Process and Polarity 9780231888684

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PROCESS and POLARITY WOODBRIDGE NUMBER

Delivered

LECTURES 1

at Columbia 1943

University

PROCESS and POLARITY Wilmon Henry Sheldon SHELDON

CI.ARK

PROFESSOR O F YALE

PHILOSOPHY,

EMERITUS

UNIVERSITY

New York · Columbia University Press 1944

COPYRIGHT

1944

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

PRESS,

NEW

FOREIGN ACENT: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, H u m p h r e y M i l f o r d , A m e n

YORK House,

London, E.C., 4, E n g l a n d , AND B. I. Building, Nicol Road, Bombay, India M A N U F A C T U R E D

IN

THF.

U N I T E D

S T A T E S

OF

A M E R I C A

PREFACE

S

I have the honor of opening this course of Woodbridge Memorial lectures, let me first express my deep and affectionate gratitude to the founder—a gratitude shared by all of us who love philosophy. Y o u who knew Dean Frederick Woodbridge, as co-workers with him in this university, need no reminder of the clear-cut sincerity and straightforwardness of his thinking or of the practical wisdom shown in his conduct of affairs. Yet I would here emphasize these qualities, not only because they were his and he was my good friend, but even more because I believe they mark the philosopher as he should be: an empirical-practical thinker, whose life and whose philosophy are one. For the empirical-practical attitude philosophy is not spun out of the analysis of the meaning of thought and knowledge, but is built up from the wellattested facts of the world: facts revealed by the sciences and the arts, by religion and morality. Woodbridge wrote: "Ways and means of improving our knowledge of Nature constitute the only problem of knowledge I can find worth while." 1 As to "knowledge of what knowledge is," he said: "But I have never discovered that thereby one knows anything about the stars or about the life of man. T h a t sort of knowledge remains to be acquired, and that sort is the sort that counts." 2 This deprecation of epistemology and analysis I first learned years ago from Woodbridge, and the lectures which follow are written in that spirit, however they may fall short of fitting expression or persuasive address. Woodbridge's interest in the world of nature together with his belief in the supernatural, as impressively set forth in his last work, An Essay on Nature, form INCE

ι An Essay on Nature, New York, Columbia University Press, 1940, p. «65. 2 Ibid., p. 206.

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PREFACE

the pattern of a philosophy by which I have long been guided. Today mankind is engaged in a fight more destructive of life and property than any in recorded history. Mankind as a whole, practically; the few neutral nations have been hard put to it to keep aloof, and their neutrality is due to no lack of sympathy with one side or the other. T h e fight not only covers more of the earth's surface than any previous war; it goes far into the third dimension, high in the air and deep in the sea. Its volume is the greatest yet known in any war. More than that, its destruction is greater even in proportion to volume. T h i s is due to the increased technical skill of the fighters, which takes its source in the unparalleled advances made by modern physical science—the physics of engines, the chemistry of explosives, and so forth. In fact, it is chiefly these material agents that have made the present conflict the most horrible one of history. T h e human motives, the psychological factors, are not new, nor are they worse than before. T h e r e was from time to time in the past as much of the world-conquering, race-dominance motive as in modern Germany or Japan. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon—they followed out that motive as far as they could. They couldn't get so far as the moderns, because they did not have the present resources of applied science. In fact, on the human side there is today good ground for encouragement rather than despair. Today more than ever before the spirit of live-and-let-live is roused, working powerfully amongst the Allied Nations to crush out once for all the menace of the world-conquering urge. T h a t spirit—the Christian spirit, no less—the spirit of tolerance and co-operation, had been growing slowly in the hearts of men, especially in the more western nations. But the shock of all-destroying war was needed to bring it to a head, to make large numbers of men realize it and espouse it for life or death. As men are, the good does not come out into the open till hard pressed, fighting for its life against those who would kill it. And this good that comes out, what is it but a life program for man, a principle to guide his conduct in his environment—in short, a philoso-

PREFACE

vii

phy of life? T h e war of today is a war of opposing philosophies, the philosophy of live-and-let-live against the philosophy of live-and-don't-let-live. T h e big general principles that a man consciously or unconsciously accepts determine his behavior in the big practical issues. And that being so, there is nothing to be compared in importance with the need of a right philosophy. Still more evident this is when we consider our course of action during and after this mortal strife of the democraticpreservative and the autocratic-destructive systems. T h e simple lesson of the facts—we kindly westerners hate to admit it, but it is being gradually forced upon us—is that for the safety of future society the would-be crushers must be crushed, rooted out, even annihilated if that is the only sure method. For this is the only way of steering between the two dangers that confront the democratic program, the two extremes, either of which taken alone would ruin it. T h e first danger is that we ourselves become animated by the same hatred motive that actuates the enemy. Undoubtedly the democrats have to act as if they hated their foes; as a man to save his wife and children kills one who if let live would enslave or murder them. And it is hard for good men to see that this is consistent with the Christian gospel of love, with which, of course, democracy is in line. "Forgive your enemies." Yes, it is hard to see that refusal to forgive an injury to one's self is one thing, and prevention of all opportunity to injure those whom one has the duty to protect is quite another thing. Christianity itself preaches forgiveness for those only who repent. So it comes about that those who feel the necessity of forcible suppression think they must discard Christian teaching and are likely to become brutal like their enemies. They turn the social motive of protection into the personal motive of hate. And that is the first danger. T h e second also confuses the social with the personal, but works the other way round. It turns the personal motive of forgiveness into the social motive of opportunity for all men,

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PREFACE

including the opportunity to the evil ones for a repetition of their crimes—which is really tempting them to commit those crimes. T h e first danger is the extreme of brutality, the second the opposite extreme of a soft sentimentalism. On the whole, in North America today the second is the greater danger, and particularly when the peace settlement comes. T h e warmhearted American hates to see people suffer; he would feed all the world if he could. His besetting weakness is sentimentalism. He does not easily reflect that right conduct is here the middle way, combining what is positive in both extremes: the severity without hatred, which is justice, and the kindness without injustice, which alone is genuine humanitarian love. It seems as if only bitter experience can show him that it is not kindness even to a murderer to permit him to murder again. And probably some deep-seated oppositions between nations —between the Allied Nations of today, too—between classes, between groups such as fight today within our own borders, probably many of these will have to come to a head, even as the opposition between the ideologies of destruction and preservation have come to a head, before this right way can be seen by the majority of men. And the sooner and more clearly we see the necessity for such a fair adjustment, the better we shall be prepared to deal with the conflicts we have yet to pass through. Crisis first brings out the good and the evil, face to face without concealment; it is man's part to solve the deadly issues under the guidance of that philosophy which Ave call the democratic spirit of all-fairness, of a working program combining justice with opportunity. Unless this spirit is firmly intrenched in his mind, man's efforts will but lead to further and further crises until the human race is destroyed. Such is our crying need of a well-thought-out philosophy today. "Philosophy the guide of life," as the saying goes. Really this is but a truism, a tautology. T o have a guiding attitude toward life is to have a philosophy. We are told that philosophy bakes no bread. No, but it provides the yeast—and the dough too—

PREFACE

ix

for it dictates man's ways of getting them. Particular solutions of particular problems—how to invade Germany, how to ration food, how to prevent inflation—these, indeed, call for a practical judgment which is decidedly not philosophy. There is something else besides philosophy. But there is philosophy too, and it sets out the fundamental motives without which there is no assurance of a heart in the right place and a mind directed toward the practicable good. All important it is for thinking men today, and in the days to come, to realize the need of this. Certainly not many do realize it. Overburdened and distracted by immediate practical needs, needs of war, of food, and so forth, who can find room for general reflection on man's place in nature and the like supposedly abstract questions? Here the blame is on two sides. T h e "common man" tends to despise what seems of no direct use—an exclusive attitude which is in itself bad. For this we cannot respect him, though we may in part excuse him. But the greater blame lies on the philosopher himself—and the following pages constitute an indictment of him as well as a project of rescue from his sins. For no doubt he has all-toooften removed himself from the arena of life. He is mainly the one responsible for the layman's usual disregard and contempt; he has more and more (in the western world) occupied himself with questions that have as little bearing on man's conduct of life as any questions could possibly have. Is there any proof of the reality of an external world? Are terms analyzable into relations, or relations into terms? Is motion selfcontradictory? Can a thing be one and many at the same time? And so forth. And today, even more; the latest turn of his mind is toward the analysis of the meaning of words. More and more of an ingrowing conscience here! N o wonder that we read in the following report made by a certain committee (or subcommittee) on the present needs in education: "It [the subcommittee] knew that liberal arts education must be curtailed in the development of an all-out war effort and that

χ

PREFACE

philosophy would not be generally considered an indispensable subject." * And "as one reply put it, 'the need of philosophers in any phase of the defense or war program is not felt by those who are in charge of the programs at the present time.' " 4 T r u e , there are, and always have been, many sincere philosophers who do not follow in the train of these inbred theoretical speculations. T h e great ones—Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, the perennial schools of idealism, materialism, and so forth—these most obviously have taken philosophy as in some sense the guide of life. But here the fault, equally great, alasi lies in another direction. Wars, we see, are due to conflicting philosophies. T h e philosophers fight with one another. Fortunately the great thinkers had to retire from practical affairs to think out their plans of life—it is unavoidable — a n d so their combats were as a rule not fist fights or sword duels, but verbal harangues. But they fought and still fight in their own way and measure. They have been and are exactly as hostile to one another as the communist and the monarchist, though not themselves taking part in bodily destruction as do physical combatants. And this mutual hostility is noticeable in their attitude toward the great wars of the twentieth century. One school and another finds the calamity of world war due to the bad philosophy of its pet rival. Dewey, the empiricist, attributed the first World War largely to the German nonempirical absolutism, which demands system at any cost.5 And recently Urban, the idealist, urged that the present war is a consequence of the instrumental empiricism which loses sight of the absolute values for which idealism has always stood.® Yes, when a philosophy takes itself as a guide of life, it also 3 W . H. Hill, "A Report to Teachers of Philosophy," article summarizing the Report of Subcommittee on the T e a c h i n g of Philosophy, appointed by the Committee on the R ô l e of Philosophy in Higher Education, American Philosophical Association, Western Division, Journal of Philosophy, X L (April 15, 194s), 216. * Ibid., p. 218. • John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, New York, 1915. « W . M. Urban, The Logical Foundations of Democratic Dogma, Rice Institute Pamphlet, No. 2, April, 1943.

PREFACE

xi

takes itself as the single world-panacea against all other philosophies. Which of these guides, asks the layman, is to be trusted? Now, if these philosophers took their doctrines with the full seriousness which a practical guide implies, they would be so deeply pained by their own disagreements that they would seek a "higher synthesis." So, indeed, they claim to do—but each party declares that its own view is that synthesis. Each solemnly affirms that it has taken account of all the refutations given by its rivals, and found its own position the final truth; the rivals are either inferior mentally or unwilling to see reason. Unfortunately, since each one says the same, the outsider can but impute these traits to all alike. None of them really wants a higher synthesis. Their seriousness is not so genuine as they think. And that is why, running through all their thinking, there is evident a certain detached speculative or sporting attitude. The materialist has a bout with the idealist; neither, of course, convincing the other, each going home happy after his intellectual exercise, scarcely troubled by his failure to convince, still less by his failure to be convinced. In a way this is fortunate, too; if they were absolutely serious they would be at each others' throats. So they come to feel that the light-hearted speculative point of view, being so much less fatal to life and property, is better than taking one's beliefs too seriously, and they are content to treat philosophy as more-orless of a pleasant game. Of course they wouldn't confess this, but their conduct shows it: they don't worry over their contests; they rather enjoy the fight, because skill in argument brings fame—refutation goes with reputation. Now, it is possible to take our philosophy with the same absolute seriousness as our health, family, property, even our lives, and at the same time to avoid the wars both of theory and of practice. Take it with absolute seriousness, that we must, else we are traitors to our own vocation, false to our oath of office. What we can do, is to include the positive teachings of all schools, assigning each its place in an order which is not

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PREFACE

that of one of them more than another. Nor, indeed, cart we take any rest until we have done so. A philosopher of today who does not first of all strain every nerve to do so is simply no sincere lover of truth. T o show how it may be done is the message of the present book, as it is of two other books by the same writer: it is the supremely needed message to the whole philosophical arena. Let the nail be hammered and hammered till finally it sticks! It is the message of the polarity of the perennial types of metaphysical system, and as we are to see, this polarity suggests new and richer systems or discoveries to come, yet without destroying the essential truth of those that have so far endured. We do not hesitate to declare that unless and until the attitude here designated is accepted and acted upon in the conduct of thought and life alike, there will be wars, mental and physical, destruction, wasted energy, needless misery. A panacea it is not, but it is the necessary condition of any panacea that may be forthcoming. As said already, the cure of specific practical evils, the solution of particular scientific problems, is an individual affair calling for special training, interest, and tact; no philosophy can dictate such cures or solutions beforehand. T h e office of philosophy, as of religion (both being facets of the same diamond), is to set the heart right and following that, the head; it gives a minimum of detail. But without heart in the right place and head facing in the right direction man cannot adjust himself to the values and powers that be or advance to better understanding and use of them. Of course, in delivering such a message we must lose something of the single-track energy of partisan zeal. T h e spirit we invoke is rather to be compared to the small and steady growth of the fertilized germ cell deep within the parent body—silent, unseen, yet productive as is no force that shows its power by what it destroys. Nor can we make much appeal to the technical philosophers of today, with their fine-spun analyses of concepts; for we sense the need of orientation to the broad outlines of reality in their practical import, and conceptual

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PREFACE

precision is here at a discount—as will appear in the text. Hence the naïve simplicity of the analyses given in this book. Also, of course, any philosophy that may be proposed will be shown not to have proved its truth. As to that, the sequel will quite agree. No system has ever been rigidly proved; none can be, to finite man, so far as we can see. But the plan here offered does claim plausibility and a considerable empirical confirmation. In any case, it is better to proffer a plan, almost any plan, than to remain in the welter of discord. We recall a saying of the evangelist Moody, 7 whose method of making converts was being criticized: " I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it." So, if the way here proposed is wrong, it is up to the critic to offer a better way. It is better to try and to fail than to do nothing. Let us then try. Permission to quote from the following volumes has been kindly granted by their publishers: T h e Yale University Press, E. Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae; The McGraw-Hill Book Company, H. Shapley, Flights from Chaos; Ralph T . Hale and Company, S. McKenna's translation of The Works of Plolinus; The Smithsonian Institution, Report for 1931; John Wiley and Sons, Lindsay and Margenau, Foundations of Physics; The Syndics of Cambridge University Press, J . H. Jeaus, Astronomy and Cosmogony; Blackie and Son, Ltd., Max Born, Atomic Physics. WILMON

H.

SHELDON

Yale University New Haven, Conn. January 4,1944 ι Quoted in D. C. Macintosh, Personal Religion,

New York, 1942, p. 248.

CONTENTS ι.

THE ONE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY

ι

M A N ' S T W O PREROGATIVES

1

METAPHYSICS A D U T Y

6

A H I N T OF T H E O U T L I N E OF A W O R L D M A P

IO

F A L L AND R E D E M P T I O N

12

OF M E T A P H Y S I C S

METHOD

L6

2. THE SURVIVING TYPES

24

T H E P O I N T OF V I E W

24

T H E TYPES

35

T H E THREE-DIMENSIONAL D I A G R A M

35

REFLECTIONS ON T H E DIAGRAM

41

IDEALISM:

45

T H E GENUS

T H E T W O SPECIES OF IDEALISM

52

MATERIALISM

6Θ

T H E OPPOSITION

BETWEEN

IDEALISM A N D M A T E R I A L I S M

3. THE TYPES CONTINUED

62

69

LOGICAL GENESIS OF SCHOLASTICISM

69

ITS ANTITHESIS A N D ITS T R E A T M E N T THEREOF

77

GENESIS OF PROCESS-TYPE

79

ITS N E W

85

PERSPECTIVE

4. POLARITY T H E THESIS

87 87

T H E N A T U R E OF P H Y S I C A L BEING

88

M E N T A L TRAITS

92

DEFINITION OF P O L A R I T Y

102

AS BETWEEN M I N D A N D BODY

IOS

P O L A R I T Y BETWEEN M I N D AS SYSTEM A N D M I N D AS P L U R A L

IO9

CONTENTS

xvi 5.

POLARITY CEEDING

IN PROCESS, OR, POLARITY

THE PROBLEM:

POLARITY

BETWEEN

FIXED STRUCTURE

AND PROCESS CYCLICAL CHANCES IRREVERSIBLE CHANCES IN THE INORGANIC WORLD IRREVERSIBLE CHANCES IN LIVING THINGS IRREVERSIBLE CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS SUMMARY

INDEX

RESULT

PRO-

Chapter THE

ONE

One

PROBLEM

OF

PHILOSOPHY

H

MAN'S

TWO

PREROGATIVES

ow many of us could walk a tightrope? Probably none. How many could walk along the ridgepole of a roof? Perhaps a few, if young and cool-headed. How many could walk on the rail of a railroad track for, say, a hundred yards? Probably more, but still rather few. But we should all like to be able to do these things. And why? There is an exhilaration in being able to balance, to stand upright, especially when moving. When we walk without falling, we tip forward just enough to give gravitation a chance at us, and yet we are not floored by it. And this delight in equilibrium is peculiarly human; for man, with his upright posture, is the balancing animal. Balance is easy for a horse, dog, or other quadruped; but man has only two feet. Monkeys, apes, gorillas, man's closest relatives, also have bipedal balance, but they use it infrequently. Birds here come nearest to man, but their claws, having a relatively large spread, give them an easy base; man alone, with his slender little feet, has a real job of it. Do you remember the old definition of man as the featherless biped? It is profoundly suggestive; for the featherless biped is the balancer. Man alone knows the full joy of keeping equilibrium amid forces that conspire to pull him down. And this balancing he has to learn; it is an achievement, not a gift. T o the animals it is a gift; they do not have to acquire it. And so man, having to work for it, gets a sense of purpose. T h e baby learning to walk and to stand is exercising a little bit of conscious intelligence. And he soon finds that he has to

2

T H E ONE PROBLEM OF

PHILOSOPHY

keep his balance in order to go where he wants. T h e balanced man has power to move freely; the tipsy man has not. And so man, at the beginning of his life, develops that habit of consciously controlled conduct which is the root of all human progress. Let him indeed be glad that he was born with only two small feet. But there is another gain; and it is even more uniquely human. T h e balanced man is free to move where he will, yes; he is also free to look where he will. One sees best when still, and stillness means equilibrium. T h e way of vision, of looking ahead to choose the path, is opened up; and as man develops, it becomes the way of quiet contemplation. For the balancing habit, so deeply implanted in infancy, colors all man's later behavior, mental and bodily alike. T h e drive toward equilibrium, the instinct toward a stable condition which gives him freedom to look about and take stock of his surroundings, grows into a firmly imbedded human motive, and it shows itself in many ways. It appears in the struggle for social security, for steady bodily health, for enduring friendships and a well-established family life, and most distinctive of all for man, in the search for a body of funded knowledge—knowledge of the ways of nature, of the ocean, the rivers and rocks, the plants and animals, and even of man himself. The drive which all these activities share is the drive toward a state of equilibrium where man is freed from the pressure of distracting needs and may enjoy the contemplation of the scene around him. Man, the balancing animal, then, shows in his balancing the practical motive, to have power to move freely, to get something he wants, whether food or shelter or the train home or the doctor or what not, and the contemplative or theoretical motive, to stand unmoved and enjoy the view, be it of landscape or the stars or the laws of nature or human history or non-Euclidean geometry. For the featherless biped these two motives are inescapable; so far as we can see, mankind will always seek power to get what he wants and knowledge

T H E ONE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY

3

of the world about him. Balance serves these two ends, and as it is man's prerogative, so are these; also as it is of man's definition, these are inevitable and for him self-justifying. And no doubt, too, they work together, each helping the other. T h e sciences, conceived in pure curiosity, grow up and tell us how to turn the laws of nature to our own ends. Knowledge is power. And when we move about in the world, we learn new things, we discover new types of animals and plants, new deposits of coal and gold—in fact we discover that there is a real world at all only by running u p against powers we have to submit to—such as gravitation itself and the sun's heat and winter's cold. Nevertheless, with all this interplay between the two motives, each has a good quite in itself. As contemplative beings we stand entranced before the panorama of the heavens, and that is enough. As practical beings we say with the Frenchman, "Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today." And that too is enough. Nothing can destroy a good once enjoyed. Both answer to the equilibrium motif, the search for a stable knowledge and a stable satisfaction, be it of the lower or of the higher needs. So much for one aspect of our human nature, the equilibrating aspect. But there is another aspect too and a very different one. Of all living animals, man alone aspires to better things. He wants more than he has got. Not that this is always true of all men, but that it is typical of man, and apparently of man only. The beehive and the anthill are beautifully organized: perhaps better than any human group. But we have no evidence that bees or ants are trying to devise any better organization. They show no sign of progress. But what do we think of the man who is perfectly content with the daily round of a well-ordered life? We call him dull, without imagination. No, man is the progressive animal. He is never quite satisfied with what he has. No matter how comfortably off, no matter if he doesn't have to work for a living, he has to have occupation; he has to divert his mind to something new. Otherwise he is bored; and boredom is possible only to a progressive mind.

