—actions whose natures and consequences are not pictured and desired by the person acting, but as a result of earlier intentions and actions of the person. For example, I do not contribute to a famine charity by using the money in another way, going on a holiday. What the omission comes to is not attending to the action in its nature and consequences as an omission, not attending as a result of earlier intentions and actions. For another example, a leader or an electorate does something that is also failing to stop genocide because the leader or the electorate have earlier done something like resolve to give their awareness to other things. There are also unintentional omissions. Here the fact that the nature and effects of an action are not in the agent’s intention is not the result of his or her earlier activity. They are of importance, and should claim attention. But we do not need to dwell on them now. There have been attempts to find a difference of fact between acts and omissions such that there is a general difference between them in terms of rightness and wrongness. The attempts have never come near to succeeding. There have been attempts to show that any act whose probable consequences are identical with those of an omission can be wrong while the omission is right. No attempt has succeeded. The most important attempt, having to do with intentions, fails for the reason accepted in ways by all of us, that what makes actions right is not intentions of agents. It is clear indeed that two actions can both be wrong, one of which is done out of the best of intentions and the other the worst. The simplest case is where the best intention is conjoined with a terrible but not a culpable mistake in belief. Very commonly, as well, people do the right thing out of a low intention. That I get no moral credit at all for the action does not make the action wrong. Nor does integrity or character help any more than intentions with right actions. Hitler’s actions would not become more right by way of an absolute proof of his integrity, his having remained true to his deepest principle. The Principle of Humanity does give an importance to intentions, however, and to the moral responsibility of people for their actions, and to the standing or decency or humanity of people over time. It gives these things importance in relation to what is fundamentally important—securing the right action, practice, institution, foreign policy, contribution to a kind of world. And with these actions and the like, to repeat, it does not make any general difference in rightness between acts and at least partly intentional omissions.

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The principle is not unusual in this. Who thinks, or who says when they are thinking, that it is all right for you to let someone or half of a people starve to death if you have arranged to have your mind on something else? Who thinks it is all right to carry on your life, maybe your political life, while the large-eyed children in those photographs fade away into their deaths? If conservative philosophers of property can be found to excuse and justify us, morality and moral philosophy in general are in this respect not so brazen in their exonerations as they used to be. There is a somewhat related and smaller matter that needs to be noticed here. You will of course have understood that the Principle of Humanity is to the effect that we are to consider all the foreseeable consequences of an action in terms of bad lives. To act on the idea of considering only bad lives of Muslims, or bad lives of Jews, or of any other group, would be to go against the principle absolutely. It is the preventing of bad lives that is fundamental. Relatedly, there will be no possibility at all of saying that firing a missile or setting a bomb is to be considered only in terms of deaths that are intended in some trivial sense or other, as distinct from other deaths reasonably foreseen and therefore intended in the fundamental sense. To leave the attitude of the Principle of Humanity to acts and omissions, another large truth about it is its end or goal. If it is the fundamental principle of justice or decency, its end or goal is not equality. It is not the end of getting everybody on a level, let alone making everybody the same. The end is not a relational one at all, not what has been objected to in egalitarianism. It is not open to the question “What is so good about making people equal if they could all be unequally better off?” The end, as stated, is the end of saving people from bad lives. It would demand urgent action, exactly as urgent, in a world where everyone had perfectly equal lives, all equally bad. So it is a principle of humanity, fellow-feeling or generosity rather than of equality—despite the great importance of certain equalities, notably in freedoms. These equalities are greatly important as means to the end of the principle.

6. Policies and Practices The Principle of Humanity is indeed fundamental to the morality of humanity. It is a summary of a kind that is necessary to any morality. It is its basis and rationale. That is not to say that it is anything like the complete morality in itself. A further and necessary understanding of the morality of humanity is to be had first by way of a number of policies and practices that give further content to the principle, and then by way of an account of its character. The first policy is to transfer certain means to well-being, material and also other means, from the better-off to the badly-off. These are means whose trans-

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fer would in fact not significantly affect the well-being of the better-off. An immense amount of these means exist. They are now wasted. Remember what we throw out, and, more importantly, what our businesses and corporations discard, leave to decay or ruin. Think about the industry of packaging things, of the costs in commercial competition that are of no benefit at all to most of us. The second policy is means-transfer that would reduce the well-being of the better-off, but without increasing the number of bad lives. The people from whom the means would be taken would still have good lives. An immense amount of these means exist. As in the case of the first policy, some consist in land, and land of a people. For this reason among others, what you are hearing about is not Rawls’s theory of justice or a variant of it. The third policy, of great importance, is about material incentive-rewards. It would reduce them to those that are actually necessary, and actually necessary in terms of the goal of the Principle of Humanity. They will not be the rewards now demanded. They will not be the incentive-rewards that issue in the best-off tenth of Americans having 30% of the income and 70% of the wealth while the bottom tenth has 2% and none. They will not be the rewards called for by the most absurd of propositions in our lives, that the rich have to be just as rich as they are in order for the wretched not to be more wretched. They will not be the rewards and lack of them suddenly visible to all in New Orleans after the hurricane in 2005. You will naturally take these three policies to exclude something else. But this exclusion had better be stated explicitly as a fourth policy. It is that in general means to well-being are not to be redirected to the well-off unnecessarily, as supposed incentives or as anything else, say proper taxation policies, so as to improve their already satisfied lives. This fattening is excluded. The fifth policy, also implicit in the others, is against violence and nearviolence. Therefore it is against terrorism and war. But like all such policies rightly called realistic, it cannot be an absolute or completely general prohibition. Like all of them, it accommodates some possibility of justified war. Like fewer alternative policies, including one to be taken from the U. N. Declaration of Rights, it can contemplate the possibility of justified action that falls under the name of terrorism.19 If it may give some limited role to a distinction between official and non-official killing, it does not immediately exclude some things mentioned earlier, including violence by victims whose oppressors leave them no other option and then sanctimoniously condemn the violence. Also, the policy sees the need for police forces, some punishment by the state, some selfdefence, and so on. A further understanding of the Principle of Humanity, as necessary, comes from what can be distinguished from policies, which is practices. You have heard that the end or goal of the principle is getting people out of bad lives, not getting them into equal lives—whatever large side-effects of

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equality there may be of progress towards the end or goal. The end is not at all open to the objection to egalitarianism that it does not matter in itself if someone has more or less or the same as someone else, but how much they have. But the end of humanity is consistent with something else. It is that we are to use the means of certain practices of equality to get people out of bad lives. Practices of equality are not the only but they are the most important of the practices serving the end of saving men, women and children from deprivation, distress and wretchedness. A main point here comes into view in connection with an argument for a good democracy. The first way to secure the moral rights of those with bad lives is to give them equal voices. Another way is for them to claim their moral rights by themselves making their voices heard. What they must have is the same hearing as the rest of us, or rather some of the rest of us. Any practice of equality that serves that intermediate or instrumental goal, an advance in democracy, must be something that serves humanity. There are other practices of equality as important. One is a true equality of opportunity. It will certainly include special opportunity for those who have been deprived of the means of developing and displaying their abilities. Other practices have to do with the fact of our common membership of a species. We must, despite all differences between us, have common needs. That fact brings with it a truth to the effect that to seek to make bad lives good must be to proceed on the basis of an assumption of equality about, first of all, food. To which needs to be added a large proposition that no doubt you will remember. Freedom, a great part of a good life, is one with equality, or at least dependent on it. How much you have of freedom depends on how much I have. The means to freedom is equalities. That does not make equality, a relative good, the end of a struggle for freedom. It leaves freedom as the end of the struggle, something that is a place on a scale, a fact of voluntariness or noncompulsion, not itself a relationship to other places on the scale. All of this statement of the Principle of Humanity, anyway most of it, might suggest that it is a principle for one large side of life but not a complete principle. You might get the idea from its focus and concentration, and in particular the public policies, that it does not cover private life, or relations between people all of whom have good lives, or relations between men and women, or matters of religion, or contracts between individuals, and the like. That is not true, for several reasons. For a start, there are bad lives in all sides or parts of our existence. Further, if you suppose that a morality needs to have in it particular sections concerned with private life, relations between people with good lives and so on—rules or ideals or whatever having to do with these—that does not go against the Principle of Humanity. What it requires is that whatever is said and done about these things is to be consistent with the principle itself, serve its end.

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7. Six Characteristics of the Principle There is something as important to the morality of humanity as what we have—the principle about bad lives that summarizes it, its view of omissions, its policies and its practices. There is what can be called the character or nature of the principle and the morality. That character or nature, as with other principles and moralities, has a good deal in it. It is not unreflective about morality or about itself. It is, to speak plainly, not ignorant, naive, simple, self-serving or political about the nature of all moral principles, judgments and the like. It is saved from unreflectiveness by knowing a little philosophy. If it sees that a decent moral principle is rightly called that, exactly a decent moral principle, and that some such thing is as important as truth itself, it also sees any such principle is an attitude—an attitude capable of being supported by facts and by a general logic. It takes any attitude whatever to be a valuing of something and hence to involve desire, which valuing may or may not conceive of the thing clearly and entirely. Thus the Principle of Humanity does not begin to suppose that alternative or competing moralities and politics, of any kind, can be different or have any other standing or be in less need of the support of facts and logic. It does not at all contemplate that it faces alternatives or competitors that have any sort of higher or deeper authority, certification or imprimatur. It does not half-respect the ordinary stuff of most politicians, their self-defensive argot for a time, maybe that this or that is unacceptable. In general the principle does not pretend a piety about morality that no one who is reflective can sustain. Morality is not something given by God, or ancient texts, or any religion high or low. It is not given to persons of special perception and sensitivity of whatever kind. Nor is morality something given to a social class or a tradition of one people, or proved by their special success, least of all their material success or vulgarity. It is not owed to any other special fact about a people, such as their power or weakness. As you have heard, morality is not the property of a political tradition or inclination, or of a commitment to democracy, let alone democratic politicians. Do you recall that there have long been denigrating utterances about morality as consisting in mere value judgments, subjectivity, emotive meaning and the like? Well, there is a distinction between all that and what has just been said. It is that morality is no more than and no less than attitudes capable of being supported by facts and logic. A second point about the Principle of Humanity is that it is in a way a literal one. It is not the sort of thing uttered in much the same words by the estimable Bill Clinton, as indeed it was, or conceivably by Brown of the New Labour Party, he of whom some have hopes in 2007 despite the fact that he has not yet

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by any public action distinguished himself from his leader Blair. You can say the principle is a different speech-act than theirs. It does imply, for a start, that we are to hold our leaders and those around them morally responsible when they violate it in the way that we have feeling against lesser wrongdoers in our jails. The principle does not presuppose a difference in kind in this respect, whatever else can be said, between a prime minister and a pornographer, or a prime minister and a child-molester, rapist or murderer. Nor is the principle meant to be an exhortation already understood as not likely to be acted on in fact, let alone understood as something that cannot be acted on in fact. We are actually to do what is actually rational to get and keep people out of bad lives, not engage in substitute-behaviour, maybe giving undertakings to estimable rock stars arranging concerts about African poverty, just in time for the world’s richest nations to meet again and do nothing much about it. The principle, as you will have taken in, is not that of conservatism or liberalism. Something close to the principle or very like it has been the source and inspiration of the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights, many U. N. resolutions, and a clear and essential part of the rest on international law. Also, I think, the doctrine of the just war. The principle has indeed been the guide or ideal of the Left in politics so long as the Left has been true to itself. That is not to say, you will gather, that it sanctions all the theory, commitments, practices and other means of all the traditions, parties and persons within the history or the present of the Left in politics. The principle is itself and not another thing. Its explanation depends on no other ideology. It is not vulnerable to objections owed to mistakes made about it or in trying to act on it. It would be absurd to suppose it is so much as touched by the fact that a Wall fell down as an empire ended. The principle, as you will also have taken in, has the fourth distinction of not operating with a merely generic notion, say happiness, satisfaction of desires, well-being, deprivation, justice, fairness or the like, let alone the common good or community. It is not theoretical in a way that lets the world slip out of view or out of focus. For these and other reasons, it is not vague, certainly greatly less vague than utilitarianism. So it is not like Sprigge’s morality, or some morality of economists on holiday in philosophy, which by going on about general happiness or satisfaction or whatever makes it more possible, even with good will, to slide by individual costs of a general happiness, to overlook victimization if not actually justify it. Rather, the Principle of Humanity fixes attention on realities that do not so easily allow us to overlook the lives of others, rise above or disregard them. It is in its character closer to life, closer to other lives than our own. The principle is also clear. It does not have the hopeless indeterminacy of Kant’s celebrated injunction that was also called the Principle of Humanity. That