4

T H E O N E P R O B L E M OF

PHILOSOPHY

He must at least have a hobby. And what is a hobby but a search for some new knowledge, some new art over and above what he needs for earning a living? Surely no animals have hobbies. T h e cow chews her cud with calm content; the dog is satisfied to frisk, bark, and eat in the household that supports him. They are never bored, they never go out to seek a richer and fuller life. T h e best to be said of them is that they are happy. But no man is quite happy, no matter how well off he is. He invents games and finds increasing interest in the ever-new situations that arise in bridge or chess. He takes to painting or furniture-making in his idle moments and aims at increasing skill and productiveness. In one line or another he works for an ever-growing power and knowledge. So, also, in his social relations. Men are ever seeking a better and better form of social order. They conjure up in their minds an ideal heaven and an immortal life under perfect conditions. They aspire to the discovery of some perfect form. They follow ideal values. No matter how far they have advanced, they want more. And in the domain of knowledge man looks around and fares forth into the new worlds of the electron, photon, positron, and so forth, and of the remotest stars and spiral nebulae. Man the aspiring seeks new worlds to conquer. And all this is a very different aspect of human nature from the aspect of man the balancing animal. For balance is first of the physical body, and only later of the mind; but aspiration is possible to conscious minds alone. And this suggests another thing. While these two distinguishing marks are doubtless of the very essence of man, they are not quite on the same level. You cannot walk in the country to explore unless you have the balance that enables you to walk without falling. But you can walk without looking around for some new discovery; you can plod through the same streets every day to go to your work or to get a little exercise for your legs. Of itself the balancing faculty does not contain any note of novelty. You might even stand still for years, like Simeon Stylites on his pillar. Balancing makes

T H E ONE P R O B L E M OF P H I L O S O P H Y

5

exploration possible and is indispensable to it; but progress is something new, not wholly definable in terms of equilibrium. It contains the note of the higher; it is not the selfrepeating, stable being, it lives in the future, in what is not yet fact, in the hoped-for good. Stability, too, is a good, as we all experience; but for it, so to speak, the good and the fact are one—there is no separation between them. Progress, with its urge beyond the present, finds the present not good enough, and the distinction between fact and value emerges into clear consciousness. If we strive toward a better future, then the present situation, the present facts, are other than the good we seek. If all life were stable, we might say "being is good" and stop there. For aspiring man, however, the statement though true is not enough: he feels that the good is more than the fact, better than the fact. T h e category of value is so far other than the category of being. Worth is higher than fact. Ideal values are to be pursued: they are on a level above the level of a stable life. T o the positive is added the comparative: good, better. And if this implies the superlative, the best and fullest being, then all the better. As the progress-motive is in this sense a higher motive, it is more a matter of degree with different men, and perhaps of choice. Especially is this evident of men in respect of their philosophy. Stability is a necessity; a thirst for more knowledge and a better social life, native though it is to man, is not a prerequisite of any life at all. All men have normally to stand and to walk without falling and to stabilize their habits; but as to their aspirations, great difference is permissible. T h e majority of men do not let their aspirations for a more intelligent conduct of life develop into that extreme of aspiration, a conscious articulate philosophy. They cannot; the practical need of earning a living is too engrossing. True, they do usually have something of a philosophy, however inarticulate. Probably every man has his general outlook on life, though he may never try to express it in words, even to himself. He has a code of conduct, be it that of a thief, a gambler, a day-

6

T H E ONE P R O B L E M OF

PHILOSOPHY

laborer, a politician, a Christian minister, or a professor of a purely theoretical philosophy. And that code of conduct shows his view of the world. Most would admit as much of religion, for one's religion is his philosophy of life, death, and immortality. But it is true of the thief as well. The thief takes the world as a likely prey: for him the universe is so far a source of plunder. That is his opinion of his environment; it is his metaphysic, because it is his chart of the real world by which he steers his behavior. A very limited chart, if you please, not extending out into the Milky Way, nor even very far into his immediate field of interest, man. But it has some breadth of view, just because he has some general principles: wear soft shoes, gloves, carry a torch, and so forth. True, also, it seems to be only a practical philosophy; probably he cares little for knowledge for its own sake. Nevertheless, he has some curiosity, as every man has some curiosity, to know what is going on in the world. He may, like many men, read only the sporting page of the newspaper. But he has his friends and likes to know what they do. His circle of knowledge for its own sake is very small, but it is a circle, and any circle is bigger than a point: metaphysics is only a very big circle. And so, obviously, with the other examples, the gambler, the laborer, and so forth; it is just a matter of degree. True, again, more people have a practical philosophy and a code of conduct or ethics than have a speculative scheme of things. Most men are predominantly practical; they have to be. But a code of conduct goes with a certain view of the world. Ethics is applied metaphysics. The two are inseparable. No, man can scarcely avoid being a philosopher. It is just a question of making his circle as big as possible and as carefully mapped. And here lies only a difference of degree of aspiration. METAPHYSICS

A

DUTY

All the more is it the opportunity and the task of those who have leisure for reflection, to give free play to their aspirations in this direction. Opportunity, obviously; but just as surely

T H E ONE PROBLEM OF P H I L O S O P H Y

η

task and duty. For in doing so they are being true to their human nature, true to that instinctive tendency which is proper to man, which distinguishes him from the other animals. Let us be very clear on this point. It is just human nature, just the natural thing which every well-developed man would inevitably do if external forces did not suppress it. Man is the idealizing animal: in so far as he falls short in his aspirations, so far does he fall short of the full stature of a man. And these aspirations are for a better and better social order, for a stronger and fuller bodily life, and for a clearer understanding of the world and all that is in it. He who dares not venture forth, whose spirit has no soaring after the impossible heights, is not a full man. T h e dangers of impractical idealism are there, of course; but, after all, nothing venture, nothing have. So far from congratulating himself, as some do, with proud modesty, that he lives on the safe ground of proved and tested fact and custom and wants no more, he ought to be deeply ashamed. He is the arm-chair man, the stay-at-home, the timid soul. True, it is not always his fault; often enough the social situation practically compels a man to stick to the lower rungs of the ladder. But sympathy for such inhibited types of manhood should never blind us to the fact that man's nature is stunted just in the degree in which he ceases to seek the broadest knowledge and the highest practical welfare for all. Now, in the domain of knowledge the aspiration for the fullest is what we call philosophy, or more specifically metaphysics. Metaphysics is the work of the surveyor who would triangulate the world about us to construct a map or chart on the widest possible scope. And the world about us here includes all regions open to thought: the starry heavens, the living things and conscious minds of our globe, the forms of beauty and the moral values that lure us men. Aspiration indeed! And at its high-water mark. Unattainable in full completeness, to be sure; but a metaphysic is not to be regarded as the quest of the unattainable, rather of ever more and more attainment. Yet it is not believable that any man who is fully

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a man, fully awake to the prerogatives of man, can be content to stop at any one stage in the construction of this map. Each of us is limited, very limited indeed; no one man, presumably, can compass the total journey, or any group of men, yet each man so far as he can must strive toward a view of the whole, must make for himself some sort of chart. As he fares onward through the bewildering forest of reality, he will often lose his balance and fall; but it is for him to get up and go on with his exploration till he has some tentative scheme of his surroundings. Those who grow pessimistic and faint-hearted ("skeptics," they are called) are lacking in imagination, in enterprise. They are poor-spirited cowards. Yes, those who deliberately give up the search for a metaphysic are false to their own human nature. But after all, why not be false? Everybody must fall short in some way. Why isn't it right to choose one's own specialty, thus serving the world best, and let the perfect knowledge go hang? And if you or I were alone in the world and fairly happy in it, this would be quite right, though not very admirable. But we are not alone; we are in a great social mix-up where misery and injustice are common, where men's interests clash, and ideologies fight with one another, causing total war as today. Above all else and today of all times man sorely needs a sound philosophy of life. Surely he is utterly selfish who forgoes this task and contents himself with anything else if he can possibly help it. Even to seek a speculative metaphysic just for the pleasure of contemplation is not enough. True, it is good; but that does not make it a duty, a solemn obligation. Curiosity, knowledge for its own sake, is no categorical imperative. The obligation comes from the fact that a metaphysic is a philosophy of life. As a practical being man has the supreme duty of lessening human pain and wickedness, and nothing will excuse him from doing his utmost to that end. It is a binding obligation upon all men in so far as their circumstances permit. Philosophy is not a duty because we like it; it is a duty because mankind terribly needs intelligence in the

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conduct of life. T h e theoretical motive is good, but the practical makes it a duty and sanctities it. But again we must remind ourselves that we cannot expect in any man, group, race, or period of history a perfect fulfillment of this task. When we have a perfect politics, a perfect art, perfect men and women, we may expect a perfectly proved metaphysic, too. But at present, absolute black-and-white certainty with regard to the world order is not to be reached by our finite human faculties. A philosophy of life, like any other program of conduct, will always await its test in the actual living. T h e proof of the pudding is in the eating. Philosophy is an experiment in proper living, based on the chart of reality which we draw up. Like all experiments, it is subject to correction, to improvement in method, to new hypotheses, new perspectives, a keener analysis, and so forth. In short, it is progressive. But never forget this: in so far as philosophy is a binding duty, to that extent it is metaphysics and metaphysics only. So it was in the earliest dawn of philosophy in India, in China, in Greece; so it ever must be. For man's duty to improve the lot of mankind rests upon his understanding of his environment; that is the prime requisite. Man cannot adjust his conduct to that environment and get power to control it for his own good unless he first of all understands it. And we philosophers of today need to be admonished on this score; for many of us have wandered far from our task. Many have all but forgotten the one motive that makes philosophy a worthy and serious quest—namely, to know reality. But how often in the past, and more often in our own period of specializing, have philosophers abandoned metaphysics for epistemology or logic or analysis of meanings or what is today called "semantics"! The only excuse for these wanderings was that same quest for reality. For of course the problem of metaphysics is the hardest of all human problems. So many errors have been made in the systems, that men felt the need of rigorous training in reasoning—hence logic—of determining precisely the nature

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and limits of certainty—hence epistemology—of defining exactly the meaning of their terms—hence analysis. T h e motive of these branches was to sharpen the tools for the attack on the problem of reality. But many thinkers have become so interested in the tools that they never try to use them; in fact, they believe they should not be used, but only contemplated. Nevertheless, those tools—concepts, meanings, inferences— would never have appeared at all but for man's concern with the real world. And these tool-sharpeners are like William James's man who, running to j u m p over a ditch, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. They wouldn't even run if they didn't think of the other side of the ditch. Reality is on the other side of the ditch; and normal men live there. A

HINT

OF

THE

OUTLINE

OF

A WORLD

MAP

And even now, at the start, we may get some hint of the structure of a world map. A map tells us where we are and how to get where we want to go. T o know where we are is to survey the scene—as man balanced on his two feet stands still and looks around him. But to be balanced is also to be able to move freely, to walk forward to some desired end. As we saw above, balance serves the two motives of pure curiosity and of practical power. So it is with a philosophy. It satisfies our inborn craving for knowledge, just for its own sake, and at the same time gives a control of our conduct, a plan of life based on knowledge of our great environment. It is, in fact, indispensable for intelligent conduct of life, even as a man must be able to poise on his feet before he can walk forward. And it is the other motive, the motive of aspiration, of exploration and discovery, that urges him to journey forth. And now see how these two motives co-operate, go hand in hand—or should we say foot by foot? For when man walks he gets a new balance, the balance of equilibrium, but this time a moving equilibrium. T o step out is first of all to fall forward, to lose one's balance; and the staggerer simply loses it but the walker regains it. What he loses on the one foot he regains with the

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ι ι

other. The feet themselves co-operate, and their co-operation gives the progress which is walking. And the motive for losing the balance on one foot is to advance to a new position, a new situation where one sees something different and adds to his experience. Thus the progress motive combines with the balance motive to give a new balance and a new advance. And this is primitive man's way of going about in his world. H e may vary the method by running, leaping, jumping, but the alternation and mutual support are the same. Let us emphasize this alternation and mutual support. For here first we come across that principle which we shall meet as we go on in our philosophic journey; the principle, as we shall call it, of polarity. We have verified it in the simplest sort of human behavior, in the earliest big achievement of the human infant, which is to stand and to walk, and by an easy analogy in the two perhaps deepest of human drives, the drive toward a stable mode of life and the drive toward an ever better and fuller life. Polarity, we call it: see why the term is a natural one, even though it must later be more fully defined. T o stand still is not to be inactive. There is muscular exertion in each leg, the one opposite the other in man's bilateral symmetry, each actively co-operating with the other. T h e left and the right foot are mirror images of each other, like the left and right hand. They are specific opposites; they belong to each other, so to speak. The hand is not the foot's opposite; nor the arm the leg's. Active co-operation of opposites producing a stable situation that gives power of controlled movement—that is the case. And in walking, another polarity is seen: one falls forward and loses his poise from one foot, and the opposite foot catches him in the fall and restores the lost poise. T o the polar opposites right and left foot are added the polar opposites poise and fall—and the second pair, joining with the first, gives something more than just polarity; together they give the process of advance. Process and polarity: the title of our course. Verified, to be sure, so far only in man and in the simplest aspects of his comings and goings; but as we shall

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find, man the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm in fundamental ways, and at the end of our inquiry, after we have surveyed the evidence drawn from what the sciences tell us about the world, we shall come back to this primitive and fundamental pair. In sum, we have equilibrium plus advance; which again is the polar couple, stability and process. Polarity itself has its own polar opposite, which is process. FALL

AND

REDEMPTION

OF

METAPHYSICS

But this is only a little whiff of breeze from the promised land. And the journey is the hardest of all journeys, as metaphysics is the toughest of all problems. And where the duty is highest, the dangers are greatest. See now the special danger that lies in wait for the philosopher more than for anyone else. Man is prone to extremes: the ardent Christian believes the Buddhist or Mohammedan to be fundamentally wrong; the lover of exact scientific method believes the mystic's experience of God to be pure delusion; and the mystic considers the things of this world surrounded by the veil of Maya. Not wholly so, perhaps, but the tendency is well-nigh irresistible, as history has shown only too well. And this tendency is the stronger, the more ardent the believer and the more sincere his conviction. So it is particularly with him who seeks a world plan—a total view of things, an ultimate truth, not a partial view from this or that perspective, but a one rock-bottom formula for reality. Such an ultimate formula or principle, being ultimate, brooks no fellow. If it did, it would not be the final truth; it would have to admit some further truth. Now, in the vast panorama of reality, physical, living, mental, and what not else, rigid demonstration is, frankly, beyond our reach. T h e world is indefinitely complex, and it is impossible for man to achieve a complete view of it. Even if he could glimpse it as one glimpses a whole city from a neighboring hill or a plane flying over, he could not see the infinite detail. Inevitably he will select some one perspective, some one aspect or

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group of facts that seems to throw the greater light on the scene. Inevitably, also, different types of men will select different perspectives—probably owing to their differing estimates of what is most important in the world. But no one has ever succeeded in explaining the endless detail of fact, whatever principle he has adopted. No one has ever shown that his perspective (be he materialist, idealist, or what not) actually does account for all the minutest changes and states of things. Even Hegel, who made, perhaps, the maximum claim in that direction, admitted that he could not by his dialectic deduce Herr Krug's pen. Perfect demonstration is beyond reach. That being so, there is always room for mistake; some minutiae that we had not discovered might change the whole outlook. Remember how the recent discoveries in atomic physics have compelled us to take a quite new perspective of time and space and matter. All the more, in that widest of perspectives which the philosopher would adopt. Accordingly, difference of opinion is inevitable. But that of itself does not imply fundamental disagreement. Philosophers might all admit that the different world views were only various aspects of one great whole, and they might still pool their views. What quite forbids their so doing is their own unique claim of ultimateness. They claim to survey the breadth of reality, to see it not from one or another perspective but, as it were, from all sides at once. The whole meaning of a philosophic principle, they declare, is that it covers everything. It is never just one fact by itself among other facts. It claims superiority, even supremacy. The other views are lower; they are due to a narrower perspective; they give minor or derivative principles. No, the philosopher feels that he cannot combine with others to form a genuinely synthetic view. His own system wouldn't be ultimate. If other men's ultimate principles differ from his, then they cannot be really ultimate. They may be partly true, but that is all. Thus he parts company with them. Claiming totality, he straightway falls into partiality. This, then, is the besetting sin of the philosopher. His urge

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toward wholeness, his high sense of duty to attain it, render him peculiarly liable to a jealous exclusion of other systems than the one which he feels to be true. For him truth means final, absolute, and ultimate truth—hence there can be no compeers of his own truth. And certainly it is hard to find a thinker of the past—or indeed of the present—who has not committed this sin. So much so indeed, that many keen minds today tell us the whole metaphysical quest is vain. For centuries, they say, the wisest men, the ablest intellects, the most sincere and earnest searchers have been at it, and they have not come to any common result. There always was, there is today, little but disagreement. Nor is it growing any less. Even in the branches of philosophy that originated in order to make men think better—in logic, epistemology, analysis—even here, too, there is disagreement. Time was when the Aristotelean logic was generally accepted. T h e modern logic shows conflicting views. And what has epistemology finally demonstrated to the agreement of all? As for analysis and semantics, we can point to no assured results. As far as help from these would-be helpers is concerned, there isn't any. They themselves need help. We might as well return to metaphysics. It is no worse off. Now, true enough, individual philosophers have as a rule refuted one another's systems; no one's system has survived quite as he wrote it. But certain types of system have survived. Idealism or spiritualism, in one form or another, has survived from early India and is very much alive today. T h e same is true of materialism. The system of Aquinas, in fact, comes rather close to having survived unaltered—allowance being made for modern changes in terminology and particular information drawn from the sciences, which even so do not seem to affect the general principles. We need name no more now. The point is that survival is a most significant thing. For it suggests value—value to man because true of his environment. Probably a belief that continues through the centuries among educated, sincere men who do after all have humanity's wel-

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fare more or less at heart, is in accord with at least something of a fruitful plan of life. T r u e , it is not rigorously demonstrated to be so; but the belief looks to be worth examining. T h e indication is that if we look for truth and not error, we shall find something of truth. So it is probable that these surviving types have survived because they have stood for certain values which men have recognized and still recognize and have to recognize for the better conduct of their lives: in other words they stand for powers or realities. T h a t , we say, is probable; and consequently it is probable that the type views are, in the main, all true together so far as they point to some positive principles or factors, and false in so far as they deny one another. We have seen that the philosopher can hardly tolerate more than one ultimate, and that there is no sufficient warrant for this dogmatic exclusion. T h u s it is now our job to delineate the types of metaphysic that have lasted out through the centuries and are still vigorous today as defended by eminent scholars and to see how they can be true together. Note that we do this on practical grounds. We follow the pragmatic test. It is not merely that they may all be true in the main, may perhaps be fitted together into one comprehensive scheme. It is not that we are just kindhearted and want the dear good men to stop quarreling. Rather it is that we are seeking a large-scale view, and it is our duty to consider as many proposals as we can, particularly when those proposals, however opposed their proposers think them, have survived throughout the ages. T h e strong indication is that they are all largely true together and the opposition between them is only superficial; for as maps or charts for the guidance of life they have succeeded, up to a point. T h e y have shown their fitness; or better, they have strongly suggested it. Our duty then—and metaphysics is a duty—is to find some point of view or principle which shows how they can and do fit together. T o fail in this is to fail to use the manifold resources that past ages of philosophizing have laid at our feet. For the metaphysical quest, far from being defeated, has been eminently success-

ι 6

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ful, however far from completeness it is. It has provided many maps and has borne rich fruit. T h e fields are white unto the harvest. O u r present need is not to destroy the truths gained but to fulfill them, to discover their bond of union. As already hinted, this bond will be the principle of polarity or counterpart pairs. B u t also it will be f o u n d to contain a progressive principle. Polarity, true to its o w n nature, indicates its o w n counterpart, the principle of increasing progress. METHOD

A n d n o w as to the method to be used in m a p p i n g o u t a metaphysic. D o you believe that the sun w i l l rise tomorrow? Y o u do. C a n you prove by a rigorous scientific method, an exact mathematical-physical demonstration, that it will? Y o u cannot. T o be sure, the man in the street thinks that physical science has proved that nature has its laws and these laws determine tomorrow's sunrise. B u t the logician knows better. H e knows that the empirical induction from which the scientist has generalized to any specific law of nature (gravitation, inertia) gives no rigid guarantee that the f u t u r e will resemble the past in this or that particular way. Y e t he, like the ordinary practical man, does not worry about the uncertainty. In fact, he stakes his life on the certainty of the sun rising tomorrow; for all his plans for the f u t u r e — g o i n g to his work, seeing and meeting other men, reading the news—these (he believes) depend on day succeeding day in the usual manner. His logical uncertainty troubles him not in the least. A n d why? Because, as a living, acting man, he forgets and has to forget the purely theoretical attitude and has to use his thought to make his preparations for tomorrow's sunrise and the daily tasks that go with it. Instead of lamenting the absence of proof the night before, he prepares to verify the event in question on the morrow and to act in accord with it. A n d this active preparation replaces the theoretical worry. It is the sort of thing that enables him to survive in order to verify the successive sunrises—

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and such verification offers the proof w h i c h theory cannot give. A n d of course this practical attitude is the sane and healthy one, which every theorist takes in the interstices of his theorizing. N o w let the philosopher learn from this. T h e sane attitude f o r h i m is not to demand rigorous demonstration of his map in advance of his living by that map. Plausibility, of course, he should seek; his experiment should be shown to be worth trying, and this is done in advance. Here he will follow the findings of the sciences, the laws and facts which so far have been verified and from which he can plausibly round to a general structure of the universe so far as known. T o this extent he will work hand in hand w i t h the scientist, respecting and using the scientist's methods wherever the subject matter permits. B u t unfortunately his b u r n i n g ambition for knowledge has led him in the past, and still leads him, to seek an absolute certainty like that which he (falsely) attributes to the scientist. H e will not give u p the cherished ideal (or idol) of an incontrovertible demonstration—and the result is an everincreasing effort after precision of meanings as the necessary instrument of rigid proof. So have come upon the scene—in these latter days—philosophers of the "phenomenology" school and the analytic-semantic type. B u t not only is this search for absolute precision quite vain — f o r nothing with which we are acquainted in the real world is exactly this or t h a t — b u t also it withdraws attention from the one control problem that started them on the road, the problem of metaphysic. W e find in our analysts of today very little information about the structure and behavior of the real world; very little interest in it, indeed. T h e y pull their intellectual weights every m o r n i n g before breakfast, but after breakfast, instead of going o u t to use their invigorated muscles, they return to the bathroom, strip, and pull more weights. H o w shall we expect from these denatured thinkers any account of the outdoor world? A n d all the trouble arose from the "Quest for (theoretical) Certainty."

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No, the map that will in the following pages be offered is by no means rigorously proved. It is proposed as a plausible experiment, planned in accord with facts we have learned and attitudes we have found to work in respect of the world about us and man; and its test can come only in so far as we men guide our lives by it. It simply says to men: "Here is a general plan of the world, drawn up on the basis of certain principles that seem to emerge as rather fundamental when we survey broadly the course of the world: try it." That is the only proper way to treat a metaphysic. It will be addressed, not to the intellect alone, but to intellect and will together. So must the method of rational proof be held within reasonable limits, and be supplemented by the pragmatic test. But there is another, and perhaps in some ways an even more fundamental, point of method. There is a third side of man's nature, the aesthetic or artistic: and a philosophy addressed to living men must take note of this also. T h e artist is a man who sees in the surrounding world certain significant notes. He paints a portrait of some great man, revealing a type of character of deep meaning for humanity. He writes a novel about commonplace and even ugly people—also of significant import for human knowledge. By some strange gift which no one has yet accounted for, he has insight into what is important in this or that situation: he singles this out from the unimportant, isolates it in a statue or a building or picture or song, and thereby does service to our comprehension of reality. He does not in the least prove by logic or scientific method that what he sees is significant; he just holds it up for men to view, and they see that it is. And the philosopher must emulate this method. He needs the sagacious insight which will fix upon the significant and central things. He must try to cultivate this, as in the past he has tried to cultivate the scientific method. If he cannot find the capacity within himself, let him go to the poets, the musicians, the painters. These have seen reality as it is. True, they have not cared to rationalize it, to demonstrate it by external evidence, theoretical or practical.

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But their insight, however insufficient for its articulation, is a prime requisite of any fruitful metaphysic. It is the originality, the productive factor of thinking, the "big summarizing act" that outlines a specific metaphysic which shall be worth investigating. Look at the history of philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Spinoza—whence did they get their constructive principles? Surely first of all through a light that flashed out before them in advance of sufficient evidence. T h e y first saw the Ideas, the form-matter, the graded scheme, the individuals, the systematic whole—then laboriously tried to demonstrate them. Intuition gave these men the power of generating hypothesis, the fertile imagination so prized by men of science. If the scientist needs it, still more does the philosopher, who with his far more difficult task must hope for a help as it were from on high, from a source transcending inductive or deductive logic. Very dangerous! Yes! Avoid such mysticism—wishful thinking, source of the false animism, the superstitious teleology of the nonscientific past, so say the positivists. No! Best things are fraught with greatest peril in the seeking, and the thinker's merit is found in his daring hypotheses: but also in the verification, detailed and careful, which must needs follow. And indeed it will not follow, except as he has the illuminating insight that alone can reveal the path of this verification, with its tedious steps, uphill grades and treacherous bogs. Without the intuitive conviction, one has not the courage and the patience to plod through the long labor of detailed evidence needed to confirm it. We say, never be afraid to make sweeping generalizations, but be afraid of not testing them time and time again in accord with acknowledged facts and practical conduct. And especially for the philosopher of today must the intuitive function be emphasized, for he is being brought up in so finespun a technique that he is losing his sense of the realities of everyday life. Technique is destroying his vision. H e is on about the same level as the factory worker whom he pities for the dull daily round of pushing buttons and the like mechanical tasks, without seeing

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the glory of the finished product. He himself, with his mechanically determined trains of propositions about propositions, is doing the same thing, only on what he considers a higher level. Is it higher? Factories often, though not always, make things that contribute to a fuller human life. Does the technique of the "positivist" do so? Let him ask himself. Art reveals values: values of beauty, of intense and vital experience, perhaps even of the ugly and commonplace, as some insist. It engages emotion. When we say that the philosopher needs the artist's insight, we are saying that he needs a rightly directed emotional life; a keen sense of values, and the right values. As to that, let him, as we said above, test the values he senses in his survey of the world and see whether or not he has hit upon those deepest, most significant values, those most important for the enlarging of life, which are the object of his search. But he will certainly not test them until he has envisaged them. And this is as much as to say that he must purify his heart as well as his mind. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind . . . " And is it not clear that this very lack of training in artistic perception is a main reason for dissension between philosophers? Here is an idealist, there a materialist; both are keen thinkers, able arguers, and each has written long books filled with evidence in favor of his own system. Do you know of any cases where either has persuaded the other to accept the central thesis of his position? Certainly such cases are rare. A long and careful book increases the reputation of the author, and often it treats special questions not very much considered before; for example, the idealist studies the meaning of special relativity, or the materialist investigates the quantummechanics. But almost inevitably the treatment of each new issue comes out for the idealist as a proof of idealism and for the materialist as a proof of materialism. Or compare the idealist and the skeptic. Professor Urban investigates with care and pains the significance of language and finds therein a proof of idealism. Professor Carnap investigates the same and finds a

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proof of metaphysical skepticism. Anyone who is willing may multiply instances. Now why is this? T h e reason usually given is that the rival has argued illogically—else he would have convinced the critic. We submit that no amount of skilled logical technique has ever convinced a philosopher, once he has made up his mind to the contrary, on a fundamental matter. T o one who without partisan leanings surveys the spectacle, there is no absolute demonstration, at least no humanly irresistible demonstration, anywhere. Not that this leads to skepticism; skepticism is itself one of the schools, and it does not convince any of the other schools. Grant, then, the failure of demonstrative force in the arguments of any one school. This gives no ground for choice—yet men do choose, and every philosopher does belong to one school or another. Clearly they choose by some other-than-logical criterion—and what else is this but the intuitive appeal, the sense for certain values as the great meaningful important things? The moral goods, for the idealist, tower above all others; they command his supreme reverence. He cannot deny them, he cannot consider them derivatives of anything else, of bodily well-being, and so forth. T h e materialist senses the stability of physical things, their necessity as a basis of life, their inescapable value to man. So deeply he feels this solid reality, this here and now rock-bottom dependability of material things, he cannot see anything beside it—least of all, perhaps, the moral law set up by the idealist, whose meaning he finds shifting from age to age and nation to nation. T h e emotion of these schools, centered so exclusively on one type, simply will not let them see the significance of the rival insight. Various names have been given to this sort of exclusive emotion—temperament, bias, wish—the point is, however, that these wishes are subjective wishes only in the sense that they do not wish to gain the insight of their rivals. They do, indeed, select genuine and necessary values; but they are blind to those others. That, and that almost alone, is the reason why argument fails to persuade opponents in philosophy. That is why one thinker reads a paper

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or book by another (not of his type) and looks for a flaw in the argument and, having found one (he always can), throws out the whole thing. T h a t is why the empiricist, detecting (as is not difficult) a slip in Hegel's dialectic of human history, instead of admitting (as is the case) that on the whole the dialectic applies fairly well, rejects it utterly. In philosophy an argument usually reaches only those who are reaching for the argument. T o all living philosophers we say, verify this in yourself if you are honest, otherwise verify it in your brother philosophers. But, of course, rest content with some intuition about the world the philosopher cannot. Test it he must. But it must precede the testing, else what is there to test? So the method which is here mentioned last must come first in the constructing of a metaphysic. T h e proof of the pudding comes after the making. Even so, however, the making requires the materials, gathered after much experience of edibles and put together with culinary insight. So at the end of our brief non-Cartesian discourse on method let us summarily say there should be three successive phases, probably somewhat overlapping, in each of which one of man's three mind-functions presides: (1) the survey of the admitted facts and principles purveyed by science and other instruments of knowledge—this is the cognitive or intellectual phase; (2) the leaping to a pervasive principle in this material of widest extent and significance—this engages the aesthetic function; and (3) the testing of this leap by seeing whether it reveals a map of our known universe on which we may rely for the best guidance of our lives. T h e first stage is the preparation by clear and coherent habits of thought and acquaintance with the facts of our great environment—this alone can provide the basis of a plausible hypothesis; the second is the beginning of metaphysics with a specific hypothesis; and the third, the fulfillment, so far as may be, the testing of the proposed insight. And the third stage completes the circle, as it means the return to the factual world from which we started,

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but the return armed with the illuminating principles furnished by the second stage. T h u s philosophy, instead of being merely an affair of thought, builds upon the three aspects of man's nature, thought, art, and practice. But at best all it can offer is a large-scale map, with a few of the main roads and perhaps fewer still of the branches. General outline, not detail; that is its special task. And this is what makes philosophy not an abstract theoretical discipline, but a very practical affair—the pilot of life. For the main roads are the roads along which there is the greatest traffic.

Chapter THE

Two

SURVIVING

TYPES

U ^ • ^ h e great philosophers and the great scientists are far I more alike than the discords of their words would M indicate. That is why they debate and wrangle. They are trying to get their instruments in tune for the great symphony." 1 THE

POINT

OF

VIEW

Now to set forth something of the various world charts that have lasted on through centuries of human thought and today have their bands of devoted followers—highly intelligent men, bent on getting the truth. And let us above all emphasize this: we start from a point of view which is primarily, though not exclusively, practical. We take it that a chart, a life-plan for man, which has long survived among unusually thoughtful men has something of value and significance for the human outlook on the world. There is at least a strong presumption that way. In the main, survival is a test of a system's value; enough of a test to make it worth our while to examine the system, enough to justify us in looking for fundamental truth within it, even though "with the admixture of many errors." For no doubt every system contains errors; the perfectionist ideal of a wholly proved metaphysic is beyond man's present powers, and the tyro in philosophy may detect slips in many an argument whose conclusion is nevertheless largely true. And if, as we saw, metaphysics is a duty, then it is the philosopher's duty to look for this truth. But this test by survival goes so against the grain in most of our philosophical technicians that we must dwell on it for a ι F. J. E. Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature, New York, 1940, p. 248.

T H E SURVIVING TYPES

25

moment. Why does survival betoken truth? Don't many false views survive? Put the answer thus. A thinker makes the hypothesis that the real world contains a certain factor X . He shapes his conduct as if X were really there. He finds that his conduct, so adjusted to the presence of X , succeeds in its aims: it can be performed, carried out, fulfilled. If a plan of action succeeds, so far it is rightly based, so far it is in accord with the nature of things; the hypothesis on which the plan is drawn up is so far verified. We plan to take a journey tomorrow, we pack our bags, look up the trains, draw money for the journey. This plan of action depends upon the hypothesis (among other hypotheses) that in general morrows will come—a hypothesis, as we said above, which cannot be proved true beforehand. But we shape our conduct by it: that is, we assume a principle in the real world, and we undertake a series of acts whose performance depends on that principle's being true. T h e performance occurs—presumably the principle is true: tomorrows do follow todays. But will the next tomorrow follow this one? There, again, we await the practical test; but if in the long run our hypothesis enables us to execute our plans, we can scarcely help acting as if it were true. And here, too, the theoretical aspect of mind adds a contribution of its own. Reality, we have declared, is known through direct contact by the active life; for it is that which we run up against, that of which we have to take respectful account, to which, as a power external to our own wishes and efforts, we have to adjust our conduct if we would fulfill those wishes and endeavors. As such, real things have power over us; and it is but a tautology to say that what has power over us has an independent nature of its own, that it has a self-maintenance, that it is not something vanishing, evanescent, liable to the Heraclitean destructive flux—in short, that it is the seat of regular behavior, of dependable, law-abiding behavior. So our reason naturally, inevitably, inclines to the belief in a world of law and order. No wonder, then, that we expect the morrow to come, that we expect lead and gold and iron, animals and men to show always

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the same fundamental traits through any amount of surface changes. It is the meaning of power—itself a practical category—that suggests to reason the confident expectation of a future like the past; and because power means selfmaintenance and reason sees this meaning. So reason and practice concur. A n d herein lies the truth of the Kantian claim that objectivity implies law and order, though the claim is not based, as Kant seems to have thought, on a merely theoretical or logical need, but at bottom on our direct experience of natural objects as powers. In this example of the morrows to come, then, carried-out action of the sort planned witnesses the reality of the principle envisaged by the hypothesis. T h a t is what we mean by survival: successful performance, completion of the intended act or acts. In the face of this completion, we feel justified in adopting the working hypothesis that the principle is objectively real. Now this is the practical attitude adopted—and necessarily adopted, too, if one would live—by ordinary everyday mankind; and compared with the theoretical, which waits ever for exact proof, it makes for a life with zest and interest, wealth of quality, richness of content and significance. Moreover, this practical attitude itself, subjected to its own test, is justified because it can be carried out indefinitely long—subject only to the sickness or death of the body. O n the other hand, the attitude which seeks no more than a demonstration by logical implication of any such hypothesis, does not lead to a fulfillment of any acts at all. It leads to the inaction and skeptical paralysis of the "pale cast of thought"—it renders the thinker (so far as he is merely a thinker) a parasite upon others who support him, financially or otherwise. T h e hypothesis that theoretical proof of specific real things is prerequisite is, so far as we can at present see, one which cannot lead any plan of action to its intended completion and therefore has no evidence in its favor. Of course this does not logically prove its falsity, any more than successful completion would logically prove its truth. Meanwhile, those

"ΓΗ Κ S U R V I V I N G

TYPES

27

w h o wish to live and live more fully, intensely, productively will adopt the more fertile practical attitude. N o w , in respect of the types of metaphysic. A system makes the hypothesis (the author usually thinks it a demonstrated truth), let us say, that reality contains a principle such as the moral law "treat every person as an end not a means." T h e n the author, who sincerely believes this, acts on it t h r o u g h o u t his life. (In the long run, philosophers w h o accept a principle do tend to act on it: it colors their lives, since you cannot separate intellect wholly from will, as theorists try to do in their purely contemplative attitude.) O n the whole, let us suppose, he does show a good effect from accepting the principle. T h a t is, he finds that treating persons as ends enables them to live and do likewise, and himself also to live and do likewise; not always, of course, b u t still considerably more often than not. By accepting and acting on the principle, he is able to gain Iiis end of continued life for himself and other men. A n d if reality means that to which we must pay respectful heed if we would gain our ends, then this principle, c o n f o r m i n g to that definition, is real, a real factor in the e n v i r o n m e n t — t h o u g h obviously not a physical factor. Incidentally, men do usually believe that this sort of life, life in a society founded on mutual respect and consideration of one another's needs, is a better life, because it makes for a richer field of interests, more surviving individuals, and generally speaking a greater wealth and intensity of experience on the whole. A n d so it is natural to speak of a more successful life, a life of greater value, as the result of acting on the principle in question. A n d f o l l o w i n g this natural bent, we shall speak so. B u t no special theory of value need be invoked. A n d of course we are not saying that a hypothesis is sound because it makes m e n feel better. T h a t would be the subjective pragmatism w h i c h argues that we should all believe in G o d because it makes us happier (for happiness is doubtless a good of sorts). N o , the claim here made is that the hypothesis enables a plan of action, many

28

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plans of action, to be fulfilled. T h e believer, endeavoring to use a suspected or assumed power, finds that he can use that power: hence he cannot but believe it really there. T h e evidence here is of the same kind as the experimental evidence by which a physical principle or law is confirmed in the sciences. T r u e , it is not quantitatively precise: but the moral principle is not a quantity. And so when a thinker steeped in the contemplative point of view sees in these recurrent types only the recurrence of certain deep-lying human wishes, we say to him: they are indeed such wishes, as we shall see when we come to study them. And wishes are often very useful things: they direct attention in a direction where we discover facts which indifference would have overlooked. But the main principles of the surviving types are more, also. Surviving among men of responsible and highly developed character, they are indexes of successful living. Successful living, of course, is relative and varying from man to man, yet verifiable to a degree in the personalities of the great philosophers of history, past and present. And success means only the carrying out of man's aim to live and to live with richness of qualitative content and maximum intensity, so far as not inhibiting other contents and other lives having them. "By their fruits ye shall know them," applies to principles as well as to men. And this helps to clear up another point. Have not the disagreements between the philosophic schools survived just as much as the schools? Also among men of superior probity, and so forth. In fact, there is a plenty of bad things, things to be removed, that have survived even in the highest animal, man: useless or dangerous organs, superstitious fears, jealous rivalries between thinkers, devastating race hatreds, wars of nation against nation. But a surviving useless organ is, so far as it remains healthy and does no harm to the body, good enough. If it drains energy from other organs, it prevents living just so far. If it becomes diseased and deadly to the organism, the destructiveness is a privation of the body's continued living.

T H E SURVIVING TYPES

29

Its survival thus means less survival on the whole. And that is the essential point. Many survivals are really preventives of survival. But they are successful in so far as they have themselves a positive vitality—a vitality due to their ability to use the environment. When a plant takes in H 2 0 or CO,, from its environment, it is using a part of the environment to continue its own life. It could not continue that life unless it did use certain agents and powers that reside in the environment. So when a thinker, with his carefully thought-out plan of the universe about him, not only continues to live, but lives more fully than the average man who has no such carefully thoughtout plan, presumably he would not have so lived unless there were something in the world, some power or powers or principles, that he uses in applying his plan. All living, even the living of evil, poisonous, destructive plants or animals, is due to the use of powers in the environment. It is evil only in so far as it destroys other lives. Live and let live—or better, live and help to live. Yes, survival itself, so far as positive and not destructive or privative, is success. So we may proceed to delineate the surviving types, confident that so far as they stand for positive principles and do not necessarily work against the survival of other types which also have survived, they reveal something in the make-up of reality. But further: even a skepticism of all metaphysics has its positive survival-value, or, as we should now say, its survivaltruth. It is not—or need not be, as many would think—wholly negative. It points out, truly enough, that none of the types has rigorously demonstrated its principles. But of course the skeptic, like other men, does actually believe in a real objective world, in the laws of the electric field, the gravitation of stars and planets, the evolution of life, and so forth. Thereby he furnishes to the thinker, if the latter would but see, a most valuable stimulus to discover the ground for belief in these things. For not even the theoretical skeptic would admit that such belief is wholly arbitrary. It is up to him to set forth his own ground for departing from his ideal of demonstration.

3o

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True, he usually does not do this; to that extent he simply continues the baiting and bickering and never grows beyond the stage of the gadfly to that of the man. And of course, also, he is really just another type of metaphysician, like the others. For he believes in a reality, as his daily action bears witness, but a reality which is opaque to logic and thus has the trait of being antirational. He is an irrationalist, just as the mystic is an irrational ist, though he does not accept the mystical nonrational method of reaching reality. And as such he is just of the irrationalist camp, fighting against the other camps, as they fight against him, none persuading any of the others. In this aspect the skeptic, substituting a question mark for the positive principles of the other schools and yet refusing to answer, looks like a man who believes that he ought to commit suicide, but is afraid to do so. And all because he does not take to heart the positive lesson of theoretical doubt, the practical attitude to reality. Note that we are not trying to prove by infallible reasoning that survival implies truth. We are pointing to the wellattested fact that organisms survive by adapting their behavior (unconsciously or consciously) to certain powers of the environment. We are suggesting that by all the specific evidence, continued living depends upon such adaptation. And we add that better and fuller living depends on more of this adaptation, more powers of external nature employed, and more fruitful powers. So when we find certain life-plans that have gone along the ages, not only with continued living—generations of thinkers one after another using them—but also with a rather full and useful living, there we have a survival that betokens a correct interpretation of external nature, correct in that the powers of nature which these life-plans envisage are really in that nature. True, there is little of precision in this argument. There is no measuring the degree of probability that the success is due to the particular life-plan rather than to some other unsuspected factor. If a system survives, the cause of its survival might be the appeal it makes to a race bias.