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was the injunction that we are to treat each person as an end and not only as a means. It can be understood to mean almost anything, down to a mild piece of advice to respect everyone, a piece of advice consistent with leaving them in misery. Nor does our principle have what is effectively the vapidity of “Love your neighbour”, however related it may be in spirit. It has more in it than the well-meant help of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Principle of Humanity, sixthly, to come on to something still larger, is a principle of truth, in several ways. In fact, a commitment to truth is just about the bottom of it. As you will anticipate, it is not respectful of any orthodoxies of opinion and reaction that have been put in place or at any rate come to be in place, many about supposed facts, in particular supposed necessities. It does not always call terrorism something else, such as resistance, thereby tending to leave out the killing and maiming. Nor does it fail to see that terrorism can also be something else, say resistance to ethnic cleansing. It does not leave out half the facts in looking at any matter. It does not look at things from your local point of view. It disdains the denials, evasions and forgettings of truth that go with taking only some lives really to matter. It is the very contradiction of what it regards as the viciousness of what certainly is no mere statement of a right of self-preservation, the declaration on behalf of a people that “our lives comes first”. The principle is not deferential to any of the kinds of our societies’ convention. If its commitment to reflection and argument, and of course to rationality, and in particular to argued endorsements, stands in the way of engaging in direct or indirect incitement, it is not deferential to the fact that some answers to questions have been proscribed as terrible. It is not respectful of the powers that be, including the democratic powers, but cynical at least about their self-deception. It does not accept a politician’s edict with respect to certain moral judgments, say about killing, sometimes to the effect that we are all to eschew them, sometimes to the effect that we leave to the politician a monopoly on engaging in them however evasively. It is prepared to think about atrocities, if not on the day 9/11 or the day 7/7 then sometime after. If not on a day in the refugee camps of Sabra or Shatila, or on a day in Bagdad, then sometime after. The principle, as you will expect, is for public inquiry that issues in relevant truth, for public conduct of public business that issues in relevant truth. The principle is an attitude antithetical to the inanely resolute one of the Blair government on television in 2006 and before then. That is the attitude, in opposition to the whole history of intelligence, that the response to a question is a speech of diversion. The principle, less importantly, can tell the difference between proper philosophical civility and sucking-up. Also the difference between considering other views and pretending that all of them are worth respect. It asserts that

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Nozick’s picture of the perfectly just society is to be thought about with contempt.20 Does the principle not only engage in and recommend truth but also rest on a foundation of it?

8. The Argument for the Principle Life would be easier if morality were simpler. Something has to be admitted about any general moral principle. Our conclusions about such matters as Palestine, 9/11, Iraq and 7/7 and so on, will not depend just on the foundation of the Principle of Humanity as stated. In fact there are things that are clearer and stronger than any general principle, necessary though a general principle may be. That a man’s torturing a child for the purpose of sexual excitement is monstrous in its wrong is evidently a kind of truth, somehow as strong as a plain truth of fact. It is more the case that the Principle of Humanity depends on such a moral truth than that the moral truth depends on the principle. The morality of humanity, like any morality, has as its content and recommendation the sum of the propositions in it including its principle, and also its nature or character. Its policies and practices are part of its content. So too are the specified consequences of the principle, some being consequences that are only such in a formal sense, and stand on their own as moral truths. Some consequences, whether or not they have that strength, are about terrorism and war. Another is the wrong of our hierarchic democracy. It is not only dim, but also a violation of the Principle of Humanity in its inequality and unfreedom, and yet more so in its products, the human facts owed to or recorded by the distributions of wealth and income. There is also the moral responsibility of its beneficiaries, those who propose to maintain it in perpetuity. You learn more of the morality of humanity by learning of such consequences. Its content is to some considerable extent given by them. Still, for all of that, it is the Principle of Humanity that sums up the rest and offers the possibility of consistency among all certainties and judgments in the morality. Such a general principle, as you have heard, is essential. It is essential for other cases than those of absolute certainty, which is to say most cases. Is there a general argument for the Principle of Humanity? Could there be what can have the name of being a proof, as has sometimes seemed to me possible? You heard at the start that we are all somehow committed to the Principle of Humanity. There is indeed an argument from our human nature. It has to do with our fundamental desires, our desires for the great goods, and also with our being rational in the minimal sense of our having reasons for things, sometimes moral reasons.

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Fundamentally it is an argument from consistency resting on strong premises. It cannot actually stop people from being inconsistent. No argument for anything, however good, can in itself be anything like a necessitating cause. But there is a price to be paid for inconsistency that few want and are able to pay. It is that if you say something is right, and then you also somehow say a thing of that same kind is wrong, you say nothing. A contradiction asserts nothing, gives no reason whatever for anything. And a reason is what you want to have, what you are claiming to have. That is true of all of us. The argument from consistency for the Principle of Humanity has a number of premises in it. They can be put in terms of certain situations of choice. Your human nature is such, you will agree, that if there is a choice between (1) your being got out of a bad life into a good one, and (2) somebody else having a good life made still better, you want the first thing to be done. Further, you give the reason that this is right. It is right that your being helped out of deprivation, misery or agony comes ahead of someone else’s still fuller satisfaction in the great goods of life. This reason for having help for yourself is of its nature general. All reasons are. From your conviction about yourself, your rightful claim, arguably you are on the way to the Principle of Humanity, or at least faced in that direction. By way of a fast example, you believe it is wrong for you to be slowly starved for a month, put in danger of your life, in order that I have my own car rather than have to go on getting to work by bus. Let alone that you be starved in order for my family to have two cars. By way of another example, you believe it would be wrong for you to be sexually degraded by Americans in a prison in Bagdad if what is gained is just my adding to the satisfactions of my good life in Washington. Your reason for what you desire, not to be starved or put on a leash naked, because of that reason’s general character, commits you to other propositions about other people with respect to additions to bad lives and good lives. That there is room for argument here does not much affect things. But, it may be said, there is a difficulty. Something else is also true. If there is a choice between your already good life being improved, and somebody else being got out of a bad life, maybe nearly a good one, you may want the first, and argue that there is some moral reason for this. You may talk of desert, or family lineage, or race, or ethnic group, or democracy, or even a piece of ancient history. You will be very far from alone. You can be faced with an objection. It will be to the effect that in what are argued to be relevantly identical situations, but where you happen to be in the bad position rather than the good one, you would judge differently. That is, you can be reminded of the first choice situation. But it will not be easy for the objector or you to succeed in this dispute, which will become one about whether the two

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situations are relevantly identical or close enough. Let us leave this difficulty unresolved and consider some other situations. Suppose you contemplate two other people to whom you are not at all connected in terms of particular sympathy or degree of identification. If your choice is between an escape from a bad life for one, and an improvement of an already good life for the other, you will want the first to happen and take it to be right. That will be your tendency despite ideas of desert or whatever. Few of us talk about private property in connection with the children with the large eyes. Consider a third situation. If your choice is between possibilities having to do only with yourself, a possibility where you escape from a bad life and a possibility where your already good life is improved, you will opt for and justify the first. If there are some exceptions to this policy of what is called maximinning, exceptions having to do with the attraction of taking a chance or gambling, they can surely be set aside as not of great consequence. Think of a choice between escaping river blindness and getting a faster car. It is not perfectly clear how to use these situations in order to try to construct an argument for the Principle of Humanity. There is no neat proof. The argument will be to the effect that our natures are such that we give a precedence, if not a complete one, to reducing bad lives rather than improving good ones. The argument will not make the principle into an ordinary truth entailed by premises shown to be ordinarily true. But the argument may establish the principle as what is most consistent with judgments about ourselves that are, so to speak, the stuff of our humanity. They are real foundations, premises of ordinary truth. No other principle of morality, you can think, has such foundations. Are they enough to allow us to speak of the principle’s moral truth? How good does a general argument for a principle have to be? That is not obvious. It does seem that these considerations of our human nature do better to support the Principle of Humanity than any other considerations, of human nature or anything else, support any other principle. There is one more thing. We all do accept the Principle of Humanity in another way, one that is less theoretical and perhaps is more telling. We accept it in actual lived disputes as distinct from reflection about imagined disputes. If you are engaged in real-life argument with somebody about right and wrong with respect to large questions, and you announce yourself as proceeding from or basing yourself on something like the Principle of Humanity, you are very likely indeed to hear from the other side, at any rate in the end, that the very same is true of it. What neo-Zionist who is a serious adversary in argument depends on an ancient piece of religion about a people chosen by God? Or a proposition about an ancient Jewish kingdom easily met by other historical propositions? What neoZionist who is a serious adversary, in order to establish a right centuries later to disperse further another people and do worse than that, claims that right on the

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basis of a divine ordinance accepted by no one else, or half of a declaration by the British foreign secretary Balfour, or because of a fact of democracy? Does he say that it is because somebody paid money to an absentee landlord in Paris that a peasant family is driven out and has to die in a refugee camp? You will hear from such an adversary, rather, about many lives of his own people taken in the recent past, about danger and safety now, about freedom, respect and being unhumiliated, about his people being together, their having their culture. You will hear about things that matter. So with those who defend Islamic terrorism, and those who justify the war in Iraq. They show by their recourse to argument from the great human goods that other considerations, say international law or religion or whatever in themselves, are not taken by them to be true foundations of argument. With the war in Iraq and international law, does Blair serve as a stark example? Having started with the justification of international law, he got around to justification of humanitarianism. The Principle of Humanity is not itself a general truth of fact. Like all other such things, it is an attitude, as you have heard. But it is a unique one. It would indeed be entirely misleading to dismiss it as just another value judgments, subjective, a matter of relativity in morals, or emotive meaning.

9. Consequentialist As Against Deontological Morality A grand division used to be made or anyway attempted among various moralities and moral philosophies. Sometimes it still is. Deontological moralities and moral philosophies are said to assert duties, obligations and principles that do not have anything to do with the foreseeable consequences or results of actions. They have to do with values entirely different from the great human goods and lesser such goods. The clearest of these may be duties or more likely rights that are said to exist just on account of our relationships to others, say our children. Other principles may seem to make sense in asserting that good intentions, maybe the pure good will, or integrity, or moral intuition, or a hold on the virtues, are fundamental to how we ought to live our lives. Or we may hear of the value of justice, where that has to do with the law rather than the good of the law, or rights, where those are taken seriously without being given a basis that explains why by recourse to something like the Principle of Humanity. Kant asserted that the pure good will is the only thing that matters. Also that promises should be kept despite bad effects of doing so, even catastrophic effects. He asserted too that all criminals are to be punished to the full extent of the law even if, as would ordinarily be said, no good whatever comes of this. Desert or retribution, and not anything like the prevention of offences, is the

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only justification of punishment in a society. If an island people decide to bring their society to an end, scatter themselves through the whole world, so that they no longer have any social purpose at all, it is their obligation to execute the last murderer in prison before getting into the boats. For several reasons the division between this sort of thing and consequentialism has become at least uncertain. One plain reason is that deontological moralities were dragged into the twentieth century. They had to admit that it cannot be right simply to ignore the coming bad or appalling effects of actions in considering whether they are right or wrong. So promises can sometimes be broken, and punishment has to do some good as well as be deserved in order to be justified. But to my mind, the deontological parts of the updated moralities do not fare at all well. Let us consider the matter. What is it to give as a reason, for the rightness of someone’s getting or having something, that he deserves it? No satisfactory answer, necessarily an answer that does not beg the question by understanding a deserved thing to be right by definition, has ever been given.21 As for reasons for doing a thing because of your relation to someone else or others, your child or your people, it is perfectly possible to accommodate these to a considerable extent in the moralities concerned with good effects. And, as can certainly be argued, to go beyond this extent of accommodation is not to do something that can be defended morally. That is, the morality of humanity allows and enjoins me to look after my children in particular, partly by way of its practice of equality. But it does not allow me to make them fatter while other children starve. A deontological morality may say in effect that I can make them fatter while other children starve. It may do so by way of the intoned or declarative reason “They are my children”. What can that be but a selfishness? Is it made less so by feeling or pompousness? It is possible to suspect, as indeed I do, that all deontological morality is in fact lower stuff, dishonourable stuff, an abandoning of humanity, of the decent part of our nature, and an attempt to make that abandoning respectable to oneself and others. It is possible to think that what all of us are moved by is the great goods and the means to them, and related lesser goods, and that these give us our only reasons for actions, moral and other reasons. So when a deontological morality purports to give some entirely different reason for action, something else is going on under the words. If, with punishment by the state, no worthwhile analysis can be given of the reason “It is right to punish him because he deserves it”, who can escape a certain thought? It is that what is going on is punishing in order to give satisfaction to ourselves, satisfaction in the distress of another. As for promise-keeping, Kant’s supposed proof that all promise-breaking is self-contradictory and that promise-keeping has nothing to do with good effects has convinced no one. And who would choose a world full of good intentions but also full of agony, distress and other deprivation against a world of bad in-

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tentions where things never the less work out very well in terms of the great goods? It would be just mad to do so, wouldn’t it?