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or a forceful and noble literary expression, or some accident of an era. But long survival, and survival among peoples wide apart racially or geographically, discounts such accidental causes, pointing rather to the elements common to the varying forms of the system from thinker to thinker and time to time as the likely cause. And let us add this: even a view of little antiquity which emerges in modern times has a weight somewhat proportional to its lateness. For it is the result of the reflection of the modern thinker on the past ages. As De Quincey (?) said, it is a great mistake to consider primitive man as old: it is we who are old, heirs of all the ages of thought. A n d our views have a consummatory flavor that our ancestors' views lacked. Thus modernity makes up for a lack of time-length. Or better, it really has behind it and in some measure included in itself, the persisting types of the ages. In the sequel we shall use this to dignify the latest type of metaphysic in the scheme, the process-type. T h e argument is inductive and no tighter than the method of agreement. It offers no proof of future truth. (Neither does any other argument.) It does offer a strong inducement to try the plans of life that have survived and the plan we shall draw up as justifying those plans. All meaningful verification comes with application to living, and there alone. Nobody really believes in a plan that he does not thus verify. But now comes the historical precisian with another caveat. How are you going to justify your claim that so and so are the common elements of, say, one hundred different philosophical systems? And again we answer, we cannot infallibly do so. Yet it is our duty, it is the duty of everyone who seeks fundamental truth, to do our best here, to limn the nucleus around which individual accretions have come and gone—and no doubt historical scholarship will find more or less error in any such proffered common precipitate. Let us only hope that our successors will do better. But after all, precision is here, too, a counsel of perfection which, like a sweet dessert, should come nearer the end than the beginning of a life-giving sustenance.

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Our first requisite is significance: single out the factors that are rather clearly significant for human living, for a chart on which we may plot the road to better things. Better an ounce of significance than a pound of precision. And by the same token, we have no definite time-scale for survival. How long must a type survive to demonstrate its importance? Hegel was the ruling spirit in German philosophy for a few decades, then his influence passed to England, America, and perhaps Italy. If we admit it to be strong enough to deserve notice today (some opponents would not), then we might give it, say, some 120 or 130 years. Is this enough? T h e system of Aquinas is pretty strong today—call its survival about 670 years, say from 1274 to 1943. T h a t seems better. But some of the Vedantist schools of early India have still their earnest disciples, perhaps as keen and as numerous as ever; give them twenty-six centuries or so. How ambiguous, then, our criterion of survival! Here we answer once more in the practical spirit. W e take the schools that are vigorous today; schools, of course, that have some degree of respectable ancestry, and indeed the more the better; and we remember also that later-born types have an added weight for their lateness. True, had we lived in the thirteenth century A.D., we should have made a different cast of the net from the one we shall now make. T h e thinkers of A.D. 3000 will also, we presume, differ from us in their own way. Here, again, we can only take what seem to us the outstandingly significant and lasting hypotheses about reality. Every age has its limits: but if later ages are to profit by our age, it is incumbent on us to hand down what truth the perspective of our time, surveying itself and the past, has to offer. T h e fact is that most of these objections of the precisians—whether of logic or of history—are themselves based on the theoretical attitude, captious of all that lacks rigorous demonstration, oblivious of the duty to frame as significant and fertile a perspective of the great world as we can. When a man is lost in the woods he does not measure the length of the leaves and grass, but looks for a path. Let

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us do likewise. Let us discard the self-scrutinizing conscience of the philosophical Puritans and look out into the real world in which we live and move and have our being. Now contrast this new departure in method with the customary one. Philosophers have treated the systems mainly from the aspect of consistency and implication. So they have done perennially, and even more insistently in the present time, aping the methods of the physical sciences which they think have given a body of fully proved results. Unfortunately they do not imitate the experimental phase of these sciences, which verifies a principle of nature by doing something to a body and observing in the body's response the power of the principle in question. No, they follow only the logical phase. T h e y pick out the mathematical and deductive element. And why? Because, sensing the uncertainty of their own results as shown by age-long disagreements, they seek certainty, form rather than content, the subjective attitude of assurance rather than reality. Dewey has marked this well in his influential book, The Quest for Certainty. A n d for the pure theorist certainty lies in logical implication and consistency. As to consistency, note this. A system may contain truths of great value to mankind even though it does not succeed in harmonizing them with one another. A n d we should remember, too, that the inconsistency may be only apparent, due to the fact that we, the critics, are judging from too narrow a perspective. If men never admitted new facts that seem inconsistent with already known facts, there would be little progress in knowledge. T h e facts of black-body radiation were inconsistent with the wave-theory of light; but were they rejected for that reason? No, they were kept, and a reconciliation was sought. T h e advance came when a new point of view was discovered which harmonized the two sets of facts. So of a philosophical system; if it has shown its merit as a chart for the guidance of life, presumably it is so far correct, and its inconsistencies may be ironed out; so then it is our duty to discover some way of doing that. T h e real question, the first question, is that of the

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practical test. A n d consistency is after all a counsel of perfection. H e w h o rejects a system in toto because it contains some internal contradictions is like a man who will not walk because w a l k i n g starts with losing your balance. B u t of course consistency is a jewel, yet like a jewel, not of much value for the more pressing needs of life. R a t h e r it belongs to the refinements that embellish a successfully rounded life. A n d not unnaturally the philosophers in their detachment from life have sought the refinements first. A n d as to rigid logical demonstration, that too is a counsel of perfection. He w h o will not make a life-plan until its success is proved certain beforehand, will make n o plan at all; he will be as the beasts. N o , a system is not great and true because it has been with mathematical precision demonstrated—rather because it has enabled its followers to conduct their lives more fully and richly and beautifully. A n d by the same token we should not be too nice about exact definition of our terms. W h o condemns the astronomer because his estimate of the Andromeda nebula's distance may be some thousand light-years out of the way? W e l l , philosophy is to other knowledge much as astronomy is to physics. Its survey aims to be the largest we can make; its counsels are general; it marks out the great highroads of reality, letting w h o will explore the bypaths and caves. T h e search for precise m e a n i n g of terms usually becomes a purely theoretical occupation, q u i t e out of connection with the actual world. If we are going to swallow a camel, let us not strain at a gnat. B u t it is the real world that man first of all needs and wants to know, and reality is never precisely anything. O u r emphasis, then, is going to be quite other than the usual critico-logical one. Probability is the guide of life, and a metaphysical system is but a probable hypothesis—to be based, of course, on observation and inference and generated by some artistic insight, but provable only in the w o r k i n g verifications. W e do not prove a system to the hearer, b u t we give the hearer a chance to prove it himself—the only way he can prove it. T h e " y o u ' v e got to show m e " attitude will not

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get its owner very far. Blessed are they w h i c h have not seen and yet have believed. But remember, too, that even the d o u b t i n g T h o m a s had evidence given h i m — p r o v i d e d he would reach out his hands and touch. So if we find several systems, or types of system, that have actually survived the centuries of b i c k e r i n g and refutation, the presumption is strong that all are true together. A n d even though their followers are unwilling to admit this, it is o u r duty as we stand outside the camps and look at their struggles, to find a perspective from which we can see their harmony. T o do this is to see the relation between them; and that relation will then be the keynote of a true m e t a p h y s i c — t h e truest we can at present discover. W e shall find, indeed, that the s u r v i v i n g systems pair off; they form couples, each member of w h i c h is the counterpart of the other, like the left and right hands. T h i s counterpart relation, then—polarity, we shall call i t — i s the first metaphysical principle we are to proclaim. B u t polarity is an old notion, little comprehended as yet: to say " p o l a r i t y " and no more is to say almost nothing. W h e n we come to define it, we shall see in it a significance for theory and practice alike, such as has not yet been disclosed by any one of the systems, while yet implicit in them all. THE

The

Three-Dimensional

TYPES

Diagram

W h a t now are the various systems—call them ideologies if you w i s h — w h i c h have survived through centuries and today exercise about as powerful an influence as ever with thoughtful men? As the eye roams repeatedly over the vast field of past and present, certain areas of concentrated intensity, so to speak, gradually shine out; areas not sharply outlined, but shading off between, yet unmistakably distinct, like the colors of the spectrum. T h e s e areas mark four types or schools of constructive metaphysic, and beside them a fifth school of more nega-

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tive type: idealism, materialism, scholasticism, process-philosophy, ¿nationalism. Take the terms for the moment loosely; in fact they are hardly to be defined exactly, for each school contains differences within. But they serve well, for they bring out the deep oppositions that are of so great concern for philosophy. They are obviously very fundamental cleavages in human thinking; they line up significantly the various plans that men have drawn up. For notice: they are not just five haphazard views. They are natural pairs, each pair comprising two natural opposites. Idealism and materialism are the older pair, dating back to earliest history in the Orient; they turn on the opposition of mind and body, spirit and flesh. Scholasticism and process-philosophy are the younger pair, arising in the later civilization of the Occident; they turn, as we are to see, on the opposition of fixed structure and change or progress. And over against these four, which profess to set forth positive, intelligible life-charts, stands irrationalism, denying all intelligible charts, finding reality above reason (so the mystics) or at any rate inaccessible to it (so the skeptics). T h e irrationalist, denying every articulate metaphysic, is against all four, as they are against him. They give answers, he writes a question mark or a dash. And, again, the four positive types display between their two couples a natural opposition. T h e idealism-materialism issue is about opposite things, qualities, terms—mind and body; the scholasticism-process conflict is about opposite relations—fixed structure versus change. Now let us, for clearness' sake, anticipate something of the examination to come and construct a diagram. And let us, for better understanding, follow roughly the historical order. For of course the historical genesis of the types will throw some light on their significance. So we begin as history began, with the antithetical pair, idealism and materialism (so in India). Locate them at opposite ends of a line, with idealism at the right. Most men are right-handed, most men put the right foot first, and idealism has generally a larger count of follow-

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ers than materialism. Draw then the line M 1. For the idealist reality is at I; for the materialist, at M. T h e opposition is primeval for metaphysic. Now scholasticism came later. It could reflect on the already long-continued disagreement, and it did reflect. T o view a quarrel objectively is to be outside the line of fire, to envisage at once the combatants and their relationship. T h i s means another than the linear dimension, as three points determine a plane. Also, scholasticism, as being opposed to the mind-body dispute, holding that there is no ground for it, is over against the line M I . So draw it thus:

s, 1

M

1

with a line between S (scholasticism) and the line M I . T h e plane figure SMI is supposed to lie flat. N o w the opposite of scholasticism, we said, is the process-philosophy (hereafter to be called simply "process"). A n d like scholasticism, process is opposed to the mind-body dispute; it believes there is no just ground for the quarrel. Hence it, too, should be located at a point Ρ outside the line MI, and a line should be drawn between Ρ and MI to designate that Ρ is over against M I . And since, as noted above, Ρ is the specific opposite of S, Ρ and S are on opposite sides of the line M I , and the lines from S to M I and Ρ to M I should best be combined into one continuous line intersecting MI and joining the opponents S and P. Thus:

S M Ρ It is better, however, to draw the line SP at a slant and to join the points M, S, I, and P, forming a rhomboid; for this suggests

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a perspective from offside, not directly above the plane on which the contestants are fighting like armies on the earth's surface. Thus:

T h e reason for the perspective will appear in a moment; but note first a point in regard to P. It arose later in history than the other types, and so had the advantage of reflecting on all three and their opposition. Accordingly it should, as viewing the plane of M, I, and S, have a position above that plane. Yet it is the counterpart of S, and must not be related to S as being in a different and higher dimension. Our diagram compromises between these two traits of P, and gives the plane M S I P an upward curvature, about Ρ as the apex—a slight curvature, indicating one continuous plane and at the same time enough to give P, the latest view, a survey of the whole plane. We should now draw the map thus:

where Ρ is a cusp point going a little bit into the third dimension. This note of a higher dimension introduces the reason, just mentioned, for drawing the figure askew. T h e skewness itself suggests an external point of view or perspective from which to see not only the near-plane M S I P but also a type represented by a vertical line cutting the plane at the center

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39 of the rhombus, reaching above and below it and ending in two points Y and C, respectively above and below the plane. If we did not thus see the plane askew, this line YC would coincide in part with the line SP—which would obscure the meaning of the diagram. For the perpendicular YC at a right angle to the plane marks a philosophy quite outside the four warring camps, a philosophy which reflects upon the total situation with its internecine strife, and as a consequence maintains that there is (and perhaps can be) no rational or intelligible metaphysic. This new type we call irrationalism. It is represented by a line rather than a point because it contains in itself two opposing factions. The upper terminus Y stands for the zenith, so to speak, of irrationalism, the lower one C for the nadir; Y denotes extreme mysticism, the alleged contact with the Highest, found in an ecstasy far above the plain on which the factions contend, and C denotes skepticism which places reality as it were below understanding—reality as sought by metaphysics being for intellect self-contradictory or meaningless, a muddle or a question mark only. For this nadir view we can really know only the positive findings of the physical sciences at the most, and at the least only the certainties of symbolic language. So now we draw the map thus: Y

M

Ί

C These last two, Y and C, agree in the negative thesis or opposition to all four camps offering a constructive plan and disagree on the positive side, the former claiming that we have a sure grasp of absolute reality through an intuitive contact, the latter denying any such contact—hence they stand at op-

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posite ends of the line designating ¡nationalism: Y standing for a superrationalism and C for an antirationalism or a subrationalism. And finally we note that our slightly one-sided perspective has a certain justification; for it puts scholasticism nearer to idealism and process nearer to materialism—which as a matter of historical fact is the case. T h e scholastic being a theist so far affirms with the idealist the supremacy of spirit. And process reacting against the older theism, dwells on the successes of the physical sciences and assumes the title of naturalism, which is not too far from materialism. The map needs one more detail: given last, though it cropped out far back in history, because it marks a conflict confined to but one of the four rational types, idealism. Idealism long ago in India split into two camps, monism and pluralism; their opposition is today in the schools of absolute and personal idealism. Monism and pluralism are usually treated by the textbooks as all-pervasive types on a par with and cutting across the other lines as if in a new dimension. Thus, there might be a monistic materialism (body a plenum, as with Descartes and Spinoza) or a pluralistic materialism, as with the old atomists: the opposition between a continuous and a discrete physical world. But this issue, however theoretically interesting, is of no great practical bearing; it becomes important, very important indeed, in the field of mind, and the mind of man. For here it is the pivot on which turn the oppositions between individualism and socialism, democracy and fascism, theism and pantheism; and these issues bear directly on one's life-plan. The monism-pluralism issue is of great moment in the field of mind alone; hence we who are treating metaphysics as the outlining of a workable chart of reality include it only under idealism. And so we add to the line MI two diverging short lines on the right, ending at Mo and PI (monistic and pluralistic idealism). Notice that Mo is at the end of the line from S to I and PI at the end of the line from Ρ to I. This is natural and fitting, since scholasticism is a pluralist philosophy opposed to monism, and process treats reality as a con-

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tinuous flow of experience, denying separate individuals. A n d if these extensions are but the rhomboid's tails they are not details, but types quite on a par with the other types. T h e map

Reflections

on the

Diagram

Its serial character.—All-important it is to view the above as a sequence. T h e systems may be all true t o g e t h e r — u p to a point; we shall see later that they are so. B u t their significance can be appreciated only as they are viewed in the order of construction here f o l l o w e d — a n order ;vhich is, on the whole, the historical one. A n d their being true together can be seen only in the same way. For each of the types is in the main a reaction against what it deems the extremeness, the one-sidedness, the omissions of the preceding types, and its positive contribution to philosophy lies in such reaction. T h a t is why the history of philosophy is prerequisite to a sound metaphysic. A t first most discouraging in bewildering variety and perennial disagreements, it is seen from a long-view and nonpartisan survey to be the greatest source of hope. It shows a development, each stage profiting (if only it would!) by what has gone before, u p to the last positive stage, which, as we are later to see, not only admits the positive teachings of past stages but suggests ever-new perspectives and discoveries. Each, we say, is a reaction to what has gone before. A n d this is true even of the first step in the onward march. Idealism, the first philosophy,

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"natural metaphysic of the human mind"—idealism is a reaction to the ordinary unhappy life of man. In it philosophy, with its religious aspiration, was born: philosophy, the intellectual counterpart of religion, seeking ultimate values. And of course the last type, skepticism, with its despair, comes after a series of systems as a reaction against the hope and the confidence with which each thinker constructed his system. In this reaction metaphysics, dying, is transported as it were to an ineffable heaven by the mystic and consigned to hell by the skeptic. But dead as it seems, it is resurrected, and the systems reappear, following again the same types and adding new forms of them, or even new types. So were the Sophists followed by Plato and Aristotle, Hume by the post-Kantian idealism, and so on. Ever the cycle repeats itself, in however varying form. Dwarf types.—Do you ask why just these types? What of realism, dualism, panpsychism, parallelism, determinism, empiricism, pragmatism, tychism, and many another? We said above that the types of our set are the ones of fundamental significance for life's voyage. T r u e , these just named are also significant, though in lesser and in varying degrees. But certainly most of them are what might be called dwarf types: they either belong within some individual of our own set or give a minimum of information about the world structure. T h u s realism (in the medieval sense) is no full type-system, being concerned alone with the reality of universals. It might go with a denial of aught but universals—after the manner of Erigena or some Neoplatonists, perhaps—it might admit real individuals also. In either case the realism of it tells little or nothing about the latter or about the order of the universals, the structural relations they bear, the place of mind and its values. It is too thin. So of realism in the epistemological sense. Suppose, for instance, it were proved that there is an external reality logically and temporally antecedent to any knowing mind. T h i s yields but a meager metaphysic. It does not tell the things we most want to know, whether this reality is mental or material, well ordered or capricious, good or bad for man's

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deepest interests. It is a dwarf type. So, indeed, of epistemologica! idealism. Suppose Berkeley was correct: esse is percipi. Of what significance for one's plan of life, one's adjustment to the cosmos, is this? T h e order and sequence of percepts might still be controlled by the laws of inorganic nature; that would be materialism for all working purposes. Or they might be wholly in accord with the purpose of a Divine creative spirit: that would be a spiritualism, or perhaps a dualism. T h e great issues are left quite undecided by such epistemological answers; though no doubt they would, if proved, convey some important information. But realism (that is, dualism), or idealism, or the intermediate positions under the heading of "critical" realism, or "objective relativism," or other epistemological view, has not the dimensions of a type of metaphysic. They may be necessary, but they are not sufficient conditions. Consider also the pair determinism and free will. T h e issue is no doubt a very important one, central indeed to a metaphysic. But it is already included in the issue between monism and pluralism. Monistic idealism is determinist; pluralistic is typically, though not always, libertarian, giving room for free choice to man, perhaps even for chance in the external world. T h e issue is already included. Merely by itself, however, it is too scanty to give a general chart of reality. Man may have free choice, but that tells little about the great universe around him. Or he may be wholly determined—that also tells little about the order of nature. Neither view is specific enough: what we want to know is, by what man is determined, whether by the Divine plan or the laws of physical nature; and, in either case, to what in the end he is determined—whether to endless progress, or to extinction, or what not. A n d so of chance or free will. How far does it extend, if at all? T o what should free choice bend itself? T o w a r d what results does chance lead? These questions are answered, or the answers are implicit, in the full-grown types monist idealism, pluralist idealism, scholasticism, and process. A n d what of empiricism, pragmatism, et al? Empiricism is a method;, we shall use it. But

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it is no answer; it might yield any one of the six great types. So of phenomenology, so of the pragmatic test, which we have already advocated. What, then, of panpsychism or dualism? Panpsychism typically goes with idealism, as it sees mind everywhere in body: but it might also be dualistic, calling body one aspect, mind another. As such it is not decisive enough, though thicker than the others above. It does not, as only panpsychism, decide the issue, but leaves it to be decided by idealism and materialism. But what of dualism? Surely that merits the name of a type—surely it is as significant as either idealism or materialism. True, indeed; yet we must note that mere dualism is not a full-grown metaphysic, since it leaves us with the problem, of the utmost significance, of the relation between mind and body. Many philosophers, discussing the mind-body problem, have come out with the common-sense dualism of interaction between mind and body. This is a genuine metaphysic, but a small one as yet. It gives no general outline of the universe so far as known to man. It is too much confined to man's dual nature. It has not the reach and spread of scholasticism, which also is a dualism, but much more, with its doctrine of levels, First Cause, and the rest. Perhaps this is enough for these lesser types; the point is this, that it is a matter of degree, and we have picked out the types of fullest degree, most significant in the issues they turn upon and of the most extensive perspective, giving the greatest room for filling in with the lesser types. Historical verification.—Take, for example, idealism or materialism as we shall describe them. In order to include systems commonly called idealistic—the Vedantist schools, Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, the English and American idealists of today— what a fearful amount of sifting of texts would be necessary! If only we could multiply these η systems together and extract the nth root of the product! And for materialism: what is the nucleus present alike in the atoms of Democritus, the manmachine of Lamettrie, the energy of modern physics, the subvocal speech of the behaviorist? And as to scholasticism, do we