10. The Ends and the Means Justify the Means The morality of humanity is indeed a consequentialist morality. It does indeed judge the rightness of things by certain anticipated consequences. It judges the rightness of actions, policies, practices, societies, and possible worlds by certain anticipated consequences of those things, and, as it may be worth adding, in those things. What makes a thing worthwhile may be the doing of it, where that is of course not the intention with which it is done, or just its being in accordance with a duty or principle or relationship, but the great good of doing it— where real good is understood as the sort of thing exemplified by the great goods of the Principle of Humanity. You have heard some objection to what is opposed to consequentialism, deontology. It is a good idea, too, to spend some time on what is said against consequentialism. It has been supposed to be at least suspect, not the kind of thing to be tolerated in higher philosophical, ethical or religious company. There are books that report on its rejection, supposedly by a significant number of moral philosophers. There are several familiar lines of resistance to particular consequentialisms, or, more likely, consequentialisms in general, bundled together and not distinguished. The most common line of resistance is in the utterance that consequentialism as understood takes the end to justify the means. In one way this is plainly true. Any consequentialism takes some end to make some price paid for it worthwhile. A satisfaction or achievement makes a cost, dissatisfaction or pain worth putting up with or enduring. But what is the objection to this? The common line of resistance sounds as if there is some quite general objection to consequentialism. It has to be to that effect. Is there? There just can’t be a general objection to consequentialism since innumerable cases of it are accepted by everybody all the time. Going to the dentist is the usual example. Others are using forceful action to stop a man lying on the ground being kicked in the head, or saying something rough and tough to stop some bullying of a child. Or having a police force. It cannot be that there is a general objection to all consequentialism. The consequentialism of the Principle of Humanity, as hardly needs to be made more explicit, is in fact not safely expressed as being that the end justifies the means. Rather, it is that the ends and the means justify the means. You have heard enough about the necessity of having means that are not self-defeating, not themselves useless makers of bad lives. That was in there from the start.

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11. Conclusion Timothy Sprigge, as remarked in the beginning, is an actual philosopher, given to concentration on the logic of intelligence. His courage in the convictions of which he comes is evident. It has been my aim to be as true to philosophy. My judgments against his convictions have not been muffled. There is a side to philosophy that is somehow consistent with its being a logic. That side is scepticism, including self-doubt. Despite my determination to have another morality heard, a determination that is an obligation in that very morality, I have some of this self-doubt about my judgments against his convictions.

Notes 1. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 9. 2. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 575. 3. Ibid., p. 224. See also his The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983). 4. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1971). 5. It needs admitting that my own view of the nature of consciousness, while it has nothing to do with Absolute Idealism, is a departure not only from the spiritualism of that doctrine but also from the devout physicalism that is the orthodoxy of the current philosophy of mind. See Radical Externalism: Honderich’s Theory of Consciousness Discussed, ed. A. Freeman (Imprint Academic, 2006). 6. R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons From a New Science (London: Penguin, 2005). 7. T. Honderich, On Political Means and Social Ends (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 17-18. Cf. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, op. cit., pp. 17-19, 190-194, 201-209. 8. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, op. cit., pp. 183-4. 9. T. Honderich, On Political Means and Social Ends, op. cit., p. 22. Cf. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, op. cit., p. 223. 10. Two reviews of The Rational Foundations of Ethics that are of roughly this opinion, but fail to register enough of what is to be said for Sprigge’s work, are those of D. Brink, The Philosophical Review, 100, 1991, pp. 675-682, and R. J. Wallace, The Philosophical Quarterly, 39, 1989, pp. 509-512. 11. Sprigge, The God of Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 516. 12. On the indeterminateness of the principle of liberty, see “John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and a Question About Liberalism”, in my On Political Means and Social Ends, op. cit.

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13. J. J. C. Smart and B. Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); T. Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (London: Pluto, 2003), pp. 28-35. 14. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard: Harvard University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); T. Honderich, Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 58-82. 15. The objection is fully discussed, and a reply by Sprigge considered, in my Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited (London: Pluto, 2006), as also in earlier editions of the book. Cf. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, op. cit., Chap. 8. 16. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, op. cit.; T. Honderich, After The Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 40-46. 17. Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, op. cit., Chap. 8. 18. The remainder of this paper is taken from my book, Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... (London: Continuum, 2006), published in the U. S. and Canada as Right and Wrong, and Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), and from Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, op. cit. 19. It is my view, defended in After the Terror, op. cit. and in Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, op. cit., and elsewhere (), that the Palestinians have had and do have a moral right to their terrorism within historic Palestine against the ethnic cleansing of neo-Zionism and more generally against the project of denying them at least their freedom of the remaining one-fifth of the homeland of which they are the indigenous people. 20. T. Honderich, Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, op. cit., pp. 32-35, 71 21. This is argued at length in Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited, op. cit.

My Philosophy and Some Defence of It Timothy L. S. Sprigge

1. Summary of My Positions I cannot adequately express my surprise and gratification that such a book as this should be appearing and my deep thanks to the editors and contributors. The essays are all full of insights very relevant to my own main ideas and interests but in the following I reflect especially on those which argue in some detail against me. My main philosophical views can be tabulated as follows. (My chief influences have been F. H. Bradley, W. James and Spinoza, but also Schopenhauer, Royce, Santayana, Whitehead, Hartshorne, J. S. Mill, Bentham and Ayer.) I distinguish four main conceptions of the world each of which has its proper place in our thought. The life world—This is the shared world of which we each think that our varying perceptual fields are all spatial parts. This for practical purposes is the real world for us and it is what we must work in and on for survival, comfort, companionship and joy. But how we conceive it is too incoherent to be the absolute truth. Of course, we organize our thoughts of it so that we mostly keep the incoherences out of sight and use the parts of it which work best for present practice. The world of science—This is the world as described by science, more especially physics. To some extent this is an elaboration on the life world, but more of it describes the structure of the noumenal world. The noumenal world—This is the world as it is in itself. It consists, in fact (in my opinion) of innumerable interacting centres or streams of experience, including our own consciousness and the other consciousnesses which we normally believe in. The Absolute—All the centres or streams of experience which exist, and thus everything except the absolute consciousness itself, are contained within one single absolute consciousness. All finite experiences relate to it in a way somewhat analogous to that in which the individual sensations of any conscious finite individual at a moment belong to his, her or its total state of consciousness. Other themes in my thought: Time—I hold that the A-series, fairly much as McTaggart described it was, as he thought, unreal. (The series of events arranged according to their degree of pastness, their presentness, or their degree of futurity.) Whether we should con-

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clude that time is unreal is perhaps optional, but it is at any rate fairly unlike what we normally think of it as being. Finite events do not drop out of reality when they are past. Events are described as past if they are earlier than the time in which they are being so described, but as things really are, there is no such thing as events becoming past. What there is is position in what McTaggart called the C-series. This is the reality which makes them appear as in temporal relations and from any position within which they present themselves as past, present or future. Actually, pace McTaggart, there may well be more than one C-series (each experienced as a temporal series). There is no need for the most part to distinguish the B- from the C-series. However, McTaggart thought that the B-series (events arranged on the basis of the relations earlier than and later than) could only be a temporal series if it were grounded in an A-series. As mentioned by Richard Gale this has been disputed by such thinkers as Russell, Santayana, and Quine. However, I think that a Bseries which is not grounded in an A-series is markedly different from time as we ordinarily conceive it and I thought that Gale did so too. Events can certainly be in the earlier/later relation one to another, but these relations are not quite what they seem. Events earlier than what I at any moment call the present have not in any way dropped out of reality or changed their mode of being. Value—What is intrinsically good or bad is essentially the pleasurable or the unpleasurable. However, there are many different kinds of pleasure and pain and many of these are qualitatively very different from each other though they all have something in common. Way of life utilitarianism—A hedonistic calculus applied to the consequences of individual actions or habits is not the proper way of evaluating them. Rather ways of life are to be evaluated for the hedonic character, and consequences for all affected, of lives thus lived. And individual actions or habits are to be evaluated according as to how they cohere with the best way of life which the individual is capable of living. My reasons for these views are briefly as follows. First, I think that the conception of things existing quite apart from any consciousness or experience is vacuous very much as Whitehead did. Imagining or experiencing it is the only way in which the nature of a reality can really come home to us, except that it can do so to a lesser extent by indirectly imagining it, that is, specifying it as in imaginable ideal relations to what we can directly imagine. We can certainly think for ordinary or even scientific purposes of things as existing apart from any experience of them but the idea becomes intolerably problematic if we press it home. Abstract structures can be imagined through appropriately structured imagery the qualitative character of which we set aside. And we can know that things with a certain abstract structure exist without knowing what their qualitative character is. But we can form no clear idea of a qualitative character which is not experiential.

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Secondly, I think that the real relations between things can only be conceived as the way in which they join together to form a whole, and that the only whole which a congeries of experiences can form is itself an experience. (The relation between whole and part is slightly different.) So all the experiences which fill up the world must ultimately join together as part of one great Cosmic Experience. Space and Time perform this operation for practical and ordinary theoretical purposes, and certainly they must symbolize something real. But this must be some kind of positioning within an Experiential Whole or Cosmic Mind. (My view of physical nature can reasonably be described by Newton’s expression “the sensorium of God”.) Thirdly, I think that the past must be not still, but eternally, a part of reality or else there is nothing for historical beliefs to be true or false about. It follows from this that the future must be in the same case. (Anti-realism about the past is wrong headed, for in effect it reduces the past to its present effects which is surely absurd. And apart from anything else how long is the present? See below.) Fourthly, I believe that whenever we think of something as good or bad, or do so with any vividness, it is imagined as suffused with qualities which are all specific forms of two great genera to which pleasure and pain belong and all of which may be regarded as pleasures or pains themselves in a sufficiently broad sense. For these alone possess really and inherently the positive glow or the nastiness which are ascribed to things in all value judgements. And I think, for reasons which I shall not rehearse, that will (willing) arises out of the basic nisus of every consciousness to fill the world with the good and remove the bad. (The world here means its own experiential stream and all other such streams of which it has sufficient imaginative cognizance plus any other location believed in.) Of course, there are all sorts of perverse forms of the good which capture men’s minds but which should be avoided in the interest of more serious goods and something of the same sort applies to the bad. There follow a few remarks about some of the things said in the splendid essays which fill up the rest of this volume.