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mean Thomism, or the Jesuit or Franciscan views where they diverge, or what? And what indeed is the process-philosophy— a name not even current today? Compare Bergson, S. Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, H. B. Alexander, James, Mead, Dewey, Whitehead; what is the precipitate of these? Yes, the scholars will catch us here. But, as we have said, it is more important to note the significant things roughly than the insignificant precisely. We shall attribute, in each type, the views that seem to have been at least suggested by the recognized idealists, materialists, and so forth, to the respective types, just in so far as they seem of deepest import for the purpose of a metaphysic. It is in each case an ideal type, a limiting concept, that we set forth: one no more realized, perhaps, in actual history than is any law of nature perfectly realized in the actual world. O u r project is not historical scholarship, but metaphysics; and our examples may be misnamed all you please provided what they exemplify is clear enough and of metaphysical bearing, that is, significance for an attitude toward the cosmos. In terms of the map, we would place the thinkers of history somewhere near the points M, I, and so forth. But it is doubtless true that the greater the thinker, the more he stretches toward his counterpart and toward the other types, too. Most scholastics have a touch of mysticism, of idealism, of materialism; likewise with the others. Idealism:

the

Genus

Its merit.—Idealism began in India, and perhaps in China, before Greek philosophy was well under way. T h a t is, thinkers whom we moderns by common consent call idealists thought and wrote, thus long ago. And today in India, in China, in Europe, and in America thinkers of high repute whom also we by common consent call idealists have done and are doing likewise. Hence we say: the view called idealism has survived long —probably longer, indeed, than any other comparable view. Now, as said above, survival implies fitness and in fact so far is fitness. But how much? Enough to make idealism a very sue-

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cessful life-plan? So, pursuant to the primarily practical attitude, we ask: were the idealists eminently successful men? We begin with this concrete testimony rather than, as is usual in metaphysical studies, by a statement of the doctrine or doctrines of idealism. For these are shown to be worth examining by the witness of the lives of their defenders. What, then, of the individual idealists? Certainly on the whole they stand out above the average of men in the conduct of their lives. A Hindu saint, a Plato, a Kant, a Fichte, men like T . H. Green, Josiah Royce, Bosanquet—not to mention our living idealists—these men do unquestionably show a high degree of thoughtful, planful ordering of their lives: yes, an unusually successful type of life. They were in a positive sense good men, good citizens, with a high sense of responsibility for doing their part in the bettering of human life. They tried to help humanity, and they did help humanity. It is not from such men that the criminals, the idlers, the self-seekers are recruited. Whatever the limitations or errors in their teaching, at least they recalled men—and themselves—to a sense of the dignity of human life at its best, to the beauty of knowledge, to the power resident in the ideals of lasting peace and good will. Their particular plans for realizing these ideals may or may not not have been correct; but even to seek those plans makes a man better, so far. And in this case more than that. A thoughtful life is in general better than a thoughtless one; but when these particular thoughtful lives show, in the recurrence of their type, the same high level—the continuing concern with man's welfare and the growth of knowledge—it must be that there is something in their methods and plans which is in accord with the great environment. The evidence is strong that what they have in common is a fertile insight—which means a true doctrine: truer and more fundamental in proportion as their lives are richer and more productive of intelligent behavior. In short, their ideals show a power making for a fuller life, a life of greater wealth of thought and experience. True, a westerner finds in the oriental mystic's with-

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drawal from the tasks of social planning, banishment of disease, poverty, crime, increased use of material forces, not at all a fuller mode of l i f e — r a t h e r an emptier one. But he overlooks this: the mystic is holding up his ideal for all men, not for himself alone; he is genuinely w o r k i n g for human salvation in his own way. Also, the westerner overlooks this: the oriental is successful in reaching a balance and a peace which is a very positive and rich experience, as those exceptional occidentals testify who have sincerely tried the experiment. T h e recurrence of eastern idealism, just as m u c h as of western idealism, shows an insight that has led to a greater l i f e — t h o u g h the directions of greatness differ. Let us re-emphasize this: it is not that the beliefs of these idealists made them feel happier. In some sense, doubtless, they did; but that is not the test. T h e beliefs gave them power, power over the conduct of their lives, guiding those lives toward more responsible action, more thoughtful reflection on the human situation, on man's place in nature, and the l i k e — and in such a way that they themselves were better citizens of the human state than most. A n d power is the mark of reality, the primary and essential mark. It shows no understanding of idealism to attempt to justify it by pointing to the comfort it gives. Feeling is subjective; successful action, a plan carried out, is objective witness of truth—so far. N o r is the idealist's life implied to be more successful than, say, the materialist's or the irrationalist's. Enough that it is on the whole repeatedly more successful than the average. W e shall find each type displaying the same phenomenon; b u t success lies in different directions. Yes, idealists have stood for something that mankind needs; they have furnished evidence of some power or powers that man may call upon to help him live a better life. T o some degree, to a high degree, idealism has been a workable philosophy of life. Limits to its success we may find, and we do find. Say, if you like, that the idealist—even Plato in some ways—has small sense of the particular events, perils, neces-

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sities, of the physical world. A l l true, perhaps. Nevertheless, a j u d g m e n t of idealism not irritated or blinded by these shortcomings (as alas! the other types so often are)—a fair-minded view looking for what truth it can find in this typical ideology, will find the idealist plan of life to a large extent confirmed. T h e r e is something in the environment of man that countenances the idealist's beliefs. W h a t , then, is this something? Obviously this: he takes the world to contain some indestructible goods or values; being indestructible (eternal is the usual word), they are always open to man for the working, never evanescent like the sensual pleasures, always productive of fuller life, of a stable peace and power to endure. T h e s e goods are far from fully realized in man's present life on earth. Man's body is not permanent, and its goods (health, sense-pleasure, bodily action) are therefore not permanent. T h e goods of the idealist, accordingly, are of another sort—probably reside in another realm than those of this world. Hence the age-long distinction made by idealists between the ideal world and this present world; between Brahm and the veil of Maya, between the Ideas and the world of phenomena, between reality and appearance. So of the earlier idealism; and even the modern Hegelian form which recognizes no other world than this one, distinguishes between the O n e Absolute Idea or Spirit and its manifold varying expression, from lower to higher degrees of reality, in the world of things and men. In some sense there is a radical difference between our actual world, which to common sense seems so real, and the ultimate reality which is not seen or heard. In fact, the idealist is the author of this distinction between ultimate reality and what we might call ordinary everyday reality: between reality and appearance or phenomena. Goods or values, then, goods that cannot lose their goodness, eternal in the heavens—that is the prime mark of idealism, as it is the source of its endurance and power and history. B u t what goods and what values? N o t those of one's material life; they are too insecure. T h o s e , then, of the mind. T h e

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yogi enters the silence, his body inactive, his mind intent on the One that is not this or that man, tree, rock, but everywhere the same in all; not open to any bodily sense, but to mind alone. The Absolute Good dwells in the realm of spirit or mind. T h e Platonic Idea is object of mind alone. The Kantian moral law eschews the goods of sense or personal desire; the pure conception of duty—object of reason alone—that is the real good. So the idealist world-view inevitably becomes more specific; the goods that belong to mind, and mind alone, those are the real goods. And in view of the rather miserable condition of humanity isn't this the inevitable reaction? Isn't it right to call idealism the natural metaphysic of the human mind? Surely it is the natural expression of man's aspiration— that distinguishing mark of humanity we noticed above in Chapter I. When man began to philosophize he had little power over the forces of nature; subject to pestilence, heat, storm, savage beasts and reptiles, where could he seek the good but in another than the physical world, a house not made with hands? What could his view be but an escapist view? For escapism is the first form taken by man's aspiration. Later on, when he has gained some mastery over external nature, he aspires to remold his world, rather than flee from it. So modern idealism has more of the social-ethical or even the material aim; it is not other-worldly, but better-worldly. It stands for the spirit-values in the world, not apart from it. And this flavor of worldliness is characteristic of modern western, particularly American thought; it has the motive of inclusion, the irenic aim, excluding only the exclusive. So idealism in this its latest form claims to include the reality of body as well as that of mind. For this advance Hegel set the pace—and all honor to him! T h e modern idealist does not, like the oriental, call the space-time-body world illusion. But the advance ceases when we ask the idealist what is the ultimate reality. For he is a monist at heart and cannot admit two ultimates. Body is real; yes, but body is a manifestation of mind. Mind is not a manifestation of body. True, also, mind needs body for its expres-

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sion, would be nothing without that expression. Nevertheless, body is not expressed in mind. It is as if mind needed a subordinate to show its own power. But it is the power. It is the spirit that quickeneth. Here the irenic aim disappears, and the kinship with older forms asserts itself. So has grown and matured in one thinker after another that map of the universe we call idealism; and the succession marks the success. It is the metaphysic native to man, the aspiring. T h u s far the genus, the generic traits of idealism, shared alike by its two species. T h e species differ in respect of the ultimate values: for the monist these are in the end one, for the pluralist many. T h e reason for differentiation will soon appear; but for the present we must dwell further on the generic. T h e merit has been brought out, but we shall not understand idealism till we lay bare the defect which goes with that merit —an unnecessary defect, but a natural one, and one which has interfered too often with a proper estimation of the greatness of idealism. And, unfortunately, this defect has blinded some of the idealists as well as their opponents, so that neither have estimated that greatness at its true worth. Its defect.—The idealist is man in his phase of aspiration after some absolute good or goods. Now, aspiration has in it the note of the endless, of mounting to an ever higher degree, of infinity. T h e counterpart phase of stability contains no such motive. A stable balance is still and quiet; it "stays put," seeking no more. It is a completed thing. Aspiration becomes more and more fervent and eager; it must gain its end. T h e more fervent, the less it counts the cost; the more eager it is, the more oblivious to any other aim and need than its own. Here lies its temptation and besetting sin. It tends so easily to discard the method of slow and stable advance, of gradually consolidated gains; its fervor turns into impatience. T h e more it burns, the more likely it is to take a quick, short road that appears to lead upward, the less likely to scrutinize this road for pitfalls and slippery footing. So aspiration, perhaps man's greatest virtue, is uniquely liable to the temptation of reach-

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ing its absolute by some brief formula, some all-compassing declaration covertly assuming its conclusion—the greatest vice in thinking. Thus Anselm in a half-dozen sentences passes from one single idea in a man's mind to the Perfect Being, 2 and Berkeley from human perception to the spirituality of all being. Because man alone of all the creatures we know, aspires to perfection, the idealist declares that perfection is implied in human thinking. And, indeed, if thought were the index of reality, and the only index, there would be some plausibility in the statement. But reality is first of all a practical affair, a power that we find in the experience of acting, which power we have to respect in our pursuit of ends. There is no passing from the nature of thought, as mere thought, to being. Now, the idealist, sensing that Anselm's bridge is too short to span the gulf, tries the method of subjective idealism: being is thought, or perception. This is not so much a short cut as a cutting out; it lightens the idealist's labor at once; he is already at the goal he seeks. What wonder that modern idealism seized on this briefest of formulas "esse is percipi" and thought to prove the spirituality of the whole universe by this little bit of epistemological analysis. So we find recent western idealism using the Berkeleyan argument—enlarged by Kant—as proving its point. It proves the external by delving into the internal. And this turned the attention of the rival types to the epistemological problem, to the study of thinking, of meaning, of language, symbolism, and the like, in order to refute idealism. T h e turn itself was started by idealism, grasping at the epistemological straw. Of course, the rivals came to see that the Berkeleyan argument could not deny external being, and the idealist came to see that the realists could not prove external being, by theoretical argument—hence the deadlock of epistemology and the demand for still more introverted studies, such as semantics. Here all notion of connecting with reality is abandoned. But the blame for the inward turning, the preoccupation with thought—the thinking of 2 Proslogium, tr. by Sidney Deane, Chicago, 1930, chap. ii.

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human beings o n l y — l i e s at the door of idealism. If idealists shudder at the decadence of "logical empiricism," they have only themselves to thank. T u r n i n g away from the real environment to the m i n d of man w h o thinks about the environment, they started a movement that was b o u n d to end in skepticism of metaphysics. T h e reason they have not themselves ended there is that they use other arguments quite irrelevant to an analysis of thought—such as the primacy of values or the rationality of being, No! idealism has erred badly in resting its case on epistemological or linguistic analysis of the processes of human thought. Its strength lies in the evidence for a rational order of the world, the survival of values, and the like. Its success as guide of life (its truth) is witnessed by its o w n survival. A n d when it turns away from reality to thought about reality it has itself implicitly abandoned its own metaphysical aspirations. W h a t idealism of this errant type needs is more of aesthetic insight and less of analytic delving. If it must study language, let it forsake the study of prose and take u p poetry: for poetry "is not a counter language but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily." 3 Even on the theoretical side, let it take up the scientific account of the world to get away from the anthropocentric bias. Let the idealist study geological history or astronomy. It will give him a much enlarged perspective. A n d let h i m recall the words of Confucius, the practical: " T h e W a y of the enlightened man is like a long journey, since it must begin with the near at hand. It is like the ascent of a high mountain, since it must begin with the low ground." 4 The Two Species of

Idealism

Let us now analyze a little further and we shall find idealism developing in more specific ways. T h e earliest idealism (that of India) was experimental in s T . E. Hulme, Speculations, London, 1924, p. 134. * Translated in E. R . Hughes, Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, don, New York, 1942, p. 35.

Lon-

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its spirit. It meant to prove itself by being lived in the life of a saint. And the same is true of Indian idealism today. It was a hard-fought battle to subdue the passions and thereby to experience salvation. It was not a mere logical demonstration that Atman existed or Brahm was omnipresent. On the other hand, an aesthetically gifted race like the Greek, joyously contemplating the beauties of the architecture and the sculpture and the poetry produced by its geniuses, would feel less intensely the miseries of the human lot. And the thinkers of that race, when they came on the scene, would pay regard in their life-plans—their metaphysics—more to structural coherence than to the efficacy in relieving human ills. T r u e , the practical motive could not wholly disappear. Plato did try to remold the State, and he urged the rational control of the passions in the individual. But he did not believe that the ideals he set forth needed proof from the living of them: they were for him sufficiently demonstrated by thought in advance of any practical test. T h e idealist is so enraptured by the vision of the ideals that he tends to forget there is anything else: the Ideas are self-existent, their own excuse and ground. And the contemplative faculty that grasps them is likewise dignified; it of itself and alone gives absolute certainty. Now see the consequences. T h e Ideas or ideals are definitely not of this world. T h e y cannot be seen, touched, tasted. T h e y are not bodies or sensations. N o r do they need to be verified in the living, as in the experience of mystical ecstasy, or even in the satisfactions of an efficient daily life. Of what stuff, then, are they made? If they are quite self-generating, they are to be comprehended by intellect alone. Even vision with the bodily eye, which is the analogue of intellect in sense-life, does not understand; it takes what is given. But intellect deals with proof, logical necessity; and this it holds to be valid of itself apart from experience. We know that 2 and 3 are 5—it is a self-guaranteeing necessity. So we know that the Idea of the Good exists in heaven and that man needs only to climb up to it. But this Idea is for such knowledge-in-advance just an im-

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plicate. For some expert initiated souls, indeed, it may be a direct experience. T h a t is not ruled out. But for most men it must be simply an implicate; and it matters not whether anybody recognizes it. T h e r e will then be a natural tendency for at least some idealists to interpret the highest values which constitute mind or spirit as neither of material nor of psychical stuff. Rather, mind will be described as rationality or logical system. Recall Kant's doctrine of the thinking mind: it is n o verifiable object; it is a presupposition. T h e logical character is ascribed to it by the demands of the contemplating intellect. Intellect loves order—understands things by referring them to an order. W h y did this stone fall off the cliff? Because of the law of gravitation; gravitation is part of the order of nature. A l l explanations refer what is explained to some given order or system of things. So intellect (reason) can work only on the basis of some presupposed system; and the contemplative idealist will declare that system is a presupposition of all rational t h o u g h t — h e n c e we as contemplators, that is, thinkers, must simply postulate the systematic character of the ultimate real — w h i c h is the spirit or mind. T h u s mind becomes not the conscious psychical being of our human experience, but just rational system. Such a view issues forth as Hegelian or monist idealism. It is an extreme result of the theoretical attitude, which takes reason as self-justifying, needing no confirmation, dealing with ultimate values valid of themselves, evidenced in this world only by implication. A n d hereby see how the old negative doctrine of spirit, the doctrine of some Indian mystics and perhaps of all Buddhist sects, has reappeared in modern costume. M i n d is not a specific experience, an object identifiable in the stream of events that make u p our human lives. Neti, neti, not this, not the other; not experience of any sort, but the organic unity of all experiences, itself above the distinction between the conscious and the non-conscious. It is dressed up, however, in the garment of reason, since the modern thinker reveres reason as the instrument of science. But to

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take conscious experience out of mind is only a negative mysticism, even though it be reason that drives us to it. We are not saying the view is wrong; we are only trying to see what the view is. By the same token, however, this is not going to be the only form of idealism. One can't be in the ecstatic beatitude very long. He must return to face and bear the pains of the human lot. T r u e , the monist would insist that the assurance of the Absolute Being does "enable us to endure hardship as good soldiers," 5 and he would point to the nobility of Spinoza's life, the heroism of the slave Epictetus, and the calm outlook of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. A n d so far, so good. T o this extent the hypothesis of idealism does work. It is not an escapist doctrine: it calls for an iron will, a high courage, and a never-flagging optimism. By these fruits it is known and justified. Nevertheless, there are other fruits that nourish man besides power to endure and even to welcome what the given order commands. T h e will of man may do more than steel itself: it may act to change the order of things, to make it minister to a richer human life here and now. Will may be directed not only on one's self but also on external nature. And this acting on external nature demands something more than the assurance of the absolute spirit. It demands specific conduct, the cure of cancer, the construction of better houses, the production of better food. These are specific values, and they call for specific productive action which the monist idealism does not by its theoretical formula provide. T h u s the monist's absolute spirit points to no specific constructive action. T h e map outlines no particular roads leading to one social scheme rather than another, to one form of art rather than another. T o know that whatever we may do is necessary and good gives no information about what we had better do. Some idealists, at any rate, will feel that a value so high as to be indifferent to any specific action of man ceases to be an all-sufficient value. T r u e , the monist assures us that the Absolute is present every5 T h e phrase is Royce's; reference unknown to the present writer.

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where and always and is indifferent to nothing. He is present in the murderer's bullet, as well as in the love of parent for child. But we want to get rid of murderers' bullets, and we want to foster parental love. So we want a principle that gives some clew as to what we should choose. T h e highest principle must reveal itself in definite ways. Light is not visible until it touches a particular body. So will occur a revolt to an idealism of conscious mind, of personal minds that can themselves produce, exhibit, and verify the specific values, values of friendship, pleasure of sense and intellect, aesthetic joy, health. Surely these pluralist idealists are justified in pointing to the conscious personal minds as values in themselves. A n d we see in history that the monist is often followed by the pluralist form. So it was in old India: T h e Vedantist (monist) schools came first, then the pluralist forms. So it was later in the Renaissance; the monist Spinoza (who, we must feel, would have been idealist but for the Cartesian dualism he inherited) was followed by the pluralist Leibniz, and later still, the monist Hegel by the pluralist Lotze, the monist neo-Hegelians of England by the pluraliste Ward and McTaggart and PringlePattison, and the monists Harris, Creighton, Royce in America by the pluraliste Howison, Bowne, Brightman, Knudson, and others of our vigorous personalist school today. T r u e , there is much overlapping here; many monists come after many pluraliste, as the English Bosanquet and Bradley after Lotze. But there is unmistakably a general trend in idealism from monist to pluralist. And it marks a re-emphasis of the practical motive underlying the metaphysical enterprise; for as one reads the writers named above, the conviction forces itself on him that the pluralist feels in the monist program a neglect of certain values actually existing and deeply needing emphasis—the values of the conscious personal life, the finite individual whose name is legion, and the progress-motive for humanity, envisaged by modern "temporalism." If, then, the idealists have split into two factions, is it not

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because the values that each stands for need to be supplemented by the values of the other? For, after all, the pluralisti in their turn seem to have lost something that the monists have. If the monist neglects the call for specific improvement of the human lot, as evidenced in the better lives of conscious persons, probably the personalist also undervalues the need for a supreme spirit presiding over all the world and in it. For the personalist—religious at heart, like all genuine idealists— with his emphasis on the value of the finite individuals, tends to regard even G o d as a finite individual. H e defends the doctrine of a limited Deity. So did Leibniz; so do our personalists today. N o w , if G o d is limited, and if (as all admit) we do not know just where His limits are, then G o d is not quite the universal helper that most religion has stood for. T h e everlasting arms are shortened that they cannot always save. W h o could worship a being that might betray him any minute? Y e t it is quite in keeping that this latest American form of pluralism stands for a finite G o d . Its gaze is so fixed on the finite goods that the value of a perfect being gets out of focus. It does undoubtedly, from a practical point of view, miss that note of the absolutely dependable which monism always stood for, that powerful steadying influence that enables man to retain his courage in the dark hours. Yes, from the practical point of view both n o t e s — t h e conscious finite person and the absolutely perfect—are attested, to a degree, as valid hypotheses for man's conduct of his life. T h e y are just different and complementary. T h e r e is no practical ground here for dissension. O n the contrary, there is strong practical suggestion of both being true. O f the religious value of the monist's notion of Absolute Spirit we have already spoken. B u t also the monist points to the systematic order of nature. W e l l , certainly we have to adapt our behavior to this order, to natural laws. T h e monist's map so far works; it is being tested continually. T r u e , the absolute necessity which he claims for every event and every aspect of reality—this is not tested. A n d that is most interesting, for this which is not experimentally verified is just

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the part of his system that contradicts the pluralist view. It is usually so: it is in their theoretical demands that the systems disagree; we shall see it in a moment. But in any case the monist's notion of system is very largely verified in the domain of natural science. On the other hand, the pluralist is practically justified in respect of the existence of personal minds. W e cannot get on with our fellowmen by treating them as the mere physical behavior of their bodies controlled by nature's order. We have to treat them as if they had private minds, hidden inner experience not directly accessible to our observation. We propose to a man that he subscribe to our pet charity; we assume that he mulls over it and decides of himself. We have to treat him as if he did. It is what we call respecting him, as we do not respect an animal or a tree. No, the hypothesis of a hidden private mind is certainly pragmatically verified in our social conduct. (More of this later when we treat materialism.) It looks as if the instrumentalists who deny it do so from a purely theoretical interest: they want to dodge the theoretical difficulties of the mind-body problem. Well, for the present let this suffice for the truth of both the forms of idealism, so far as their opposing views are concerned. Notice, as we leave them, that they stand, respectively, for the motives of balance and of aspiration. Monism affirms a stable and fixed absolute, integral through all change; pluralism aspires to an ever-better world; God and man, at least, are growing toward perfection. And so we may admit that the yogi or the Buddhist is quite right so far as he is positive. His verified experience of the mystical One may be a very great good indeed. We say only that he is wrong when he condemns all other goods as illusory. In fact, whatever is experienced as good is good so far; whether any farther, is again matter of experimental testing. And just so far as the Absolute One of modern western monist idealism fails to direct man when he comes to a crossroad in life's journey, so far it shows that monist map inadequate. T h a t map, though a guide in many ways, is not a sufficient map of the

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great world. It is right in what it positively reveals, and it is wrong only in denying that there are values in addition to the Absolute One. And conversely of the pluralisms map. As for the theoretical or logical grounds for dissension, we must simply deny them. We cannot say in advance of experience what contradicts what. T h e contemplative attitude does not come to the test of reality armed with a procrustean frame that reality must fit. Whence would it draw one? Contemplation is passive, quiescent, the still gaze upon the still object. T h e clear and distinct, ideal of pure thought, is for the steady view of an unchanging object. So the theoretical attitude takes its realities as precisely what they are given as being. All it can say is: A is A, and A is not-A. As to what A is, it has no means of telling; as to what A may become, it has no means of telling. But when we act on the object we find out what it may become. W e try to lift a grey round stone, and learn that it is heavy; the grey round thing turns out to be also a heavy thing. By experimenting on things we find out new properties that were latent in them and that without acting on the things we should never learn. A n apple turns out to be food; coal turns into a fire. Real objects are thus, for inquiring man, primarily objects of action, not merely of contemplation. And if that is the meaning of reality, then whatever experiment reveals cannot be contradictory. If the pluralist map enables men to adjust themselves to the environment, it is, so far as human tests can go, a true map. If the monist map also enables men to adjust themselves to the world, it is also, as far as human tests can go, a true map. Both are true, and they point to counterpart aspects of the real world. Idealism gives two truths instead of one contradiction. And of course the real problem is not to exalt either at the expense of the other, but to ascertain what this counterpart relation is. That, and that alone, is here the proper task of metaphysics. So far the case for idealism. But even if the above were granted, a greater conflict lies waiting. When the idealist settles his internal troubles and turns to face the outer world, he

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finds an external foe—the materialist. So now to see the case for materialism. Materialism For our purpose it is enough to define materialism as the belief that all reality is in the last analysis physical and physical only. Whatever appears otherwise—notably mental states and processes—is truly but a bodily phenomenon. When the materialist says this, he is facing the idealist. Each is the opposite of the other. They form a mutual antipathy; they belong together. If a philosophy survives long, we said, that indicates its success as a life-plan. Well, materialism dates back almost as far as idealism, and as it has had probably its best defense in our own day, certainly it has survived about as long. Wherein, then, lies its appeal and its workability in life? Note that it was not quite the first type of philosophy, so far as we know; it came after idealism in India. And naturally so; for materialism as a consciously formulated philosophy is not naïve, not the "natural metaphysic of the human mind." However true it may be, it lacks the note of aspiration, the note that first stirs man to philosophize at all. But philosophy could not stay wholly in idealism. And why? Obviously because of idealism's extreme claim: the supreme good is the ultimate real. T h e emphasis on ultimate and the degradation of the apparent world does go against something in the human make-up. It is a simple reflection that the ultimate wouldn't be ultimate unless there were an appearance, a veil of Maya. Isn't the veil a real veil then? If what we see through it is illusion, the veil must be a real being to cause the illusion. Now, the materialist feels this deeply. He recalls men to the world which the idealist would tend to neglect. But this is only half the story. For the materialist, too, is human, and he has his sense of values. And no doubt if he did not sense certain values which the idealist loses sight of, or underrates, he would not persist as a type in

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history. And he does hold up such values, and very necessary values they are: the bodily values, the values we produce from the physical world—food, clothing, warmth, shelter. These values are secured, indeed, only by those who have a lively awareness of fact. And they do pride themselves, too, on that; they condemn the idealist as impractical. Their sense of fact, which is relatively weak in the idealist, opens up to them a group of values; that is the point. T h e materialist, like the idealist, is offering a plan of life directed to the securing of certain values, and his map of reality does point the way to the securing of them. From the Çarvaka to Marxian communism, the labor for the material values is so far justified. This is the positive element in materialism, the reason why it will always make its appeal. It offers specific attainable goods, it offers clear-cut verifiable evidence for the reality of the region wherein those goods dwell. Yes, materialism is, like idealism, justified up to a point. Perhaps that point is not so far along or so high as the one reached by idealism. For the moment, comparisons are odious. But, of course, what angers the idealist is the absoluteness, the universal claim, of the materialist when he would reduce all values and all being to some function or phase of physical being. T h e idealist feels that the materialist thereby underestimates, or even loses, the higher values of morality, benevolence, and so forth. And the materialist in turn feels that the idealist neglects the values on which these must be built—health, moderate wealth, and all the bodily goods. Notice what we said: "on which these must be built." Now, what is built on is a firm base, a stable foundation. It is the note of stability, of balance. Keep your feet on the ground, says the materialist: the solid ground of verified fact. As idealism betokens aspiration, so materialism cherishes that other distinctive human prerogative—balance. There is no aspiration in materialism. As balance is necessary for the free movement of advancing exploration, so are material goods necessary

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for the leisure and strength to think clearly, to judge sanely, to pursue the sciences and arts. So the primal pair of rivals in philosophy follow the lines of man's dual nature. The Opposition

between Idealism

and

Materialism

Now each of these factions is so enthusiastic over its own set of values that it would fain see them ultimate. Wherefore each, not content to wait for practical verification, tries to prove on theoretical grounds that the rival set is false and its alleged realities are self-contradictory. It couldn't convict the other of falsity on practical grounds—so far as the values loved by each are positive and are securable, so far each map is correct. So each faction, with its partisan spirit, is driven to discover some theoretical flaw, usually contradiction, in the opponent. T h e idealist argues that body is a self-contradictory thing; the materialist argues that mind is meaningless and unverifiable except in terms of bodily function. T o illustrate this, let us consider only two typical cases, one from each side. We shall find the error due to the taking of a merely contemplative attitude, neglecting the practical test. Take, for instance, the idealist Leibniz's argument against the reality of body. Bodies, he urged, being infinitely divisible, have no ultimate parts of which they are constituted; hence, they are not constituted at all and are illusory phenomena. Mind, which is not made of parts, alone is real. Note the static view of body here: body is essentially spatial. T h e element of tendency, motion, acceleration, or force is quite overlooked. Naturally so: the point of view is contemplative, and reality is ultimately what it is, what can be seen at a glance, not what it is impelling, leading to, about to be. Leibniz, wishing to destroy matter, eviscerates it into a static Cartesian extension, while to save the mental monads he endows them with force. Matter or body, however, derives its being from its power, from what it does, not from the parts which make it up. T o treat matter as mere extension is already to condemn it—and Leibniz himself had already criticized Descartes's physics for

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having omitted force. But force—ma—is quite as physical as is space, and is not a sum of parts. So we see: the refuter finds the rival view or the category he condemns, self-contradictory because he interprets that view in an exclusive way, a way which deprives it of that hallmark of reality which is its real justification—efficacy. Now for an instance of materialism doing the like sort of thing. Modern materialist definitions of consciousness bear a certain family resemblance: they sound the note of the tentative, the potential, the obstruction of the smooth course of bodily events giving rise to an ambiguous situation with conflicting tendencies. Thought is a plan of action, tentative action; in terms of speech it is subvocal speech. There are several versions of the thesis. Montague locates human consciousness in the potential energy of the synapse, presumably in the motor centers of the cortex; some behaviorists locate it in the throat, others in the response of the organism as a whole, and so forth. But the common element is this: mind is the potentiality of a bodily response. Notice that mind is taken here in the light of activity; it is a forward-looking function or attitude or set. Generally speaking, the older materialist views of mind treated it on the contemplative side—smooth fine atoms, or a brain secretion. T h e more recent views share in the great modern trend toward a dynamic point of view, that trend which has culminated in the process-philosophy of today. Modern materialism says that mind is what mind does. And if this is the whole truth about mind, the case for materialism is strong. But it is not the whole truth. We have emphasized all along the twofold nature of mind: it is both active and contemplative. Men seek to know in order to act. Yes; they also seek to know for the pure delight of contemplation, as Aristotle said once for all. And the present functional materialism, which dwells on the active aspect of consciousness, underemphasizes the static aspect, the quiet awareness, the almost nontemporal beholding which includes in one glance past, present, and perhaps future events. T h a t is why the new views do

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not account for the memory of past experiences. W h e n I rem e m b e r taking the nine o'clock train yesterday morning, I am looking backward; and w h e n memory is true, as it normally is, my m i n d — a present fact and event—somehow connects with a past event. N o w the very essence of a bodily event (let us grant) is that it connects with the f u t u r e — i t is passing on to the future, it has the potency of what it is going to be and the note of futurity; b u t it has no tendency toward any past event. Physical process is in one direction only. Its time moves away from the past, not toward it. But memory, just so far as it is a conscious recall, does not move at all: it is still awareness, just that function w h i c h the functional definition cannot treat. T r u e enough, memory has also its forward-looking aspect. It passes quickly into the stream of active life. I remember that the nine o'clock train I took yesterday was a very slow train and I resolve to take the eight o'clock train next time. Memories are practical influences, and we learn by experience. A n d the behaviorist w o u l d rightly say, we can't understand its full significance, perhaps even its chief significance, for life, apart from its action in the present and the future. B u t it is just as rightly countered that it w o u l d have no significance for action if it didn't first deliver its message to the quietly receptive consciousness. A g a i n , the functionalist will declare that we don't even know whether o u r memories are true or not till we test them by their consequences. A m I dead sure that it was the nine o'clock train I took? Better look at the timetable. T r u e , also; b u t it is equally true that there would be nothing to test unless we first recalled the past event, whether truly or not. A n d once more the functionalist will remind us how much the meaning of a past event depends on the way we now react to it. T a k e the old illustration: Caesar crossed the R u b i c o n . Was it the first step toward modern fascism? Was it on the other hand a call to later m a n k i n d to take the decisive step and dare the fates to do their worst? T h a t depends upon o u r own response or interpretation. A g a i n true. But unless Caesar or someone else remembered that Caesar had crossed the river and wrote

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it down in his journal, and others remembered reading that journal and wrote it down in their histories, there would have been nothing to interpret. And here belongs the point referred to above, about the privacy of mind. Our memories are essentially private. No matter how the brain may be X-rayed or otherwise seen into at the moment when it is remembering some past event, the then brain events are just present events and have in them no pastness, no reference to the past (except, of course, to an interpreting mind that sees those present brain events). Traces of the past in the present are not traces except to an inferring mind. Physically the past is dead and gone—only its effects, in accord with the instituted order of nature, are now alive. T h e dust on a book that shows its age is physically only present dust. So memory (we are, of course, talking of pure, not of rote memory) has nothing physical about it, nothing that can be viewed by another mind than its own. It is not capable of public verification; it is forever private and hidden from the public gaze. Public verification itself depends on the use of personal memories. This is where the personal idealist is right, over against the materialist. And this is why in practical life we have to treat a man as if his deeds originated in a private realm peculiarly his own; in short, as if he were an original responsible agent, not wholly dominated by the order of external physical nature. But it is not merely the practical attitude which respects the privacy of individual minds. Even the contemplative standards of verification suggest it, if they do not prove it. We are accustomed to hear it said that the physical sciences prove their results by public confirmation. An experiment is carried out; other scientists repeat it and get a like result. T h e true, then, is that which is observed by many. And this is often regarded as materialism's strong point. Physical things and events are open to public inspection. Private feelings are not so. Introspection is unreliable. A man may say he feels horror and pain, but if the bodily reactions, the change of pulse rate,

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of breathing, of the various actions of glands, all tested by very refined physical observation on the subject—if these changes do not appear, then we say the subject is deceiving himself. And that is the basis of the materialist psychology, behaviorism. Now, we ask, of what value would be the confirmation by many witnesses unless these were independent? And independence means privacy. Witness A has his own individual observation of the subject's pulse rate; so has witness B; so witness C. If the merely private has no value, how can a sum of merely private experiences have value? No, the publicly confirmable, alleged scientific test of truth rests on the privately experienced. T h e physical sciences do not, as the analytic philosophers (or psychologists) of scientific method do, reject the notion of private mind. On the contrary, they use it. No, the rejection of hidden consciousness is not due to practical motives or to the logic of experimentation. If the modern "naturalist" discards it, that is because of some theoretical postulate that he has taken to heart, some adulation of the social as the only genuine reality. As an example of materialism's exclusive attitude here, notice that Montague, most impartial and synthetic of materialists, has defined consciousness as the negative of energy— not merely potential energy, but anergy, which is physical energy in an opposite phase from what we call the physical. Isn't this about the same as defining mind as the negative of body? Does it not seem like including idealism under materialism as that-which-is-essentially-related-to-materialism-bynegation? This gifted thinker and writer has called himself an "animistic materialist." Materialism gets the noun, animism (consciousness) the adjective. Is this not a beautiful case of a dualist who will have one of the two ultimates supreme and thereby defines the other as related to it by negation? Why should he not equally well reverse the formula and define the physical as the negative of the mental? Yet he does not.

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It is here as with the idealist. The idealist took a narrow one-sided view of the physical, its static or backward aspect, and found it self-contradictory. The materialist takes a narrow, one-sided view of the mental; he sees only its forward side and finds it to be nothing but the physical functions it exhibits on that side. He blots out the side he cannot account for, the private side, and then finds it blotted out. It is characteristic of the philosophical camps; for we shall find them all doing the same thing. It is the temptation of the contemplative life. The thinker seeks and loves some one supreme principle—he can admit no fellow principle. If he discovers one (as he generally does), he subordinates it. T h e materialist knows perfectly well that consciousness is real enough, but he reduces it to a real function or aspect or phase of his primary reality, body. And conversely the idealist. Yes, even if the modern materialist thinks he has got away from the lure of the theoretical—because he treats mind as active process—he has not escaped it. He thinks that because mind has an active aspect it cannot also have a passive one. And note, too, that there was never any need of yielding to this contemplative lure. T h e schools might just as well have opened their minds to evidence and sought truth as much in the rivals as in their own type. No doubt if they had genuinely sought it, they would have found it. No, it is not the intellect which needs discipline; it is the will, the heart, the impartial desire for truth, yes, even truth for its own sake—their own motto. If the heart is not set right, it does not matter how much detailed evidence is amassed, how many or how long the books written, so long as it is done from the exclusive point of view. They think they shall be heard for their much speaking. Even the contemplative attitude need not mislead; inadequate it is, for it has no tests, but just because it has no tests, it has no ground for refuting the rivals. It can only adduce more and more evidence in favor of its own positive conclusions. But in default of genuine open-mindedness, the philosophers

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have always tended to "pass the buck," blaming not their own wills and hearts, but some "faculty" instead—in the early days sense and later reason, as did Kant. Pass now to the later types: scholasticism and process, as we have called them.

Chapter THE TYPES

T

LOGICAL

GENESIS

Three CONTINUED OF

SCHOLASTICISM

HE idealism-materialism issue and the monism-pluralism issue within idealism are the oldest in the history of metaphysics. Had the tale gone no further, metaphysics would have been more respected than it now is, but less worthy of respect. More respected, because there would have been only three parties; and it would seem no greater disgrace to have three parties in metaphysics than to have Republicans, Socialists, and Democrats in a nation. And our own task of reconciliation would be greatly simplified. On the other hand, we should be much worse off without the later types. For these arose largely from reflection on the difficulties of the others, and in this sense they stand on a higher plane. T h e scholastic type which we are now to study, taking its intellectual beginnings from Aristotle, is essentially synthetic. Aristotle set out a world-view which drew on many previous views. It was his method to look over the field of philosophy as well as of nature. In him, more than any other Greek, was the motive of uniting the contributions made by his predecessors. And Plato, though probably recognizing some positive reality in the world of becoming, displayed no interest in that world comparable to that of Aristotle the empirical scientist. T h u s the spirit of synthesis entered the European world. T r u e , it had appeared earlier in India in the Jaina school, reconciling at least in intent, Vedantist and Çarvaka. It is indeed perennial, and typically it is the third system in temporal order; the two opponents must fight before the quarrel is settled. But its fullest, richest development has no doubt bios-

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somed in the scholastic synthetic plant. And that spirit of looking for the truth in both opponents which led to it, probably entered European thought through the mind of Aristotle, synthesizer to a degree of Plato and Democritus. Now the synthetic aim is not merely a combination; it combines by a principle, and this principle being novel, gives new insights into the nature of reality. Being a reflection on the conflicting results of past philosophy, it stands outside the hostile camps. Idealism and materialism were concerned with the same subject matter—the world—but they moved in opposite directions; idealism toward the pole of mind or spirit and materialism toward the pole of the physical. As we saw in drawing the map of the systems, to survey opposite directions along the same line, one must get outside the line; and this means a new dimension introduced, as a point outside a line implies a plane. And we may expect that thought, moving in this higher dimension, will see things not given to the lower, just as a circle or triangle has properties that could not hold of a straight line. So the synthetic view will see the world as not ultimately simple, but ultimately composite; composed, that is, of both mind and body, of both one supreme mind and many lesser finite minds. T h e idealist was concerned to show that body is really mind at bottom; he was not much interested in the enormously rich and diversified behavior of the physical world—only so far as it would reveal the ultimately spiritual character thereof. T o know the physical world for its own sake, he did not particularly care. T h a t is why idealists as a rule have taken little interest in the philosophy of nature and the specific discoveries of physics, astronomy, and biology. And the converse is true of the materialists, though in a lesser degree; for the materialist is historically speaking a revolter against idealism, and he has to study the mind's ways pretty thoroughly; but even then he studies only their bodily expression. But the synthetic thinker will value each of these realms, mind and body, and seek knowledge of each for its own sake. Hence his attitude will be very largely empirical. And the total

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world-view which he seeks will necessarily show the relations between the two realms; it will show a world-order, with mind, so to speak, at one place and body at another, and with their relative positions and their interconnections marked out. He will collect information by observation and inference and systematize what he learns into a metaphysical scheme or worldchart. He will use the sciences for this end. Scholasticism is, or at least means to be, a scientific account. But though at heart a pluralist, his synthetic spirit will tend to recognize the truth of monism, though in such a way as not to deny the ultimate reality of the many. And there is, it would seem, only one way of doing this: the doctrine of creation by a single first cause. T h e world is really many, not a single organism as monist idealism claims; but it owes its whole being to one creator. There is nothing real but God, except what God makes. And God makes the world, not by any logical necessity—for then God and the world would really be one organic unity and pluralism false—but by a free creative act. Theism is the natural synthesis of monism and pluralism. Scholasticism, then, is not only a scientific but also a religious worldview. Thus, in the very nature of things we might expect to arise a system that envisages the highest values—using the practical motive of religion—and the greatest wealth of facts—drawing on the theoretical motive of knowledge for its own sake: at once a theology and a cosmology or chart of the created universe. And for such a view the distinction between ultimate reality and proximate reality or appearance has disappeared. T h e whole world lies before the thinker, a plain where all things rest on the level ground of fact, though some reach a greater height than others: a total intelligible order because created by a perfect mind. T h e problem of the philosopher will be to discern the fundamental relations between things, giving a structural plan. T h e synthetic type will be above all a structural account; if possible, with some key principle pervading the whole scene from one end to the other.