2. Comments on the Essays Richard Gale has written very carefully about my view of time and I am most grateful for this (though I am not persuaded that I am essentially wrong). Gale charges me with confusing a phenomenological sense of “present” or “now” with an indexical sense. A partial reply is this. Indexical expressions typically identify something in relation to what is here and now but “here” and “now” are both phenomenological and indexical expressions. Their indexicality is of a special kind as the standpoints in relation to which all other indexical expressions

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are understood (unless perhaps one wants to add “I now”). And they are phenomenological expressions because there is a special feeling of something being here and now which is quite different from the feeling of something as expected or remembered or far away and they cannot be conceived without having the same phenomenological quality and functioning as such standpoints. In the case of “here”, however, we readily recognize that there are events in other consciousnesses which are here to them and we think that their here is as real as our here. But in the case of “now” we think that our now (along with all events supposed simultaneous with it) is in some way specially privileged and incline to think that it alone is real (though not for long). I might add the simple point that the duration of the present is very problematic. If reality is just what is happening now (at this instant) then hardly any of the events we refer to can ever have been real. But if it is not just what is happening now, but includes vast stretches of history, human and cosmic, then what is the status of most of it, now that it is gone? The endeavour of people like myself to have an answer to this cannot be answered by seeking to regiment the use of indexical expressions. A position like mine is just one of the answers which have been given to this question; in contrast stand, for example, the answers of Whitehead, Bergson and others. Whatever the answer, the question is a real one. Where McTaggart’s argument is dubious is in his saying that to identify an event as past you need to identify the time at which it is past and this you can only do in a way which leads to an infinite regress. But as we ordinarily mean it a past event is just past period. There is no need to specify the time at which it is past. Yet this idea that it is just (simply) past, is unsatisfactory. For what does it mean? Perhaps that it is previous to what is now real, but not quite real itself, at least in the same sense. For somehow we believe that it has an alternative sort of reality to what is experienced as going on now, and yet we cannot explain what this alternative sort of reality is. And in the end we have to allow that it has the same sort of reality as “all this which is going on now”. Of course it may properly be described as past in relation to this vantage point which is the real now for us whenever we speak or think, but even so it has just the same kind of reality and the use of indexical expressions by someone who lived then, rather than now, is eternally as correct as ours. In any case, I don’t think that these points about indexicals affect the main issue at all. This is that if events when they sink into the past simply become nothing, it is difficult to see how there can be true or false thoughts about them or even thoughts which imply their having occurred at all. But if they have not become nothing, what have they become? The only satisfactory answer I can find is that they are simply components of total reality just as my present experiences are. It is not good enough to say that they were components of total reality but are so no longer. Nor will it do to say that they are components of present reality for that they are not in the ordinary tensed sense (not, that is, at the time

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that these words are written or read). The only answer which I can find is that past events are part of the same eternal reality as what at any moment I think of as the present. From this it can easily be inferred that the same is true of what I now call the future. The ordinary incoherent concept of time, for which the past is somehow both nothing and something, is so essential to our ordinary experience of being in the world, that a view of things which departs from it cannot easily be expressed except in a way which seems problematic. It is easy to think that the view to which I and many others hold is properly expressed by saying that past events are still there. But of course “still” belongs to the language which misrepresents reality, although it is a misrepresentation which is essential for us beings who seem to be living in time, and whose experiences at every moment seem to take over from previous experiences. But really they are just there, not still there, but eternally there. No other account which is not subject to what seem to me unanswerable objections will do the trick. The process philosophy of Whitehead and Hartshorne gives the past a reality as something which is kept for ever after in the divine mind but only once it has happened. But as I remark further below the idea of an event occurring first outside the divine mind and then moving into it seems unintelligible. An eternalist view both of all events which seem to be in time and of the divine mind itself does not face the same problem. It is difficult to move argumentatively from the confused common sense conception of time to another and truer conception (more consistent incidentally with relativity theory) without getting into a tangle over indexical expressions, but the argument still seems to me essentially right. The past is just another part of the universe from that which we at any moment regard as the present, not something with a different kind of reality as we confusedly but inevitably suppose. This is the moment to say something about the objections which Leemon McHenry makes to my (and probably Spinoza’s) view of time, namely that it makes moral, or indeed other, choices not genuinely free. For if what I choose now, or will choose in a moment, is eternally just there in the divine mind, there seems no real choice left. Well, first I admit that in the very act of choosing you cannot think of your choice as just there. But that does not make your choice an impotent illusion. And if it is a bad choice, then, so far as blame is concerned, you can be blamed for it, that is, someone may reasonably try to make you feel uncomfortable about it in the hope that you do not do such a thing again. However, I do not think that blameworthiness is a fundamental category in terms of which the world or even human life can be understood. Just as there are beautiful things and ugly things so there are good and bad people, or at least good and bad behaviour or thoughts at particular moments. That it is hard or impossible to incorporate this conception into the process of making a decision does not show that it is not true. It is a truth which it is hard and perhaps wrong to cling to at

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any moment of choice, but true it may be nonetheless. Still, I do not deny that this may seem bizarre to many thoughtful people. But it is not denied, it is, in fact insisted on, that what will come after now is largely, if not wholly, determined by what is occurring now. Therefore if Spinoza’s message is the good one he thought it, he was quite justified in seeking to write something which might modify people’s behaviour. And certainly his determinism can be invoked as a ground of good relations and forgiveness. In any case I am not concerned to defend determinism only determinationism according to which there is an eternal truth about everything which, as we must put it, has happened, and is happening and will happen, whether or not one moment of time has a character entirely due to previous moments (plus the laws of nature, nature, that is, in the widest possible sense). And it does not follow either from determinationism or determinism that our choices at any moment are not contributing essentially to what will be. Henry VIII was a vile husband (not to speak of many much worse people) whatever the metaphysical truth about time and cause and effect may be. I thank Leemon for his complete understanding of my position and quite understand his objection to this part of my viewpoint. James Allard has given a very thorough and correct account of my main metaphysical views and method of arguing for them. He also gives a very clear account of the different kinds of judgement or belief which I distinguish and of the types of truth of which each is capable. The only thing which should be added is the concept of indirect imagination which allows me to explain the possibility of such metaphysical beliefs as that of the existence of the Absolute and the noumenal basis of time, as something of which we can have a sort of second best real (rather than notional belief) which can reasonably figure in a metaphysical system. I should make it clear also that a real belief need not be true, it need only envisage what it affirms with adequate fullness. My real belief in a child’s visual experience of a toucan as I read a story aloud to her may be false either because she was not listening or did not have sufficient imagination. Again one may have the real belief that someone is in pain when she or he is only pretending. Metaphysics, for me, seeks beliefs which are real and true but these are not the same thing. Allard then carefully explains my account of concrete universals in The Vindication of Absolute Idealism. I very much appreciate the care with which he has studied and expounded my views. Geoffrey Madell and I are at one in our rejection of physicalism (of which he is a distinguished critic) doubtless for quite close reasons. But Madell thinks that I have made no case for panpsychism, and himself holds by mind-body dualism. Is he a naïve realist in his view of perception? I am not quite sure. At any rate, he thinks that the reasons why idealists such as myself believe that what is directly presented in perception cannot exist independently of mind, are quite wrong. The reason he criticizes most fully is the view that because we always see things in a certain perspective it follows that they can only be presented as

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they appear to someone, not as they are in themselves. But to me it still seems that we cannot imagine what a thing is really like except as presented to a perceiver (or as feeling its own being). He believes that the facts of perspective show that what we perceive when we perceive a table is just what we would expect to perceive if we were perceiving a real external object. “Let us suppose, for a moment, that it is the real table we see. Must not this real table seem to diminish as we move further from it?” (Reid) But it seems to me that this table seen as at a certain distance and this table seen as near to are fairly different from each other and that the real table, if there be such a thing, cannot be either of them. The fact that the camera would record things similarly different seems to me to support the view that they are different, for clearly the two images on the photograph are different in character. And of course the photograph is something physical which can itself be seen at different distances etc. At any rate, so far as perspective goes, I think that the nearest to naïve realism that could be true is that a physical thing exists and has characteristics both at a place and from various places and that its perspectival qualities (perhaps too its secondary qualities) are of the latter kind.1 Besides the perspectival variations, there are all the arguments from secondary qualities and from the nature of the brain processes which underlie perception. But perhaps what I would most emphasise is that the world comes to me perceptually with myself as its centre, which other things surround, and that such a world cannot really be part of the same continuous whole as the world which has you at its centre. Besides, if one takes science seriously, physical things are complexes of all sorts of unperceivable things, such as atoms and electrons etc., and this “scientific world” is essentially unimaginable or to whatever extent it can be imagined is so only through an imagined perspective on it. These considerations do not prove the truth of panpsychism but they do suggest that we cannot imagine physical things as they really and inherently are, and panpsychism is the only reasonable suggestion which seems to be around as to what they really and inherently are. A possible response to the idea that we are not seeing something as it independently is because we see it in a certain perspective is to contrast seeing in perspective with some more absolute vision or perceptual experience of it. This is to grasp after the idea of a non-perspectival perception of it and this may lead one to imagine it (or even oneself) feeling its filling out of a shaped space from within rather as one seems to experience one’s own body as doing. Then to avoid any breath of panpsychism one says that what would be thus experienced would exist even if it was not felt. So perhaps the “real” Mount Everest (about which Hannay speculates so interestingly) is that body as it would feel itself filling out space if it were suitably sentient. But the analogy is limited. For although we may seem to have our own body at least partially presented from within, this body image is really a presentation the cause of which lies in the brain, rather

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than in the parts presented, though of course it depicts it as it is from within in certain gross respects. Still perhaps a more full and immediate experience of a bodily thing’s volume by itself is possible. But could this really be cut off from the experience of it? Only if so, can we liberate this idea from panpsychism. But the main thing is that Everest (as thing in itself) undoubtedly exists. And panpsychism, I repeat, is almost unique in giving a definite answer as to what things in themselves are. (Schopenhauer did up to a point and perhaps in the end there is not much difference between saying that everything is Will and that everything is Experience. He spoilt it a bit, however, by denying that the Will has separate bits of itself corresponding to different bits of the physical world.) My approach to these matters does indeed turn on my own sense that I do not know what something is really like in itself unless I either directly experience it, or imagine it (even indirectly, see above). And everything which I adequately imagine and concerning which I raise the question does seem to be either an experience or something which is an object of, and ultimately an ingredient of, experience. The whole issue of our varying (literal and metaphorical) perspective on things which are somehow still the same things is brilliantly raised in Alastair Hannay’s dialogue.2 More generally Hannay provides a rich exploration of the question whether we can get any grasp of things as they may exist independently of human experience or perception of them. He relates this to wider issues than those simply concerned with ordinary sensory experience or perception of things. Are, for example, numbers only grasped from the perspective of other numbers?, he asks at one point. But his concern is rather with the concrete world and whether consciousness can ever light up something which is already there or always manufactures (in each of its instances) a world out of its own peculiar sensory data which may be unique to just one kind of living thing. What was the world like before there were brains, and what is it like apart from them? Hannay distinguishes a more phenomenological and a more cognitivist way of regarding the world’s reality, the one seeming human all too human though certainly seeming to bring things strongly to mind, from an apparently more “objective” cognitivist approach which tends to lose sight of the things with which we grapple in daily experience. He points out that it is the reality of views (“there is a beautiful view from up there”) which is at the heart of most of our difficulties. Are they really there when unperceived? However, by relating this question to the climber’s experience of Everest he avoids the excessively visual orientation of much philosophy of perception which tends to replace the tough resistant character of things with something rather ghostly. He brings out the confusing uses of the question “is it all just something in the head?”. This is an excellent treatment of all these issues. Hannay’s position seems at least to border on a form of idealism for which ours is always a human interpretation of something which transcends our actual experience.

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There are, of course, several different sorts of idealism, the chief of which Leslie Armour, in his historically and philosophically rich contribution, distinguishes as mentalism, ideationalism and symbolism. His own view is a form of symbolism according to which the world is like a book there to be interpreted, but which like any worthwhile book (treatise, novel or play) is open to a variety of different, and differently illuminating, interpretations. The world we know is bound to be just one of these. These different interpretations are not incompatible, in the sense that a rational person must choose between them but they are suited to different purposes. I have sometimes myself felt that the fact that certain thinkers, Spinoza for example, are continually interpreted in fresh ways shows the richness of their thought, not its unclarity, for it reflects the multiinterpretability of the world itself. So there is much that is persuasive in Armour’s claim here. It is rightly opposed, I think, to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. This is indeed very much how the universe seems. It is perhaps a fault of mine to seek obsessively for a single view of how things really are. Still I think there are certain choices in metaphysics where one choice is nearer the truth than another as I am sure Armour does too. John Leslie and in a different way Bill Mander are the idealists to whose thought my own is closest. Leslie’s idea, most fully presented in Infinite Minds3, is that God’s thinking of things may well be enough to constitute their existence. For fully adequate thought must use complete models of what is thought of and the models used in God’s thinking may be simply what we come across as the things themselves. This is remarkably convincing and seems to me to mark a real advance in absolute idealist thought (if he will accept that denomination.) As to what explains the existence of a thinking God or divine mind it is simply the consequence of its being a good thing that he should exist, for Leslie thinks that all things which exist do so because it is good that they do so. I am troubled by this if it implies that there is nothing which is truly bad. (However, I am inclined to think that real evil exists because the good so to speak unwillingly requires that it does so without thereby making it any the better; the world would be better without it, if only it could. But I shall not explore this matter further here.) Leslie infers from his ought-to-exist thesis that there must be many Gods each creating “his” own world by “his” adequate imagination of it. To the question which I once raised as to whether if there were many Gods or Absolutes, in no real (as opposed to ideal) relations to each other, they would know of each other’s existence Leslie has suggested that each could deduce the likely or even certain existence of the others. But would not this set them puzzling in a way which destroyed the unity and satisfactoriness of their thought? This is very deep water. Granted that our universe or Absolute (which may of course include many spatially disconnected physical universes, provided they are somehow really re-

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lated within it, perhaps by the contrast it experiences between them) is a kind of universal mind or better experience, I am inclined to leave it open whether there may be totally other universes or Absolutes. The nearest I come to much of a reason for a negative opinion on the matter is the possibility that ideal relations of contrast or affinity between the characters of things require the possibility of this being somehow mentally registered. This would require that every putative other universe would have to be really connected with ours through the cosmic mind experiencing the contrast between them (unless, indeed, which seems practically impossible there was no affinity or even contrast between their ingredients.) But this view of ideal relations is open to serious doubt. So I do not have strong intellectual reasons for denying a plurality of Absolutes, yet I think the totality of all things (perhaps including a variety of physically disconnected physical worlds co-present in the one Absolute Experience) would lose something if it was not unified in one comprehensive thought; so perhaps that is a reason for thinking that there is one ultimate Absolute. Bill Mander thinks that it is evident from reflection on our own consciousness that it must be part of a much larger Whole, ultimately of a Cosmic Mind. Thereby he arrives, along a different path, at a view of things very like that which I take. I am very glad of this, and am prepared to see his as another way of approaching the same truth. But I do not agree that the Jamesian note in my own thought (streams of experience) and the Bradleyan note (the Absolute) are in contradiction to each other, though perhaps there is some tension between them. As I see it, each consciousness reflects in its character the other consciousnesses with which it is in communication and indeed its entire environment. It has its own character but this is one it could only have granted its precise position in the general scheme of things. Moreover, there is something not easily graspable about our states of consciousness especially “at their edges”. This is particularly true of the flow of time which baffles introspection. Thus introspection itself exhibits the incompleteness of each moment’s experience (completed in the Absolute where all things hang together). I would say more if space allowed. Nicholas Rescher would have little truck (I imagine) with any of the idealisms of which I have spoken so far. What is important for him is the distinction between conceptual and causal idealism and he supports the former. I agree with the basic principle of this that many of our key concepts of nature borrow from concepts which apply more basically to mind (though surely concepts of the mental are often misleadingly modelled on concepts of physical facts). But I take a further step and hold that this is a sign of the mind impregnated character of things in general. In any case, Bill Mander and myself agree with the view of such absolute idealists as F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green, and more doubtfully Hegel, that all our experiences are ultimately the experiences of one Cosmic Mind (or elements in

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one Cosmic Experience) of which our minds (or moment by moment experiences) are parts. Pierfrancesco Basile argues against this with some force. But first he gives a very good account of a view which I especially support, namely the doctrine of panpsychism as it has developed in the philosophies of a number of historical philosophers and is occasionally endorsed today (though more often dismissed as absurd) and says rightly that it should not be rejected as simply too bizarre to be true. One may add the point that for many earlier philosophers it was mind or the mental whose nature was taken to be fairly unproblematic and that it was the nature of matter or the physical which was regarded as problematic. Certainly once you have a naturalistic and materialistic view of the world you can puzzle as to how mind came on the scene. But I still think that it is more reasonable to take it that we do know what mind is, or at least what sentient experience is, and contrast it with problems which arise when you try to think what physical reality is “in itself”. He then criticizes the idea of the Absolute as an experiential whole which contains all finite experiences (meaning by “finite” simply less than the Whole). The problem is not the unimaginable “vastness” of the experience. For it arises equally for the view that there are much less comprehensive experiential wholes which contain lesser experiential wholes with their own sense of distinct identity and ignorance of the whole to which they belong. (Somewhat similar problems arise for the mind dust theory for which little particles of experience join together to make larger mental wholes such as our own consciousness.) Basile thinks that the efforts of Bradley, Royce and myself to compare the relation of the Absolute to those total experiences which are the what-it-is-like-tobe-one-of-us-at-a-particular-moment to the relation which our total experiences have to the individual sensations, feelings, thoughts etc. which they contain are vain. Certainly the cases cannot be quite alike. For our individual sensations do not conceive themselves as stages in the life of distinct conscious beings. But if a whole can be made up of one sort of mental items how can we be sure that a whole cannot be made up of a different sort of mental items which do have a sense of their own separateness, a mistake which is corrected in some larger whole but is all the same an essential part of their own character? Well, one would not think that this was how it is unless it seemed the only answer to a very real question. A panpsychic universe consisting of innumerable separate units of experience seems hardly conceivable. Would it be a universe at all? It seems more like a Leibnizian monadism which can only function because God is allowed a kind of privileged access to everything, a permission which seems inconsistent with Leibniz’s basic principles. We naively think of Space, and similarly or differently of Time, as the great containers of everything, but it is more problematic how distinct experiences can belong to a common Space (and

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perhaps Time) than it is to see how they can belong to a common Eternal Mind (or Eternal Experience). Certainly I once dismissed any such compounding of consciousness as an absurdity but I came to think of it as the only possible solution to a very real problem. (William James also ceased to think it the absurdity he had once thought it, although for other reasons he rejected its use by absolute idealists.)4 Basile raises objections also to the idea of a temporal process belonging to the eternal specious present of anything like the Absolute. Well, I can only say that I am convinced by the argument briefly sketched at the beginning of this essay that all moments of time exist eternally, whether in the Absolute or elsewhere. As for why we can access the past in a way in which we cannot access the future, well, that just seems to be a feature of the C-series (the B-series properly understood). But why are they arranged like that, so that the later know the earlier in a way of which the converse is not true? Well if designing a theodicy one could think of reasons for things to be arranged that way, but I leave that aside. The most obvious alternative view is that it is the causal relation which is, as has been famously said, the cement of the universe, and of a panpsychic universe in particular. But causation requires relations which are not causal (or so it seems to me) which must figure in any laws of nature, or of noumenal reality, which there may, indeed must, be and which are the basis of causation. Although I cannot reject absolute idealism for Basile’s reason it is certainly the biggest problem which such a metaphysic faces. But I must leave it there, only asking the reader to look at the section in my The Vindication of Absolute Idealism on the compounding of consciousness. I thank Pierfrancesco for his very insightful treatment. Will Sweet’s important essay arrived rather late when I had finished writing this chapter, so there is only space left for some quite brief comment. It provides a thorough and valuable account of various forms of personal and absolute idealism, and how they bear on religion. He is surely right that the former is nearer to conventional Western religion than is the latter. It is, though, I think a bit misleading to say that there was or is a broad consensus among absolute idealists that the Absolute should not be identified with God. The history of controversy over this seems to have been quite complicated.5 Certainly for some the Absolute is not sufficiently personal to bear that name, but the notion of a more impersonal God is not foreign to religious thinking. There are indeed a number of ways in which a being could be personal or impersonal but the Absolute or Divine Consciousness, as I conceive it, very much under the influence of Bradley, being timeless and unchanging, could hardly be the former in any remotely ordinary sense. My concern was to emphasise that metaphysical positions arrived at argumentatively may have significant religious implications for their proponents. I especially wanted to scotch the quite common notion that metaphysical attempts

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to prove the existence either of God or of the Absolute (or of both if they are the same) are unfitted for promoting a religious orientation towards things. My own metaphysical position, if true, shows that the one great Whole within which we live is a proper object of religious emotion and that the effort to improve our own part of it will not ultimately have been in vain. It suggests at any rate that human and cosmic history is not simply a tale told by a nonexistent idiot signifying nothing, but is, however slowly, moving towards some extraordinary climax (i.e. at the climactic moment of the C series) at which the last word will be with joy and goodness rather than with suffering and wickedness (though much of the latter must remain an eternal blot on the nature of things). It may also justify discursively the feeling that the world has a kind of depth to it which many of us experience most fully through music but which others experience in different ways, more especially the mystics. Above all, it opposes the kind of materialism for which human and animal welfare and suffering are mere physical buzzings in the brain much like the workings of a computer. And the existence of God or the Absolute encourages us to think that the last word will be with joy rather than suffering. Of course, absolute idealism cannot offer everyone what they most want from religion, but if it is true it does endorse an outlook which is religious rather than irreligious or so at least it seems to me. And if this metaphysic is wrong, I suspect that any better alternative (such perhaps as some form of process philosophy) will, in its own way, also be religiously relevant. My view of things, as already indicated, owes a good deal to the process philosophy of Whitehead, Hartshorne and James. However, I find an eternalistic view of time logically compulsive and so cannot quite go along with them; also I am dubious whether one can really make sense of one actual occasion entering into another. (On my view our experiences do not enter into the Absolute; they are just eternally there. If there were events which were first outside, and then inside, the Absolute, they could hardly be the very same event.) However, the issue which Marcus Ford (whose book on William James6 I much admire) takes up is that I wrongly accuse Whitehead and Hartshorne—though not James, how could I?—of inadequately facing the nature of evil. I did not mean to imply that they took a light view of evil (as perhaps Hegel did) and probably did not do justice to their position taken in toto. But I am genuinely puzzled as to how Whitehead thought that a thoroughly evil mind, or mental state, relates to “the subjective aim” or lure, which God is said to hold out to every moment of consciousness (even if it allows some latitude). What sort of ideal did God hold out to Himmler as he planned the system of gas chambers and related mentally to Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies? Did God suggest some kind of total reform, some abandonment of these plans? Or did God suggest some way of organizing the system more efficiently or even humanely? The former suggests some kind of heart searching on the part of

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Himmler or some kind of inner battle. Well, perhaps there was but it cannot have amounted to much. The latter suggests that God entered with at least a little sympathy into the plans. Neither alternative seems very satisfactory. One is inclined to say that God was just absent then, but this does not fit with Whitehead’s general metaphysic. And there are some particular statements by Whitehead which are worrying. Perhaps my strictures apply rather less to Hartshorne, who thought that the nastiness of much human behaviour was bound to be a possible byproduct of free will. “My formula is, that the risks of harm from freedom are justified by the opportunities for good.” I admit that absolute idealism can likewise seem insufficiently concerned with the problem of evil. This is certainly true of Bosanquet. For myself, I can only conclude that things are so tied up one with another that all the good things which occur are bound to be coupled with appalling evil, both moral and natural, though the evil does not contribute to the good or does not do so for the most part. What seems to many an evil intrinsic to life is the fact of predation. That nature is red in tooth and claw has seemed to many besides Tennyson a difficulty in their creed, if this be essentially an optimistic one. How should one respond to this feature of the world? Is one like Strindberg to find joy in the hard and cruel battles of life—and perhaps learn to understand them by joining in? And there is the feeling, which John Llewelyn discusses, on the part of Roger Scruton that by hunting one gets closer to nature and of Ortega y Gasset that one humbles oneself in an almost religious way by lowering oneself to the animals. In contrast to this somewhat Nietzschean view there is the more Schopenhauerian celebration of pity or compassion as the supreme good. If one wants somehow to be at the heart of things should one join in the universal hunting of one creature by another or rise somewhat above this as a human being? Which is the true message of a deep ecological ethic which sees each thing occupying its own niche in an ecological system? For Llewelyn a passage from Tolstoy helps him find the right stance. In this passage Tolstoy describes how he turned against hunting after watching a wolf whom he had shot. The appeal on the face of the wolf (thinks Llewelyn) is something we should really feel on the part of every existent. Each pleads with us to respect it. Even if it be an inanimate object it still has in a certain sense a face which it turns towards us. Each creature at its own level of being, its position in the ecological system to which it belongs, lives its own life or exists its own existence and we should not object to that if it is a predatory animal. But the human position in the world, at least for those whose basic needs for food and shelter are satisfied, is one from which we should call for everything to be able to live or exist in its own way, and it is only with regret that we should ever destroy anything. “In my judgement”—says Llewelyn—Ortega was “giving for