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We said just now that this new point of view provides new insights; for it combines the factions by a principle which is more than their sum. And this principle enables it to include a motive which did not come from Greece, but from the Orient, home of revealed religion. Remember that philosophy originated in religious aspiration in India. At first that aspiration had taken the form of faith in a revelation—the Sacred Books. The motive was practical: faith means confident action, action with certitude of a good result. T h e Greek had quite or almost lost that category; for him reason was all. But the synthetic attitude, once taken, aims toward inclusion, ever larger and larger. T h e theoretical spirit of Greece must be united with the working faith for which oriental religion stood: a faith native to Christianity, born on the western edge of the East, a nonintellectual certainty, in some sense a higher than intellectual certainty. And the scholastic philosophy would synthesize them; and by giving a rational argument to justify faith, as follows. T h e scholastic first proves by logical reasoning (opponents would say, fails to prove, but at any rate means to prove) the existence of God, a perfect being who desires the salvation of man and offers man the means thereto. Now (he continues), while reason is infallible in its own right, /¿«man reason is often imperfectly conducted, and there are truths which from the human level reason cannot discover or prove. Hence, It was necessary for man's salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God, besides philosophical science built up by human reason . . . Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation. Even as regards those truths about God which human reason could have discovered, it was necessary that man should be taught by a divine revelation; because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors.1 ι St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica I, tr. by the Dominican Fathers, London, îgso. Q. I, art. i. Respondeo.

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T h u s was dogma justified by logical argument. A n d furthermore, as to the particular articles of faith, these too, he claims, are justified by reason. N o t that the dogmas of the T r i n i t y , of the Resurrection, and so forth, are proved true by h u m a n reasoning about their particular statements; no man can prove these particular dogmas. B u t the scholastic believes he can prove that the source from which they come, the N e w Testament, is itself divine. For this he draws his evidence from history; the life and death of Jesus, the miracles he performed, the success of the C h u r c h he founded, and so on. N o w , the hostile opponent may insist that this historical argument is not strong enough to prove infallibility. B u t he must at least admit that it is set forth as a rational inference from data furnished by the empirical science of history. W h e t h e r right or wrong, the scholastic is a thoroughgoing rationalist at heart and in intention. A n d by including the faith motive he offers a new sort of synthesis besides the dualistic mind-body doctrine; a synthesis of the practical (religious) motive of salvation with the rational motive of theoretical certainty. H e saw that there is no serious philosophy except the practical concern be taken to heart; for otherwise philosophy w o u l d be an idle speculation, a game, a sparring of wits. T h e moderns w h o have blamed scholasticism for being tied u p with religion do not understand what philosophy is. T h i s second part of the scholastic synthesis, then, restores the practical motive which animated early H i n d u idealism, though restoring it in the guise of a rationally demonstrable and theoretically certain plan. B u t to restore it in that way only, is to provoke sooner or later an equal and opposite reaction to the practical as the supreme and only test. It is like what happened to idealism: the extreme claim that evaporated body into mind led to a reaction that solidified m i n d into body. A n d if scholasticism successfully overcame that first issue, it raised a second issue which w o u l d later show the need of another synthesis: the issue between theoretical certainty and practical testing in life. It is this issue, latent in the scho-

74 T H E TYPES lastic union of reason and faith, which came out into the open in the modern process-metaphysic. But it didn't come for a long time. European thought has been mainly of the contemplative sort. Men looked at the map of the universe which this or that philosopher had drawn, and they did not ask whether it was a workable chart for life's voyage. They asked whether it was true or not. They asked whether it corresponded with the facts. And of course a great deal of evidence can be collected in this way—evidence pointing to this or that chart as a plausible guide, perhaps so plausible that we don't need to test it, but can safely adopt it and go on our way rejoicing. And of course, too, evidence might be found pointing in the opposite direction. It was in this manner that the latent issue was brought into the light of day. The scholastic constructed his chart, slowly and carefully, erasing and rewriting, adding, altering lines here and there, until it became perhaps the fullest and richest ever presented in the history of philosophy. Only after its completion and adoption —in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—did empirical evidence appear which seemed to disagree. Perhaps this evidence was not sound. Perhaps it could be fitted into the chart. T h a t is not our concern now. But it gathered new facts, more and more, until a quite new perspective of reality seemed to be dawning. And this new perspective led eventually to the emphasizing of the practical motive and the deprecation of speculative certainty—precisely the opposite of what the scholastic system had stood for. T h e change came about in the arena of theoretical knowledge, and it led out to the arena of the practical test. How, then? T o answer this we must first have the scholastic system in fuller outline. T h e speculative system of scholasticism concerned itself with the empirically given world and what can be inferred from it. We said above that it had from Aristotle the empirical motive: all knowledge starts from sense impressions of the external world, chiefly visual impressions. And the world is seen

THE TYPES

75

to be manifold and complex, wherefore the result will be a structural account. Now, structure naturally means more or less precise terms. You don't have order without a place for everything and everything in its place. And the implication is that the places be quite distinct, marked off from one another, individuated in clear-cut outline. T h e structural point of view wants firm lines, definite figures, no shading off of one into another, each element as distinct as the bricks or boards of a house. Thus it tends to the category of substance; for a substance is a definite thing or term, an individual entity, changing in externals, perhaps, as a chameleon changes color, but always in its inner nature or essence that particular kind of thing individuated (in the physical world) in that particular body. No confusions here; no turning of one substance into another, even as you could not become me nor I you. T h e universe tends to be divided into "water-tight" compartments; individuals and definite regions of individuals. All this goes with the structural point of view. Here enters, through the door of sense-observation, the doctrine of levels. Levels are by nature exclusive. A dog cannot become a man, nor a plant an animal: there must be barriers that cannot be crossed. And this in turn suggests the fixity trait. Unless an order is fixed, unchanging, it is no order. If bodies fall today, but not tomorrow, there is no law of gravitation to count on. Genuine order means unchangeable behavior for the same things; they must have an identifiable character and ever show it. A diamond must be hard, coal combustible, hydrogen combinable with chlorine univalently. That is the very meaning of order, that there must be laws. And this in turn means causing; law is always a relation of cause and effect. Let go the stone, and it will fall; set a flame to the wood, and it will burn. So much for the world of fact. But what of the good? Remember that the synthetic view has no distinction between ultimate and ordinary truth, between reality and appearance. So the physical world and the living bodies in it, particularly man's body and conscious mind, have their own being and

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their own degrees of good. Good is not restricted to the supreme being. All that exists is good; being as such is good. If the supremely real is, as idealism says, the supreme good, so the other reals which materialism insists upon, are in their own way and degree good. Isn't order good? Isn't the order of nature beautiful to contemplate? And isn't each thing that makes up this order therefore good? Isn't everything therefore good just in so far as it shows its powers: the rocks in their weight and hardness, the trees in their growth and productiveness, the suns in their heat and gravitational pull—all together by their regular law-abiding behavior fulfilling their innate tendencies and capacities in a system that harmonizes them all? No, for this view there is nothing without its share of intrinsic good, the good of playing its part in the world scene by bringing out its latent capacities, showing what it can do. For all performance, so far as it does not hinder some other, is good. As the scholastic puts it, act is good, for it is the fulfillment of potency. Evil and bad is anything that obstructs and deprives, preventing fulfillment: a blight that kills the chestnut tree, a blow that kills or maims a man. So we have now before us a physical universe with a pretty well fixed order of different levels from fullest and richest being such as man to poorest such as the ultimate physical elements. But, as above noted, order means law, and law means causal agency. T h e principle of causality thus appears fundamental. Suggested at first in sense observation, it commends itself at once to reason; nothing can be or happen without a sufficient reason. There must, then, be a cause of all that is; and one cause only, because the world is a single order of stratified levels. And as this cause is the source of all that was or is or will be or ever could possibly be, it must contain in itself all that being could be, fullest possible being, an infinite wealth of content, an energy of maximum intensity. And as all positive being is good, such a First Cause is perfect—"and this we call God," as Aquinas said. So the orderly universe is seen to be the work of a perfect

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77

being—a work which could not, of course, be perfect like its maker, since it lacks the causal efficacy of its maker, but which is, in Scriptural phrase, "very good." And thus is laid the foundation of the religious or practical superstructure noted above. It is a theoretical formulation: it relies on no subsequent practical tests. It is, however, a synthetically-motived theory that we find here: the motive of serial order at bottom. Series from high to low, from cause to effect, but always series, and in fixed grades. And indeed it is a very remarkable fact that the synthetic-theoretic attitude does seem to give a logical basis to man's aspiration for a perfect being, a being who, just because He is first cause and creator, is a being of practical power to whom man may fittingly pray. ITS

ANTITHESIS

AND

ITS

TREATMENT

THEREOF

T h e antithesis of fixed structure is change or process; the physiology of the world contrasted with its anatomy. Now, recall what happened with idealism and materialism. What did idealists do with the physical, the antithesis of mind? T h e y admitted its presence, but gave it only a relative reality. Body, they said, was an aspect, a manifestation, of mind; mind was the real thing, body its expression only, and not ultimately real by itself. T h e idealists claimed to be fair, to include the reality of body, but they reduced it to a lower level and made it dependent, phenomenal, derivative. T h e y made a pretense of synthesis, but were not sincerely synthetic. Likewise the materialists; they reduced mind to a phase or function of certain bodies—living bodies, bodies of men and perhaps the animals. They, too, fell short of a true synthesis. And we find a somewhat similar point of view in scholasticism, in respect of the antithesis of fixed structure, that is, of process and change. T h e scholastic, of course, acknowledges that the real world is full of change. T h e planets revolve ceaselessly about the sun, the breeze is never quite still, plants are always growing, animals moving. And these motions are real enough: they are in no way just appearance, in the older idealistic sense. What then

78

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is their relation to the permanent things making u p the permanent order of the universe? If a plant grows and takes on a new shape, how can it be the same plant? Is the man at fifty, w i t h his matured experience of life, the same as the newborn babe w h o had all yet to learn? As we know, the scholastic answers with the category of substance. A substance is an individual t h i n g — atom, molecule, plant, a n i m a l — w h i c h has a fixed nature, a character of its own never fully expressed at any one time, b u t always, so to speak, ready to be expressed, always latent w h e n not explicit. Y o u w h o have a deeply musical nature are not always playing your piano or singing; you may be driven by poverty to a life of manual labor or a clerkship that allows you no chance to develop your musical capacities. Even so, you are potentially a musician; it is part of your essential nature. So the mature plant has actualized many of the potencies of the seedling, and the adult man those of the infant. T h e substantial form, as they name it, is or contains the potencies w h i c h will or will not become actual, according to circumstances. T h e changes that occur in the life of the plant or man are b u t the passage from potency to act. Potency means liability to change; change is the characteristic of what is potential. T h e inner nature of the substance does not c h a n g e — t h o u g h it may be destroyed—except so far as it passes from potency to act. N o w what is actual is certainly more real than what is only potential; it is the potential fulfilled, or realized. Being real, it has power. T h e mature man can do many more things than the baby can do. H e is effective, productive, causing things to happen, while a mere potency lacks causal efficacy; the mere capacity to be a musician does not make him an actual musician. He has to have the actual piano or violin, the financial means for study, and so forth. In short, what is potential has a lesser degree of being than what is actual; what changes is not yet fully up to its own standard, is, as we say, liable. It has not the self-poise that cannot be overthrown; it is unstable, weak, not full being. Change, then, belongs to a world that has not the full measure of being; it marks a lack, an imper-

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79

fection. It is not of itself a positive reality, not of itself productive. It is subordinate to the permanent, not co-ordinate with it. It has, indeed, an ultimate reality, but what is that ultimate reality? It is the fact of a lesser grade of being. T h a t there are grades below the full being of G o d is the case; ultimately and in the last analysis it is the case. Change is the case; but the changing things are the weak things; and weakness is the case to some degree everywhere, except in God. T h e scholastic type, like the idealistic and materialist, includes its antithesis as a lesser form, not as co-ordinate with the thesis. As regards mind and body, to be sure, it is a genuine dualism. T h e corporeal forms, embodied in primary matter, that make u p oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, are not in any way reducible to aspects or phases or expressions of mind. T h e y are really and irreducibly physical. B u t the bodies are also liable to change; all primary matter is open to the reception of any form, having so great potentiality that it has no existence by itself, and every substantial form is liable to suppression or expression according as external causes give the occasion. In this aspect the scholastic synthesis has not quite the dimensions of a true synthesis. Change, which is so obvious, so pervasive and ubiquitous that the natural man seizes on it as a basal princ i p l e — c h a n g e is not accepted on an equal footing with permanence. GENESIS

OF

PROCESS-TYPE

Here, then, we may expect sooner or later a new departure. W h e r e we find a pair of opposites like these, each answering to a fundamental craving of human nature, we are not surprised to find man the thinker taking now one and now the other as the single ultimate. T h e r e were good historical reasons why the medieval thought got the first innings and emphasized a fixed order. It needed such an order; a life lived in accordance with it would be the best sort of l i f e — t h e life of a well-ordered Christian community in a stable State. Imperial R o m e and contemplative Greece together fixed on the subsequent Eu-

8o

THE

TYPES

rope the life-plan of a hierarchic series. It answered a deeply practical and a deeply theoretical need, and to a high degree it was successful—and still is so for a large group of sincere m e n — a n d is thereby pragmatically verified. B u t man himself was moving. Civilization was passing from east to west; f r o m Asia to Europe, from eastern to western Europe, with A m e r i c a receptive as early as 1492. A n d new conditions must arise, material conditions first, and social conditions later. Also the center of attention must shift, even as the dualism would suggest. W e noted that the scholastic synthesis was nearer to idealism than to materialism. Its main attention was given to the spirit side. Even so, man's attention will shift from the spirit to the b o d y — a n d this did occur in the rise of the experimental physical sciences. A n d these sciences were the first to suggest that the scholastic treatment of motion and change fell short. Change, as Galileo discovered, was a productive principle, not sufficiently described by the category of potency. It was not merely a stage or phase in the development of a substance w h i c h would cease if the substance were wholly actualized. It was a power which under suitable conditions would g o on without end. So said the law of inertia. Yes, it was very natural that the revolt from the overemphasis—so to call i t — o f structure should come through observation of material t h i n g s — these being, as it were, more changing because on the lower levels of being. T h e revolt w o u l d consist, fundamentally, in this new thesis: change is a productive and efficient agent in itself. Reality in the physical universe has an intrinsic principle of creativity, of novelty, of adding new things to the sum of positive being; at least, reality on the levels on which man dwells, the forces of nature, inorganic and living, and man's own productive powers. B u t this revolt is different in kind from the revolt of materialism against idealism. For it has the latter revolt behind it, and it has also the scholastic synthesis behind it. As c o m i n g later, it learns m o r e — o r shall we say, can and ought to learn

THE

TYPES

8 ι

more. It is not just an opposition to a previous view; it is an opposition to two previous views and also to the opposition between them and to the proffered synthesis of them. The plot has thickened much; it has thickened so much, as we are to see, that it has gone into another dimension, a higher dimension, from which the philosopher gains a quite new perspective. Recall the map in Chapter 2, where the corner marking process-metaphysic was lifted a little above the plane. Like scholasticism, the modern revolt finds the conflict between materialism and idealism needless. Now, scholasticism solves the issue by admitting both mind and body real, but finding them in a definite orderly relation, the relation of form to matter. In man, for example, where mind and body together constitute a single individual, the two are not separate agents interacting, as Descartes thought they were. A man's mind isn't one entity and his body another entity. If they were such entities, it would be impossible for either to act on the other. The Cartesian dualism makes mind and body independent substances—and being independent, there is no natural tie between them. But there is a natural tie, as common sense knows. A man's body expresses his mind—it does what he does—he is his body. His body is his mind individuated in "this flesh and these bones." T h e situation is of a certain kind of nature (rational, sensory, and nutritive) embodied in this material group—in primary matter, as they say. For the Cartesian dualism, the relation between mind and body is a disorderly one; each forces something on the other. The light of the lamp forces on me a mental state, perception of color; my intention to write compels my arm and hand to move and pick up a pencil. But in fact the relation of mind and body is pretty well regulated; and the scholastic, seeing this, rejects the Cartesian extreme dualism and, as is his usual way, adopts the via media, a moderate dualism or ordered relation of two different but correlative terms—form and matter. Now, see how the modern process-view treats the same issue. T h e modern view is primarily a revolt against a fixed order,

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intrinsically unchangeable. And so it naturally lays more stress on the discrepancies that we do seem to find between man's mind and his body. Often enough my body does not do what my mind wills. My hand is palsied, my liver sluggish; I cannot help it though I would. So the nonscholastic sees more in the Cartesian dualism. But he cannot go with either idealist or materialist and abolish the dualism. What then? He will seek a point of view admitting it, but in such a way that there is no stark discrepancy between mental and bodily things. And he sees that causal influence between two self-enclosed entities is irrational—as Leibniz saw before him. He feels the scholastic synthesis of form-matter to be just a matter of form—a statement of mutual respect between mind and body that does not account for their too-frequent antagonism. T h e dualism must be a dualism, not of a fixed relation between two uncompromisingly, irreducibly different terms, but permitting a shift, a transition, between them. Only so is it intelligible. If all reality is a becoming rather than a static being, then we have a dualism of process. Mind and body then will almost inevitably be defined as differing in phase or function rather than as fixed entities or substances. Function of what? Well, that is a question the opponents will ask; and the process-view must answer, function of no particular kind of thing, such as mind or body—rather a certain way of behaving of the facts that we experience. When things behave in the ways usual to higher animals and men, they are conscious; in so far as they behave, perhaps, mechanically, they are physical. And since no particular kind of thing can be specified, we must use some very general term, indeed, that applies to both body and mind—such as the term experience, experience, of course, taken in no subjective sense. Now this functional-process point of view is certainly new, and it does avoid the difficulties of causal interaction, and it does deny the compartment-view of dualism and is not exactly a synthesis of idealism and materialism. It finds that mind and body are not terms, but relations. The first three types, all

THE

TYPES

83

alike, treated mind and body as precise terms with fixed meaning and content—terms which could not possibly pass into each other. T h e new view is here liberal. What is in one phase a body is in another phase a mind. My brain is an electrodynamic system—also it is conscious. A mind may be a body, it may become a mere body—as when a man goes to sleep; his body, or a part of it, becomes a mind when he wakes up. T a k e these descriptions as terms, and they are ridiculous, contradictory. Take them as phases, functions, relations, and they have sense. Such is the new way of reconciling opponents. It is a greater, more fundamental change of venue than anything in past history of philosophy. It has transformed not only the systems but also the nature of the very building blocks out of which the systems were built. For terms it has substituted relations. Yes, but even so, we haven't yet brought out the real message, the quite novel and fertile insight which puts the modern type in a so-different category. Change might be the ultimate fact, yet not a very positive thing. A man lives and then dies and is no more. Admit that some changes are self-repeating: uniform motion in a straight line might conceivably go on forever, and if this happened with many bodies and on a large scale, who knows how the present world-order might be distorted? T h e rival views have felt this. T h e y have one and all attacked the process-philosophy, because they feel it is so largely negative: no permanent laws of nature we can count on, no ultimate standards for right conduct, for beauty, even for logic itself. Destructive, they find its message to be. And so it would be if it were just a melting down of terms into relations, of the rigid into the fluent, of reality into passage. But these opponents overlook the empirical spirit of the new view. Having once waked up to the novel discovery of the law of inertia by experimental empirical science, the process-type is stimulated to look for more. It is going to examine the changes it finds going on in the world. It is going to look into the other levels of being above the level of dead inorganic events. Once

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convinced that change is an ultimate principle, not to be condemned, as the ancients condemned it, for a sign of lesser reality, the modern thinker will find this ultimate principle just as deserving of study as the ancients found their mind or their body or their fixed order worthy of study. And that is what happened. On the level of living things, change was found to take on the form of growth. Of course the growth of plants and of animals had long been noticed. But it had also been noticed that this growth never went beyond a certain limit. Oak trees never reached a height of five hundred feet, and they grew more and more slowly until they died. Even trailing vines finally reached a limit beyond which they could not live. And dogs, horses, and men have an end, apparently, to their growth long before they die. And the fixed-order type of metaphysic, observing these limits of growth, inferred that these grades of reality have their definite boundaries, their mature states, beyond which they no longer grow or even change at all except superficially. So the heavy hand of the order-view kept down the possible suggestion that growth, being a characteristic of all living individuals, might apply to the whole stream of life as it goes on in time. T i m e itself, being of the essence of change and destruction, had not seemed a promising thing to study. T h e eternal principles alone merited man's thought. But the new view would regard time as a positive principle and would find the long history of life more interesting even than the grades and levels now existing. Not the development of an individual animal or plant from birth to its settled mature form, but the development of life as a whole through the long range of time, from the earliest known past to the present—that is the new field for the process-view to explore. And doing so, it found that the notion of growth did apply, in a way hitherto unsuspected, to the extended course of life throughout the ages. Life was found to evolve, to increase in total volume and in richness of internal differentiation, from simple beginnings to its present vast reach and complexity. The growth principle, which got snowed under

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85

in the individual, reappeared in race history. It is the large, long-range view, the view that takes time seriously as an ultimate trait of reality, that discovers this. T h e discovery was closed off to a metaphysic that took permanence alone to be the key trait of reality. Thus, as if inevitably, came about the new notion of change; change as growth, as not the destruction of the old, but its preservation, with novelty added. T h i s modern gospel has transformed change from a negative to a positive principle, a productive tendency in nature; itself a new synthesis of permanence and change, at once conservative and radical. Of course, no one claims that this positive principle is the only sort of change. Of course there is all-too-much destructive change going on. And there are obvious present limits to life's capacity for expansion. And many races, orders, genera of animals and plants seem to evolve so little that they are and have remained practically stationary. There is a merely conservative or static tendency in many regions of nature, no doubt; there is mere destruction and loss in many other regions. But the point is, that there is also an expanding, novelty-producing tendency in some parts of the world. And to be sure, we have dealt only with the living, the biological realm. Whereas within this realm there is another, the conscious, in which the principle of cumulative process is even more evident. Memory, which seems to be fundamental there, is the cumulation of past with present experience. Enough, however, if we see the distinctive positive contribution of this present-day revolt, this swing from structure to process. ITS

NEW

PERSPECTIVE

Now see how it opens up a new perspective, a higher dimension from which to view the civil wars of philosophy. If process is an ultimate trait (we don't say the only one) of reality, and particularly of man's mind and history, then shouldn't we expect changes in the history of his reflections on the world? Shouldn't we expect that new aspects of reality would swim

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into his ken, making the later systems fuller and richer than the earlier? And that is what we do find. But more. If the process-thinker is true to his own principle, he will at least guess that the old may be conserved along with the new. He will naturally incline to argue as we did above, with respect to idealism and materialism—to argue that their survival gives a practical witness of their truth—wherefore they cannot be opposed to each other in their positive contributions. For he is committed to the practical test by his emphasis on action and experiment; for him a thing is what it turns out to be when we act on it. And by that same test, he should admit the truth of the structural metaphysic—and seek some way of overcoming the apparent conflict between that and his own. But he must, of course, show specifically that the relation between the opposed pairs—mind-body, structure-process, as these actually exist in the world, is complementary rather than contradictory, or as we shall call it, polar. And that is the empirical inquiry which we shall next take up. T h u s process suggests polarity as its helper on the conservative side; for by polarity the systems are saved from mutual destruction, and process itself is one of the saved systems. And as we go on to work this out in the next two chapters by empirical investigation of mind and body, structure and process as they occur in nature, there will emerge our total thesis: there are two great tendencies or traits of things, namely, (1) they are groups of polars, and (2) they show a principle of increase, and (3) these two are also a case of polarity, even as increase is something in addition to polarity, though there would be no increase without it. For these two are related as are balance and walking in man: balance does not imply walking, but one cannot walk without balance.