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himself and advocating for his readers a vacation from the human condition, a vacation so vacated of reason as to be atavistic”. My feelings are much the same as Llewelyn’s on this. Pauline Phemister argues well that Leibniz’s God is religiously relevant in the way in which I have implied that he is not. I suppose my somewhat negative attitude to Leibniz as a religious thinker who might be taken on board by us today, is a response to what he says about the damned and the consciousness of it by the blessed. This passage, since I first read it as quoted by William James in chapter one of Pragmatism,7 has limited the seriousness with which I can take him as an inspiring religious thinker. I know that some Church fathers (e.g., Tertullian) said much the same, but it is something from which more sympathetic figures have turned away. So although he is fascinating as a metaphysician I find his appeal as a religious thinker rather slight. But I may be narrow minded in this. Peter Forrest in his challenging essay on another seventeenth century philosopher offers us two options as to what Spinoza meant by “substance”: (1) A substance is some thing that has properties and stands in relations but is not itself a property of a substance. (2) A substance is something which can exist all by itself. On my first reading of Forrest’s essay I went for (2) which I think Forrest regards as primary for Spinoza. However, on reflection I think that perhaps (1) is nearer to his idea of substance. For this I interpret as something of which other things may be enduring or passing states while substance is not a state of anything else. Thus flu is a passing state of a human being but as popularly conceived a human being is neither an enduring or a passing state of anything more fundamental. But according to Spinoza a substance is not a state of anything more fundamental, but a human being is. That there is just one substance and that it is a necessarily existing thing is something to be proved later. But even so much suggests why a substance exists necessarily. This is because for a thing not to exist is for something more fundamental never to be in a certain state. No such failure to exist can be ascribed to a substance.8 Forrest’s discussion is full of interesting ideas, but to discuss it further here is impossible. My more thorough investigation of Spinoza’s terminology and metaphysics is in Chapter Two of my The God of Metaphysics. Stephen Clark is a well known protagonist in the battle against modern physicalism. On animals he holds positions with which I am in complete sympathy though he does so on the basis of a much richer biological knowledge than I possess. In his paper in this volume he raises the question of how far animals are aliens from our point of view. Both our fellow humans and animals “are presented to our sight as signs of distinct worlds of feeling” which we should

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recognize, as Llewelyn also stressed, as making demands upon us. The idea that they are not conscious because they cannot talk is dismissed as it should be, if only on the grounds that a human baby could not learn to talk “without already thinking and feeling”. Clark continues with a finely balanced discussion of how animals compare with us. We risk either thinking them too alike or too different. We should at any rate accept them as the home of values some of which may be hidden from us. And it is quite reasonable that there should be some contrast between how far we are upset by the troubles of animals and those of humans while doing what we can to alleviate them in both cases. How different are animals from flowers we might go on to ask? Even a panpsychist will not suppose that a flower (which is probably not a single conscious individual) can appreciate its own visible beauty. This is presumably not even true of cats, who certainly are single conscious and visualizing individuals, but do not have an outside perspective on themselves such as we gain from mirrors etc. So a beautiful cat is not beautiful in the same way for itself. But it certainly has some sense of self and of its good or bad relations with other individuals and recognizes which of them are its conspecifics. So cats have lives quite like our own in some respects but in other ways quite different. My good friend, and excellent philosopher, Ted Honderich has written a thoughtful, thorough and important criticism of the kind of utilitarianism which I favour. Here I can only offer a concise and insufficient reply. First, let me say that my whole attitude to matters of value and ethics is based on my belief that the only things which can properly be regarded as intrinsically good are pleasurable experiences or states of consciousness which feel good in the actual living through them and the only intrinsically bad things are such states as feel bad in the living through them. For they alone truly have that sparkling or drear character which we attribute to anything we think intrinsically good or bad (as I have already said). This must be qualified by saying that there are many states which feel bad at one level but at a higher and more holistic level feel good. Certainly Tchaikovsky’s late music was a product in part of his own unhappiness but surely he enjoyed the creative process and had a pleasure which most of us lack.9 This granted it is not a long step to base ethics on utilitarianism whether the quantitative utilitarianism of Bentham or the qualitative utilitarianism of J. S. Mill or of some other sort. Ted thinks Mill confused. As for myself I see neither of their views as quite satisfactory. I cannot quite accept Mill’s elitist qualitative utilitarianism. For it seems to imply that if there are two persons engaged in different occupations which are equally pleasurable that one occupation may be intrinsically more valuable than the other. But I think that if they really are equally pleasurable they are equally intrinsically valuable. (Obviously their value may be different extrinsically.)

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But equally Bentham’s hedonistic calculus is not quite satisfactory. For it implies that if you take two pleasurable experiences of which one is ecstatic while the other is minimally pleasurable and that the first lasts only an hour then there must be some number of hours of the latter which is of more intrinsic value. The case is even more obvious with pain. Suppose someone is tortured for five hours but that it produces N momentary alleviations of a mild headache on the part of N people: then there must be some value of N such that the alleviations of the mild pain outweighs the pain of the torture. Take, for example, a mild headache and an excruciating pain which can be inflicted on creatures of some sort. Then there must be some numbers N and M such that it would be right to inflict this excruciating pain on M animals, or for that matter human beings, to provide a cure for that pain. In short, it would be better that N animals should suffer terribly and perhaps for quite a time in order that human beings should be saved from a very, very mild headache lasting five minutes which would probably occur only once in their lives. Or if the reference to animals muddies the issue suppose that it was human beings which are in question; however, I choose animals because this is somewhat closer to an actual possibility. In short, according to the hedonistic calculus sufficient duration of a pleasure or pain of a very faint sort equals in value some much shorter period of a pleasure or pain of a very intense sort. For example, all the happiness in your life (say seventy years) would be outweighed by the absolutely minimal moment by moment happiness of a slug which lived long enough.10 This does not seem right and therefore rules out Bentham’s hedonistic calculus. However abandoning that does not force us to embrace qualitative hedonism of Mill’s sort for this applies to pleasures and pains all of equal duration which may differ in value though they do not differ in the intensity of the pleasure or pain. If both qualitative and quantitative versions of hedonistic utilitarianism are out what are we left with? Well, we may be left at least with this; factors favouring an action or policy must consist of pleasures promoted or pains prevented even if we accept that there are problems of weighting the positive and negative value of the various pleasure and pains concerned against those promoted or prevented by a different policy. In short, utilitarianism may still limit the kinds of factors which may be taken into account; even if it cannot determine one correct answer it can still show which general sorts of factors my be judged relevant to the justification of an action. Consider now briefly the so-called happiness box. Well, what kind of happiness does it supposedly provide? If it provides the happiness of a good friendship then the scientist who controls the box is as true a friend as a socalled real friend. For he must have the qualities, wit, shared interest in art and literature etc. which he appears to have; he could not use the controls properly

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otherwise. There is no more likelihood of deception than in the ordinary case. (The apparent friend may be an enemy spy in disguise but must not the disguise show through in the end?) Sexual relationship is a bit different but even here if he is going to be convincing the apparent lover must have feelings suitable to the apparent situation if he is to express himself properly via the machine. As for the enjoyment of nature I suggest that this could only be conveyed by a controller who had some such enjoyment himself which he was communicating, like Beethoven or Delius (and perhaps not even by him if there is a more mystical aspect to such enjoyment). But perhaps the happiness box is supposed to produce simply a feeling of happiness with no narrative element or no narrative within which one is an agent so that every detail is fixed up in advance. Well, any normal human being would get bored. But if it is simply a bliss without content, then that is what many spiritual aspirants have sought and is perhaps not to be despised. But the situation is more likely to be that of the very long lived slug. This raises the whole issue of relationships. If A has the apparent experience of companionship with a friend of the kind B really is and vice versa, but there is no causal relation, is the value less than if they are in real contact? In short, is the value of their relationship just the sum of the separate experiences of each neither of which logically requires the other? Well, here I would say that the relationship may have its own felt value which is more than the sum of two separate experiences. True, this claim rests on the somewhat Whiteheadian view, which I accept, that we do actually experience each other’s experiences (at least in the sense that there are necessary connections between them) and that the partition between us is not watertight. Here metaphysics comes in, whether absolute idealist or process philosophy style. But I find it hard to understand the world without appealing to one or other such concept of reality. One might put it like this. No man is an island and there is a seepage from one stream of consciousness to another and this seepage is experienced on both sides as something good (if it is good) or, if it is deceptive, it will be no more so than all must grant the more superficial sorts of relationship may be. (Excuse the somewhat mixed metaphor.) But what of other values? Is not a certain level of equality desirable among the human family? First, there is the principle of diminishing returns. Higher taxation for the rich and better services for the poor, sick and the otherwise needy (or really useful overseas aid) will give the latter more happiness than the rich are deprived of. And would it not be better to have no poor if this could be prevented by sacrifices on the part of the rich? Moreover, besides diminishing returns there is the value in all kinds of ways of a spreading universal sense of brotherhood and sisterhood? And by value here I mean greater happiness and less unhappiness not excluding the inevitable feelings of envy in an unfair soci-

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ety (or world). So I support the desirability of human equality and I mean equality of outcome not of opportunity, especially since the latter rests on an incoherent notion of free will (e.g., that we could all be equally skilled in the ways of the market if we wished to be). Doubtless this must be modified somewhat to allow for the goods produced by some competition. And in the end I appeal to the fact, as I see it, that happiness is greatest for all if the majority are living a way of life which is maximally felicific. Honderich’s principle of humanity has much to be said for it. But if an ethics of this sort is to be well founded it must derive from the fundamental values which are really out there as one might put it, namely the objective intrinsic value and disvalue pertaining to pleasure and pain. This seems to me the only way of escaping from the idea that ethics is an optional human construction whereby we “invent” right and wrong and does not fully recognize that bereavement and hunger are miseries as real in others, both near and remote, in them as they are or would be in him and his associates. My one objection to the principle of humanity is that it has no place for animals whose happiness and unhappiness is just as real, whatever the differences, as our own. And as for nature at large I believe that our feelings for it rest at any rate partly on a real interaction of our personal consciousness with the impersonal consciousness of supposedly unconscious things. It will be seen that my version of utilitarianism draws on my metaphysical views. But mainly this is an interpretation of feelings which all normally sensitive people have, however they explain them philosophically.

3. Proving the Existence of the Absolute: An Addendum I finish briefly with an addendum to the “proofs” of absolute idealism which have persuaded me. It relates to the nature of counterfactual propositions and how they can in some cases be true. In my Facts, Words and Beliefs I advocated the following account of counterfactual conditionals. If p, which is false, had been the case then q would have been so, means that “p is not the case but among all logically possible but nonactual universes there is one which includes p and q, and which is more similar to the actual universe than is any logically possible universe which includes p and not-q”.11 This is very like the views of David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker, but I had no knowledge of their views which were expressed at about the same time. Anyway, although the view appeals to me I am not quite happy with it. Thus I now prefer another approach. If one individual intends to carry out a sufficiently definite policy in dealing with certain matters then it is possible for another sufficiently intelligent individual who realizes this to predict with a highish level of probability how he will

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behave in such and such circumstances. Moreover, he can form a reasonable view of how the individual would have behaved in certain counterfactual circumstances. In one of the easier card games, (which are not a matter of pure luck) one can recognize someone’s policy and decide what he is likely to do in each situation which might occur in the game. If this is not possible, that is because there is some open endedness to his policy or some failure on one’s own part to guess what it is or on his to be consistent. That this is not possible in chess turns on its special complexity. But if a super mind, superior to any extant computer, were playing a game according to a definite (even if flexible) policy then there would surely be a truth implied by that policy as to what it would be likely to do at each point in the game, even if the implications were not always known for sure by any lesser mind. Now suppose that the universe as a whole is being operated on by—or is itself—a super-mind operating according to, a certain policy of this sort then there would not only be a truth at every moment as to what was probably to come but a truth as to what would very probably have happened if something in the past had been different. Thus there are definite counterfactual truths as to what would in all probability have happened in the universe if certain details were altered with a carefully selected minimal disturbance to the rest of what was going on. The point about this is that from mere facts about physical things, thought to be out of the control of any mind, no similar deduction can be made as to what might have happened counterfactually. I find it difficult to make sense of sheerly physical potentialities as they have traditionally been described, for they are neither elements in what concretely is nor pure possibilities like universals. But if what concretely is includes, or in its totality simply is, a mind carrying out a certain policy in what we might call the world game then the fact about that mind and its intentions are facts about what is, but such that they logically necessitate what it would at least very probably have done in any particular counterfactual circumstance as long as the game continues. (Actually if, as I believe, everything is intrinsically connected to everything else by their full intrinsic natures the idea of a minimal disturbance can only make sense at a rather abstract level. Perhaps the laws determine the describable character of each event, or its probability, but the unique feeling of what it is like for a thing to be in a certain situation in the causal world is necessitated differently. So counterfactuals will only be true of the world as necessarily conceived somewhat abstractly by us. But this should be sufficient at the level of ordinary thought.) Thus there is something very special about intentions. Their existence and character have logical implications as to what (at least very probably) will happen, or would happen, under definite circumstances and are thus quite different from other sorts of mere fact. It seems to me, therefore, that if the whole world is evolving according to the plan of a super mind then there is an explanation of counterfactual truth which would not otherwise be available. (Even if the policy

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leaves some latitude as to what will be done one can at least think of high probabilities of this kind as being in principle deducible.) So far as this explanation of the possibility of counterfactuals with a definite (or very probable) truth value goes, the policy might be either the laws of nature or these plus other principles, perhaps of an aesthetic or moral character. Now some will object to this argument on the ground that it falls foul of ideas associated rightly or wrongly (I am advised wrongly) with Wittgenstein concerning “following a rule”. The general line of thought is that there is no absolute truth as to what is implied by the determination to follow a rule, since (to put it roughly) someone committing themselves to follow a rule is in a mental or psycho-physical state in which certain symbols are entertained, but as to what the rule expressed in the symbols imply this is really a matter of later choice, even if others will describe some actions as according to the rule and some others not. Thus in explaining that in saying 2, 4, 8, 16, 32… I am following the rule of always saying next the double of what I said last, it will be claimed that especially when we come to higher numbers, it cannot be said that some apparently eccentric (or faulty) following of the series is necessarily a failure to follow the rule. For what the rule implies for a certain person, or at least social group, is not truly logically definite but only a fact of empirical psychology. That is, the noises or marks in which a rule is formulated only show their meaning by what they determine me to say, or what other people in my society may say, as the series goes on. All I can say to this is that it seems to me blarney. Unless a definite law of nature, say the law of gravity, has definite implications as to what will be or occur at each moment as a result of how things were at earlier moments, it seems to me that science would be impossible. (We can reasonably treat this law as absolutely true for present purposes.) And it does seem to me that a mind can direct itself to a definite universal and decide to exemplify that universal in everything it does, even though, of course, (if it is itself finite) it cannot run the infinite whole of these implications through in its mind. (Of course it can change its plan). This line of thought, according to which the world is controlled by a God existing in time may seem to favour a more conventional form of theism than the pantheism which I advocate. But if the One which is the Whole in which everything else (at all times and places) is contained, has as one of its main features the conscious commitment to certain rules then, as it seems to me, its existence explains matters as well as does a conventional theism. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that if the Eternal One eternally grasps the principles which relate the multiplicity of its contents one to another then that conscious grasp of its own nature will serve the same explanatory function as a more temporal God’s policy for dealing with events as they arise. Maybe it serves it better for it gives less purchase to the idea that God may change his mind.

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A not strictly philosophical question is whether the existence of the Absolute has any real religious significance. I suggest that it does, if only because it justifies a certain cosmic emotion which we sometimes feel towards the Whole of things and through which we conceive the idea that in spite of all its horrors the world is essentially worthwhile and good, and, this being so, will probably improve in time, that is along the C-series, since a world which was not improving sub specie temporis could not be worthwhile.

Notes 1. The idea (slightly adapted here) comes from C. D. Broad, which he ascribes perhaps correctly to Whitehead and Norman Kemp Smith. Incidentally perhaps the neatest distinction between primary and secondary qualities is to be found in Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1925), pp. 206-208. This is not quite Locke’s account but it is how the distinction is in effect most often now used but without much explanation. 2. John Wisdom used to often remark in conversation and lectures that philosophical questions were such that, when everything was said which could be said in favour of and against each answer, that just was the answer; there was no need to decide between them. I think that Hannay almost achieves this in relation to the idea of things as they are and as they are in perspective for us. 3. J. Leslie, Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4. “We have now reached a point of view from which the self-compounding of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain fact, and in which the speculative assumption of a similar but wider compounding in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a legitimate hypothesis. The absolute is not the impossible being I once thought it. Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and we finite minds may simultaneously be coconscious with one another in a super-human intelligence. It is only the extravagant claims of coercive necessity on the absolute’s part that have to be denied by a priori logic. As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogical and inductive grounds the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing.” W. James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), p. 292. 5. For a useful account of controversies over this see A. O. F. Sell, Idealism and Christian Belief (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). The author is, however, quite negative in his view of absolute idealism. 6. M. Ford, William James’s Philosophy: A New Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). 7. W. James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), pp. 26-27. 8. See Spinoza’s Ethics, proposition 8, Scholium 2. 9. Cp. M. Schlick, The Problems of Ethics (tr. D. Rynin) (New York: Dover, 1996), Chap. VI, esp. pp. 136-142.

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10. See my The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 19. 11. Facts, Words and Beliefs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Chapter XII, section 5 at p. 283. I have a letter from David Lewis about this dated 5 November 1993: “Dear Professor Sprigge, Thank you very much for the note and photocopy you gave me when I was in Edinburgh last month. Since returning to Princeton, I’ve read Facts... XII.5 and Vindication... 2.5. Sure enough—your 1970 analysis of counterfactuals is very like Stalnaker’s and essentially identical to mine. (The only difference I spot concerns the case of an impossible antecedent: your counterfactual goes false, mine and Stalnaker’s go true. Very much a side-issue.) I wish I’d known about your analysis and given you due credit years ago, but better late than never! As for chronology, it’s all very close. It was in May 1968 that I wrote to Stalnaker saying “You and I have proposed very similar theories of counterfactuals”. (I’d just heard of his work from Richmond Thomason.) At that point he had a final version of his soon-to-bepublished “A Theory of Conditionals”; I had seminar notes; and if my experience with production of books is any guide, you must already have had a manuscript of Facts... in pretty much final form. Stalnaker’s paper appeared later in 1968; my theory as told by Howard Sobel (with my permission and with full acknowledgement) appeared in 1970 in Inquiry, as an appendix to Sobel’s paper on utilitarianism; your book and Stalnaker and Thomason’s joint paper appeared that same year; and my own first paper on counterfactuals appeared in Theoria in 1971. Paul Benacerraf beat us all by many years. But alas, he let Carnap persuade him that because of the vagueness of similarity, the idea wasn’t worth pursuing! If I believed in complex structural universals, one of which is the total nature of the actual world, and the rest of which could have been, then I might be willing to join you and others in identifying these structural universals with (at least some of) the possible worlds. I resist not the identification, but rather the structural universals themselves. I have trouble making sense of the relation between a structural universal and the simpler universals which are its constituents. I’m sending you an offprint about this from the Australasian JP, 1986. Sincerely (Signed David Lewis)”

Selected Publications of T. L. S. Sprigge

Books The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (ed.), Vols. 1 and 2 (London: Athlone Press, 1968). Facts, Words and Beliefs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983). Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1984). The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1993). The God of Metaphysics: Being a Study of the Metaphysics and Religious Doctrines of Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, A. N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Concluding with a Defense of Pantheistic Idealism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006). Booklets On the Significance of Spinoza’s Determinism (Leiden: Brill, 1988). Spinoza and Santayana: Religion Without the Supernatural (Delft: Eburon, 1993). Contributions to Books “Consciousness” in The Ontological Turn: Essays in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann, edited by M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1974), pp. 114-147. “Punishment and Moral Responsibility” in Punishment and Human Rights, edited by M. Goldinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1974), pp. 85-96. “The Animal Welfare Movement and the Foundations of Ethics” in Animal Rights: A Symposium, edited by D. Paterson and R. Ryder (Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1978), pp. 87-95. “Bradley and Russell on Relations” in Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume, edited by G. Roberts (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), pp. 150170.

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“The Distinctiveness of American Philosophy” in Two Centuries of Philosophy in America, edited by P. Caws (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 199-214. “James, Tarski and Pragmatism” in Pragmatism and Purpose: Essays presented to Thomas Goudge, edited by L. W. Sumner, J. G. Slater, and F. Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 105-120. “The Self and Its World in Bradley and Husserl” in The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, edited by A. Manser and G. Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 285-302. “George Santayana” in American Philosophy, edited by M. Singer, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 115-133. “Utilitarianism” in An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, edited by G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 590-612. “Schopenhauer and Bergson on Laughter” in Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal, Vol. 10, edited by E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 39-65. “Les règles morales de l’expérimentation animale” in Symposium spéciale pour la sècurité et le progrès de la recherche biomédicale, edited by S. Garratini and D. W. van Bekkum (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), pp. 3461. “Hartshorne on the Past” in The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, edited by L. E. Hahn, The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 20 (Chicago and La Salle, IL.: Open Court, 1991), pp. 397-414. “Whitehead und Santayana” in Die Gifford Lectures und ihre Deutung: Materialen zu Whitehead’s “Prozess und Realität”, edited by M. Hampe und H. Maassen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), pp. 11211141. “Ayer on Other Minds” in The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, edited by L. E. Hahn, The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 21 (Chicago and La Salle, IL.: Open Court, 1992), pp. 577-595. “Fundamentalism and International Law” in International Law and Armed Conflict: United Kingdom Association for Social and Legal Philosophy Sixteenth Annual Conference at Leicester, 5-7 April, 1990, edited by A. G. D. Bradney (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1992), pp. 103-108. “Refined and Crass Supernaturalism” in Philosophy, Religion and the Spiritual Life, edited by M. McGhee, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 105-125. “Animal Experimentation in Biomedical Research: A Critique” in Principles of Health Care Ethics, edited by R. Gillon (Chichester and New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), pp. 1053-1066.

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“Bradley” in The Nineteenth Century, edited by C. L. Ten, Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. 7 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 437-458. “Baruch Spinoza”, “Arthur Schopenhauer”, “William James” in The Philosophers: Introducing Great Western Thinkers edited by T. Honderich, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 67-76, 139-148, 197-202. “Idealism, Humanism and the Environment” in Current Issues in Idealism, edited by P. Coates and D. D. Hutto (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), pp. 267-302. “James, Aboutness and His British Critics” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by R. A. Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 125-144. “Respect for the Non-Human” in The Philosophy of the Environment, edited by T. D. J. Chappell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 117-134. “Bradley’s Doctrine of the Absolute” in Appearance versus Reality: New Essays on Bradley’s Metaphysics, edited by G. Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 193-217. “Is the Esse of Intrinsic Value Percipi? Pleasure, Pain and Value” in Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, edited by A. O’Hear, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 119-140. “Is Pity the Basis of Ethics? Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer” in The Basis of Ethics, edited by W. Sweet (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), pp. 103-125. “The Absolute Idealism of Josiah Royce” in Anglo-American Idealism, 1865-1927, edited by W. Mander (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), pp. 141-162. “The World of Description and the World of Acquaintance” in Beyond Conflict and Reduction: Between Philosophy, Science and Religion, edited by W. Desmond, J. Steffen and K. Decoster (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), pp. 9-30. “A. J. Ayer” in A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, edited by A. P. Martinich and D. Sosa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001), pp. 205-217. “Idealism” in Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, edited by R. Gale (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), pp. 219-241. “Could Parapsychology Have Any Bearing on Religion?” in Parapsychology, Philosophy and the Mind: Essays Honoring John Beloff, edited by F. Steinkamp (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company 2002), pp. 127-145. “Josiah Royce” in American Philosophers Before 1950, edited by P. Dematteis and L. B. McHenry, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 270 (Detroit and London: Thomson Gale, 2003), pp. 267-282.

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Selected Publications

“Spinoza and the Motives of Right Action: Some Remarks on Spinoza’s Ethics IV” in Spinoza on Reason and the “Free Man”, edited by Y. Yovel and G. Segal (New York: Little Room Press, 2004), pp. 105-121. “William James as a Religious Realist” in William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited by J. Carrette (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 191-202. “James, Empiricism, and Absolute Idealism” in A Companion to Pragmatism, edited by J. Shook and J. Margolis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2005), pp. 166-176. “Bosanquet and Religion” in Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism, edited by W. Sweet (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), pp. 178-205. Articles “Internal and External Properties”, Mind, 71, 1962, pp. 197-212. “Definition of a Moral Judgement”, Philosophy, 39, 1964, pp. 301-322. “A Utilitarian Reply to Dr McCloskey,” Inquiry, 8, 1965, pp. 264-291. “The Common Sense View of Physical Objects”, Inquiry, 9, 1965, pp. 339-373. “Professor Narveson’s Utilitarianism”, Inquiry, 11, 1968, pp. 332-348. “The Privacy of Experience”, Mind, 78, 1969, pp. 512-521. “Santayana and Verificationism,” Inquiry, 121, 1969, pp. 265-286. “The Analytical Solipsism of William Todd”, Inquiry, 13, 1970, pp. 462468. “Glover on Responsibility”, Inquiry, 14, 1971, pp. 464-471. “Final Causes”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 45, 1971, pp. 149-170. “Ideal Immortality”, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 20, 1972, pp. 219235. “Quinton’s Half-Hearted Ontology”, Inquiry, 18, 1974, pp. 355-366. “Reinhardt Grossmann’s Ontological Reduction”, Nous, 9, 1975, pp. 429445. “Spinoza’s Identity Theory”, Inquiry, 20, 1977, pp. 419-445. “Metaphysics, Physicalism and Animal Rights”, Inquiry, 22, 1979, pp. 101-143. “Comment on Language and Metaphysics”, Theoria to Theory, 12, 1978, pp. 75-80. “Metaphysical Enquiry”, Theoria to Theory, 12, 1978, pp. 135-149. “Knowledge of Subjectivity”, Theoria to Theory, 14, 1981, pp. 313-325. “Honderich, Davidson and the Question of Mental Holism”, Inquiry, 24, 1981, pp. 323-341.

Selected Publications

327

“The Importance of Subjectivity: An Inaugural Lecture”, Inquiry, 25, 1982, pp. 143-163. “Vivisection, Morals, Medicine: Commentary From an AntiVivisectionist Philosopher”, Journal of Medical Ethics, 9, 1982, pp. 98101. “Santayana and Panpsychism”, Bulletin of the Santayana Society, 2, 1984, pp. 1-8. “Non-Human Rights: An Idealist Perspective”, Inquiry, 27, 1984, pp. 439-461. “Utilitarianism and Idealism: A Rapprochement”, Philosophy, 60, 1985, pp. 447-463. “Philosophers and Antivivisectionism”, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals, 13, 1985, pp. 99-106. “Persuasiveness of High Probability Values—Reply”, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals, 14, 1986, pp. 299-300. “Philosophy and Common Sense”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 185, 1986, pp. 195-206. “Are There Intrinsic Values in Nature?”, Journal for Applied Philosophy, 4, 1987, pp. 21-28. “Do Animals have Rights?”, Edinburgh Medical School Journal, Summer 1987, pp. 19-23. “Ethical Considerations on Animal Experimentation”, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals, 14, 1987, pp. 307-311. “Intrinsic Connectedness”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 88, 1987/88, pp. 129-145. “Personal and Impersonal Identity”, Mind, 385, 1988, pp. 29-49 “Utilitarianism and Respect for Human Life”, Utilitas, 1, 1989, pp. 1-21. “Personal and Impersonal Identity: Reply to Oderberg,” Mind, 98, 1989, pp. 605-610. “A. J. Ayer: An Appreciation of his Philosophy”, Utilitas, 2, 1990, pp. 211. “The Satanic Novel: A Philosophical Dialogue”, Inquiry, 33, 1990, pp. 377-400. “Some Recent Positions in Environmental Philosophy Examined”, Inquiry, 34, 1991, pp. 107-128. “The Greatest Happiness Principle”, Utilitas, 3, 1991, pp. 38-51. “William James 1960-1990”, British Society for the History of Philosophy Newsletter, 6, 1991, pp. 14-29. “The Unreality of Time”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 92, 1992, pp. 1-19. “Is Dennett a Disillusioned Zombie?”, Inquiry, 36, 1993, pp 33-57. “Consciousness”, Synthese, 98, 1994, pp. 73-93.

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Selected Publications

“Idealism Contra Idealism: The Conceptual Idealism of Nicholas Rescher”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 1994, pp. 408414. “Bradley and Christianity”, Bradley Studies, 1, 1995, pp. 69-85. “Is Spinozism a Religion?”, Studia Spinozana, 11, 1995, pp. 137-162. “Absolute Idealism”, Philosophical Writings, 2, 1996, pp. 82-100. “A Reply to Joseph Bernstein”, Journal of Medical Ethics, 22, 1996, pp. 302-303. “Commentary on Minds, Memes, and Multiples”, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 3, 1996, pp. 31-36. “Bird on Sprigge on Bird: A Reply”, Bradley Studies, 2, 1996, pp. 117128. “Kerr-Lawson on Truth and Santayana”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 33, 1997, pp. 113-130. “Spinoza and Indexicals”, Inquiry, 40, 1997, pp. 3-22. “Pantheism”, The Monist, 80, 1997, pp. 191-217. “The Absolute Idealism of Josiah Royce”, The Philosophers’ Magazine, 1, 1997, pp. 32-33. “Consciousness: A Panpsychist’s View”, The Philosophers Magazine, 2, 1998, pp. 42-45. “The God of the Philosophers”, Studies in World Christianity, 4, 1998, pp. 149-172. “Freedom is Necessity”, The Philosophers’ Magazine, 6, 1999, pp. 46-50. “Dreyfus and Spinoza on Things-in-Themselves”, Inquiry, 42, 1999, pp. 115-124. “Whitehead and Santayana”, Process Studies, 28, 1999, pp. 43-55. “Has Speculative Metaphysics a Future?”, The Monist, 81, 1998, pp. 513533. “The Relation between Jeremy Bentham’s Psychological, and his Ethical, Hedonism”, Utilitas, 11, 1999, pp. 296-319. “Is Consciousness Mysterious?”, Anthropology and Philosophy, 3, 1999, pp. 5-19. “The Mind of Spinoza’s God”, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, 50, 2001, pp. 253-272. “Kierkegaard and Hegel”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13, 2005, pp. 771-778. “We Do Have Duties Towards Animals”, Faith and Freedom, 59, 2006, pp. 16-22.

Notes on Contributors

James W. Allard is Professor of Philosophy at Montana State UniversityBozeman, and the author of several scholarly studies on British idealism including The Logical Foundations of Bradley’s Metaphysics: Judgment, Inference, and Truth. Leslie Armour is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Rational and the Real, The Concept of Truth, Logic and Reality, Being and Idea, and Infini Rien: Pascal’s Wager and the Human Paradox as well as many articles on metaphysics, ethics, the theory of knowledge and social philosophy. He edits the International Journal of Social Economics. Pierfrancesco Basile has been post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and now teaches Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His publications include Experience and Relations. An Examination of F. H. Bradley’s Conception of Reality and several articles on the origin of analytic philosophy, British idealism and process philosophy. Stephen R. L. Clark has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool since 1984. His books include The Nature of the Beast, Animals and their Moral Standing, Biology and Christian Ethics and G. K. Chesterton: Thinking Backwards, Looking Forwards. Marcus P. Ford is Professor of Humanities at Northern Arizona University. His publications include William James: A New Perspective and Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University. Peter Forrest is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. His major research interests are the Philosophy of Religion and Space and Time. His most recent book is Developmental Theism: From Pure Will to Unbounded Love. Richard M. Gale is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh; he is the author of The Language of Time, On the Nature and Existence of God, The Divided Self of William James, On the Philosophy of Religion. Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He has published Mental Images: a Defence, Kierkegaard, Human Con-

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Contributors

sciousness, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays and On the Public. He has translated several of Kierkegaard’s works and was for many years editor of Inquiry. Ted Honderich has been Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London, visiting professor at Yale, CUNY, and now Bath. His publications include A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience and Life-Hopes, How Free Are You?, as well as an autobiography, Philosopher: A Kind of Life. Three volumes of journal papers have recently appeared. John Leslie is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Guelph, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of Victoria. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he was the Society’s British Academy Exchange Lecturer for 1998. His books include Value and Existence, Universes, The End of the World: the Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, Infinite Minds and Immortality Defended. John Llewelyn has been Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Visiting Professor at the University of Memphis and Arthur J. Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. Among his publications are Beyond Metaphysics?, Derrida on the Threshold of Sense, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics, The HypoCritical Imagination, Appositions—of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology, and (forthcoming) Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida. Geoffrey Madell was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and subsequently Honorary Faculty Fellow in Philosophy. He is the author of The Identity of the Self, Mind and Materialism, and Philosophy, Music and Emotion as well as of many articles, mainly on the philosophy of mind, with a particular emphasis on the question of personal identity. William J. Mander is Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford University and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. As well as a number of articles on idealism and pantheism, he has written extensively on the history of British idealism, including a book, An Introduction to Bradley’s Metaphysics. He has recently edited (together with Maria Dimova-Cookson) a collection of essays, T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics and Political Philosophy, and is currently working on a full-length history of the British idealist movement.

Contributors

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Leemon B. McHenry is Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. He was supervised by Timothy Sprigge for his Ph.D. degree at the University of Edinburgh and subsequently published his thesis under the title Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis. He has taught philosophy at University of Edinburgh, Old Dominion University, Davidson College, Central Michigan University and held research positions at Johns Hopkins University and UCLA. Pauline Phemister is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She works on early modern philosophy and her publications include Leibniz and the Natural World and The Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Nicholas Rescher is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of more than a hundred books in various areas of philosophy and his works have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Timothy L. S. Sprigge, Emeritus Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and former Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, also taught philosophy at the University of Sussex, University of Cincinnati, and University College London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and past president of the Aristotelian Society. He has been chairman and vice-chairman of “Advocates for Animals”, an anti-vivisection and animal welfare society based in Edinburgh. William Sweet is Professor of Philosophy at St. Thomas University (New Brunswick, Canada). He is an Editor of Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, the author of Idealism and Rights and of Religious Belief: The Contemporary Debate. He has also edited several collections of scholarly essays (including Idealism, Metaphysics, and Community, Bernard Bosanquet and the Legacy of British Idealism, and The Moral, Social, and Political Philosophy of the British Idealists) and The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet.

Process Thought Edited by Nicholas Rescher • Johanna Seibt • Michel Weber Advisory Board Mark Bickard • Jaime Nubiola • Roberto Poli Volume 1 Michel Weber (Ed.) After Whitehead Rescher on Process Metaphysics ISBN 3-937202-49-8 Hardcover, 339 pp., EUR 89,00

Volume 7 Michel Weber Whitehead's Pancreativism The Basics ISBN 13: 978-3-938793-15-2 Hardcover, ca. 255 pp, EUR 84,00

Volume 2 Jason W. Brown Process and the Authentic Life Toward a Psychology of Value ISBN 3-937202-73-0 Hardcover, 700 pp., EUR 119,00

Volume 11 Nicholas Rescher Process Philosophical Deliberations ISBN 13: 978-3-938793-37-4 Hardcover, 195 pp., EUR 69,00

Volume 12 Sergio Franzese, Felicitas Kraemer (Eds.) Volume 3 Fringes of Religious Experience Silja Graupe Cross-perspectives on William James’s The Der Ort ökonomischen Denkens Die Methodologie der Wirtschaftswissenschaften Varieties of Religious Experience ISBN 978-3-938793-57-2 im Licht japanischer Philosophie Hardcover, 210 pp., EUR 79,00 ISBN 3-937202-87-0 Hardcover, 362 pp., EUR 98,00 Volume 14 Michel Weber, Pierfrancesco Basile (Eds.) Volume 4 Wenyu Xie, Zhihe Wang, George E. Derfer (Eds) Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality ISBN 13: 978-3-938793-38-1 Whitehead and China Hardcover, 358 pp., EUR 98,00 Relevance and Relationships ISBN 3-937202-86-2 Hardcover, 220 pp., EUR 87,00 Volume 15 Silja Graupe The Basho of Economics Volume 5 An Intercultural Analysis of the Process of Gary L. Herstein Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Economics Translated and Introduced by Roger Gathman Cosmology ISBN 978-3-938793-08-4 ISBN 3-937202-95-1 Hardcover, 325 pp., EUR 79,00 Hardcover, 202 pp., EUR 69,00 Volume 6 Edward J. Khamara Space, Time, and Theology in the LeibnizNewton Controversy ISBN 3-938793-26-0 Hardcover, 180 pp., EUR 69,00

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