Chapter

Four

POLARITY

E

THE

THESIS

VEN if we did no more than accept the five positive types as supplementing one another in an easygoing irenicism, much would be gained for the cause of philosophy. We should have exorcised the devil of perennial refutation, and therewith the inhibitive or evil aspect of the sixth type, irrationalism. We should have gained five plausible working plans or charts of the world; and let each man choose, according to his native personal reaction—his temperament—the chart he probably can use most profitably. Nevertheless, we cannot but feel this unsatisfying. There is no initiative, no virility, in the soft pacifist attitude: no stimulus to further discovery, no suggestion of new insights. What is needed is some positive leading principle; advances are made only with a leading principle, a flag to be followed. But now consider: if these five are true, isn't their relationship true? And more: if there is some one relationship shared in the several couples, isn't that a very central and significant truth, the very principle we need? So we suggested earlier in this book, and our treatment so far indicates the answer: there is such a relationship, and it is what we have called polarity. Our task now is to give the evidence for this; which means to show that mind-body, one-many, order-process are polar opposites. In this chapter we take up the mind-body and the one-many couples (the latter in respect of minds, where alone it has much significance); in the next, the order-process pair. The present book leaves to anyone who is sympathetically inclined, to deal with the relation between irrationalism, so far as positive, and constructive metaphysics.

POLARITY

88

W e are to set forth the salient traits of mind and body; to see how they are related. And first in regard to body. THE

NATURE

OF

PHYSICAL

BEING

Here we must take body pure and simple, so to speak: not mixed with anything else, as perhaps it is in the human body, which has a mind, or even the plant body, which is living. True, mind and life might turn out to be only very complicated bodily mechanisms; but we could not prove it unless we first knew the traits of mere bodily mechanisms that have no life or mind. So we must look to the sciences that deal with inorganic things. A n d of these, physics has unveiled, we all believe, more of the intimate traits of physical being than any other science. What, then, do we learn from physics of the nature of such being? A century or so ago the answer would have been given by the categories of dynamics—what used to be called the mechanical point of view: ultimate particles with inertia, giving one another accelerated motions, each particle in a single position at a given instant, and the accelerations occurring according to rigid law. But it is now generally agreed that this picture applies to molar rather than minute phenomena, to phenomena of the order of size observable to human vision — f r o m which region, in fact, these categories were largely drawn. Minute phenomena within the atom, so far as experimentally verified, are unaccountable in the old terms. T h e category of the ultimate particle disappears. W e must believe "that neither electrons nor positrons are immutable elementary particles, but that by coming into collision they may annihilate each other, with the emission of energy in the form of light-waves; and conversely, that a light wave of high energy can in certain circumstances become the source of a 'pair' (electron + positron). There is experimental evidence for both processes." 1 Further, the category of precise visual shape disappears. » Max Born, Atomic Physics, London, 1935, p. 43.

POLARITY

89

The incongruity of waves and quanta haunted all the earlier theories which we are here reviewing and found its resolution only in the later formalism which is discussed at length in this chapter, a formalism which definitely renounces the attempt of visual characterization and which grants no ultimate significance to the terms "wave" and "particle." 2 Further, the supposition of classical mechanics, based again on vision, that motion must pass continuously if at all from one speed to another and in general the belief in continuity throughout nature now disappears. And finally the belief of the older view that a definite body is in a precise place at a certain time must be given up. These three hypotheses: (1) possibility of an infinitely detailed experience, (2) identity of the elements of calculation with those of observation, (3) sharp prediction of the data of observation, are dismissed in quantum mechanics.® The general principle by which (3) is replaced may be termed the principle of elementary diffuseness.* (Of this a special example is the indeterminacy between position and momentum.) Take, for instance, the notion of a swarm of electrons all moving in the same direction, each electron being a little magnet, with its magnetic moment in a certain direction. From the classical point of view it is possible, by impressing a suitable field of forces, to separate them into two distinct beams, "each containing, in classical parlance, electrons with their magnetic moments oriented in one direction." 5 This interpretation [we are told] is inconsistent with quantum mechanical notions. They require us to think of these two beams as not entirely homogeneous, but as having merely a preponderance of magnetic axes in one direction, with a definite probability assigned to the observation that, in one of these beams of maximum homogeneity, an electron shall be found with its moment at right angles to the aligning field.® 2 Lindsay and Margenau, Foundations Referred to hereafter as LM. 3 Ibid., p. 398. * Ibid.

of Physics, New York, 1936, p. 390. 5 Ibid., p. 400.

« Ibid.

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Is no material thing o r collection of things sharply defined, then? T h e principle of elementary diffuseness answers: none. A definite body, so clearly outlined to our visual sense, is not q u i t e a fact of nature. Even the molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, and so forth, which we infer to exist from our visual observation, are n o t to be defined in terms of sense any farther than we can help. Any object of physical inquiry which, in classical physics, is thought of as an entity as distinct from a mere property, will be termed a physical system. . . . It would be well to strip the classical conceptions as much as possible of their inherent picturesqueness and regard them as abstract characterizations. . . . Whether or not it is necessary to prohibit imagination completely, and to reject all attempts of visualization, it is difficult to say. . . . It seems safe to suppose, however, that the least amount of imaginative impediments is desirable if we wish to proceed most easily, for it may always turn out in the light of later developments that qualities with which the systems are commonly endowed are untenable. We know, for instance, that Anaxagoras imputed color to his atoms. . . . Let us, then, think of a physical system in the most abstract manner possible.7 Again: In quantum mechanics the state of a system is no longer defined by means of a number of variables having an immediate intuitive appeal and recalling exact configurations of constituent parts. In fact, it is not defined in terms of observables at all; it is simply a function in configuration space.8 Again: T h i s abstract definition of states has an effect upon the character of physical laws. T h e latter in general connect states. In classical physics they connected positions and moments at different times. 9 W h a t , then, has b e c o m e of the common-sense view of body? W e used to think a body was made of some sort of stuff in a definite place at a definite time and with precise outlines. Now the stuff seems to b e gone—even the classical mechanics replaced it by mass, measured by ratio of accelerations of unit τ Ibid., p. 401.

*lbid., p. 402.

9

Ibid.

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particles; and if these particles still might have stuff in them, the particles themselves now disappear into probabilities. W e read, "the whole course of events is determined by the laws of probability; to a state in space there corresponds a definite probability, which is given by the d e B r o g l i e wave associated with the state." 10 So we have left, instead of the old ultimate particle, a diffuse something. T h e mechanistic picture, with its clear and distinct primary qualities of shape and size and motion, has gone more or less the way of the secondary qualities. T h o s e secondary qualities turned out to be the impressions of a vast n u m b e r of minute vibrations, too fine to be distinguished by our coarse sense organs, fused into a l u m p effect. So, too, the mechanist world of exactly defined objects, precisely numerable shapes, velocities, and positions, as seen by our gross senses, turns out to be a w o r l d of diffused elements, probabilities of positions, and so forth. O u r senses, too large to observe the fine inner nature of body, gave us a picture on the one hand too confused and on the other too precise. Nature is more precise than secondary qualities indicate, but not so precise as the primary qualities appear to make it. T r u e , there seems to be some difference of o p i n i o n among physicists here. Some w o u l d put the diffuseness in the objective world, and others in the h u m a n mind o n l y — i n its constructions, its postulations about the world. W e outsiders can only take as datum what is furnished by their results, and these results as they stand do not lead beyond the notion of slightly ambiguous elements which w h e n viewed en masse by our coarse senses have the appearance of precisely ordered phenomena. In sum, physical reality is composed of diffuse elements influencing one another's behavior in certain ways, and these elements, being diffuse, are not themselves individuals, b u t are again collections or groups of probabilities. W e have only ever-varying collections, never precise units. Body is that whose nature is always determined by its parts. T r u e , the be10 Max Born, Atomic

Physics, p. 83.

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havior of a body depends on the electric field in w h i c h it moves. But this is no determination by a whole, for the field is in turn determined by the charges. " T h e region about an electric charge where its influence may be detected is called its electric field." 11 In the older mechanistic scheme of dynamics there were ultimate parts, w h i c h behaved always as fixed units and were themselves not composed of parts. T h e y were just very small wholes. T o d a y there are no such fixed units; every u n i t is diffuse. T h i s is, indeed, the whole significance of quantity and measurement, as compared with quality. Explanation by quantity rather than quality proceeds always in the direction of the smaller and finer, f r o m the whole to the part. So for what we may call the spatial aspect of body. As for the temporal aspect, physical being is confined to the short range of the present. T h e past lives not in itself, but only by its present effects. It determines the present to some degree if not wholly, and that is all we need to mean by efficient causation. But in no sense does the future determine the present; that would be final causation, a hypothesis which the physicist believes that he does not need in order to explain his findings, and therefore ignores. T h e s e two fundamental traits of the physical—wholes determined by parts with no ultimate parts, and a present moment which excludes both past and future yet is partly determined by the past—these two traits display the general meaning of physical things in space and time. MENTAL

TRAITS

N o w look at mind. A n d remember, this means: look at what minds do, what processes and states we verify constantly in our daily consciousness, processes and states which no metaphysical type-system denies, even though it might consider them not truly fundamental. A l l acknowledge that minds look before and after; all acknowledge that minds desire or seek some goods for the future. As we saw at the beginning, m e n enjoy contemplation and endeavor or act toward ends; seeing n F. L. Robeson, Physics, New York, 1942, p. 401. Italics not in text.

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and seeking are, perhaps, the two poles of mind. The modern pragmatist who rightly emphasizes the active side of mind, sometimes goes so far as to find all visioning a means to some end, to the solution of some problem. But though life is replete with problems, life isn't all problems. Sometimes we enjoy vision just for its own sake. "Light," said Schopenhauer, "is the most gladsome of all things"—for by light we see. It is the contemplative impulse, an end in itself. It does serve useful purposes, of course. A man who looks at the country before him, enjoying just the view itself, will be better able to find his way. But he still likes to see the landscape, even if he knows he is not going through it. If one were to die the next minute, he would still feel the contemplation of the worldview to be worth while, to make life better and fuller than otherwise. Even the condemned criminal is allowed to choose his last breakfast at pleasure. No, there are at least these two quite distinct traits or processes in mind, and it is not just to the plain facts of everyday experience to treat either as merely a phase of the other. Obviously these two bear a certain analogy to the physical categories of space and time. Contemplation (whether of sense or intellect) is typically of a scene, a panorama, even though a small one, an experience of totality always to some degree. When you concentrate your attention intensely or exclusively on some one thing—looking at a street sign in the twilight to read it—then you are not, strictly speaking, merely contemplating; rather you are trying to solve a problem, to find your way, perhaps. In mere contemplation, attention is enlarged rather than concentrated. You take in, or try to take in, an extended view—be it of the ocean from the masthead, the forest from a hilltop, or the message of the book you have just read when you retrospect upon it. True, man's range of attention is very limited; the eye must rove from one hill or dale to another, and memory of the book read must flit to and fro from chapter to chapter. Even so, he is trying to take all in in one glance. T o some extent, too, he is succeeding. T o some extent

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every man w h o sees, sees an area, a field of vision, never one object alone. Process may be there, but it is a m i n i m u m . T h e typical state is one in which all the parts lie before the comprehensive glance. A n d on the other hand, seeking some good is clearly a temporal process, and we need hardly labor the point: from going to eat one's dinner to planning the f u t u r e course of a professional training, the situation is that of end and means, the end in view only, then the means in being, followed by the end in being. N o w note the contrast over against the analogy. Contemplation, like space, is appropriately and typically timeless; an instantaneous vision of a field. B u t the nontemporal character of spatial coexistence is confined to the present. If there had been no past at all, if the whole world had suddenly sprung into existence, the contemporaneity would be just as actual. T r u e , the present is slightly ambiguous, as we have learned from the special theory of relativity; yet it has its limits in each particular case. But the nontemporal quality of a thinking or visioning mind is quite different. It always involves or contains something of the past. T h e instant glance retains the datum of the just preceding glance. T h e book just read, w e comprehend by reviewing, r u n n i n g over in the m i n d — a n d reviewing is remembering. T h e unity of the scene is secured by recall, always to some extent, of the past and just preceding look. Here lies the contrast. W e noted above, summing u p the results on body, that physical being is wholly present b e i n g — the present, of course, having a somewhat ambiguous extent. Mental being retains and recalls the past. It gains its timelessness through using t i m e — i n memory. T h e opposition is outstanding; the difference .is apparently irreducible. A n d , indeed, the point is an old one. But now see what it means. M i n d , with its memory, securing a comprehensive vision, achieves a unity not known in the physical realm. In that region the parts determine the whole: the elements and their forces are all there is. Mind, in the contemplative phase, is from the beginning, in however slight degree, a totalist: its

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motto is breadth and comprehension. This, too, is an old point; Kant made it in his own way when he spoke of the synthetic unity of apperception. T h e fact is plain enough as everyday experience—every time we look about us in the street or the office we do see the forest for the trees—the whole setting including both focus and margin. T h e visual field looks continuous, and continuity is a mark of wholeness. T h i s marks the comprehensiveness of mind in joining the present with the past. But also, mind in a way joins the present with the future. As the saying goes, it looks before and after. Looking before, or forward, it is more connected with action; it forms a plan in view of what it sees, and this plan is of mental texture, an object of thought for the moment and before action takes place. I see the plank across the bog hole. I remember that planks as thick and tough looking as this is have borne my weight. I determine to trust my weight to the board. Thought is here tentative action, arising in problematic situations—this the instrumentalists have taught us. T r u e , it is also something more, a present anticipation of something to come, of something in the physical world as yet nonexistent. A n d this presentness of the future as a possible or intended event belongs to mind in its contemplative phase as well as on its active side. Even if I do not carry out my intention of walking the plank, it is none the less my present intention, an actual object of thought at the moment. I know what I mean to do, and the knowledge is not wholly, though it is partly, the temporal process of tending or starting to walk. If some former theories of mind have neglected the instrumental aspect of ideas as plans of action, let us not forget in our turn that just because they are plans they comprehend a present situation together with a possible future situation. As in memory the past is synthesized with the present, so in intention the present is synthesized with the possible future. And remember, too, that both of these syntheses normally and usually occur together. In planning, we judge from past experience and the present situation what will be the appropriate response to se-

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cure the future good we want. In fact, the instrumentalist account makes mind more genuinely synthetic than former views, which took mind as primarily a static beholder. For it has broadened our outlook by including not only the reference to past experience—which the idealist has emphasized— but also the reference to future experience. And this is in line with the new notion of process: inclusion of the past along with the added novelties of the future, progressing typically to a richer and richer experience. Normal everyday life, then, with us conscious human beings, is a series of synthetic experiences, uniting a greater or shorter time-stretch in a more or less momentary awareness. T h e significance of conscious mind seems, indeed, to lie just here. T h e conscious mind by this inclusive glance is able to steer itself, to direct its future. And perhaps this should furnish the very definition of mind as contrasted with body. At any rate, see the contrast with body. Mind as synthesis works with wholes, with extensive stretches of events; its phenomena determine their details from these wholes. Relative wholes, of course: man seems always limited to rather short stretches. His memory does not go back many years and in some particular situation of his life he may use but a brief time-span. A long previous life is not necessary for a baby to learn to fear a dog that barked at him five minutes ago. And usually a long life's observation is necessary, or desirable, if one is to judge correctly the motives of one's fellowmen. And still more so, to plan for a distant future, one which will be determined by men yet unborn. But always it is characteristic of mind to view runs of experience, short or long. And this is true, also, as we saw above, in the spatial as in the temporal dimension. Wholes determine parts for mind. It is the message of the Gestalt psychology. And, incidentally, let us add, this is why the precision methods of the physical sciences have given so little result in psychology. But with body it is quite the opposite. There, the parts determine the whole. This seems to

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be the teaching of the physical sciences. T h e behavior of the elements determines the total behavior of a body. Many philosophers of the present day would here interrupt and say, "you have left out the very essence of mind, namely, symbolizing. T o be a mind is to have something mean something else as the spoken word "dog" means a certain animal genus, or the spot of light overhead at night means a star, or the sign QO means the concept of infinity. All reasoning is symbolic in the end, and reasoning is the supreme function of mind." Well, there is good cause for ignoring symbolism here. It is not the normal organ of locomotion for thinking mind that it is supposed to be; it is the lame man's crutch, the artificial instrument constructed by a mind that fails to prehend the real. T r u e enough, we poor human minds have to use this crutch; so much of reality we have to guess at, to infer without verification. But verification itself uses no crutch; for verification, as we have seen, means feeling the force and the power of the rocks, trees, dogs, horses, and fellowmen with whom we have active intercourse. Of these we are aware, these we behold as real, not when we take them as meant or symbolized by the words other men utter or write down, the feelings they cause in our sense organs or brains, not when we take them as implied in the sequence of our ideas about them, but when we feel their pressure upon our actions. Symbolic knowledge belongs alone to a contemplation that has lost or forgotten this genuine verification and tries to grasp reality by some process of inference and implication alone. Inference is indeed an affair of symbols, and as all inference is liable to error, symbolizing is a mark of the mind's failure, a substitute for direct acquaintance, an instrument that may crack or slip or that we may bunglingly misuse. As a category of the merely contemplative attitude, it is a mark of liability to skepticism. And that is why the "logical positivist" and his kind have to restrict their philosophy to the study of symbolism. T h e healthy animal and the active man do not use symbols except

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as cues to a proposed response to the stimulating environment. It is the professional philosopher of western tradition, following the Greeks, w h o takes the merely contemplative attitude as the proper essence of mind, w h o invests the study of symbolism with an undeserved importance. In this connection the words of Plotinus might well apply, if we replace "reasoning" by " s y m b o l i z i n g " : "Reasoning is the act of the soul fallen into perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength; the need of deliberation goes with the less selfsufficing intelligence; craftsmen faced by a difficulty stop to consider; w h e r e there is n o problem their art works on by its o w n forthright power." 12 L e t this, then, conclude the evidence in re mind in its phase of awareness, beholding, contemplation. N o w as to the other phase, the phase of action, process, productivity. T h i s we have already treated, b u t only in so far as it included the aspect of still contemplation. N o w we are to emphasize the aspect of movement, of the acting out of the plan contemplated—in short of the relation b e t w e e n earlier and later stages. T h i s relation is obviously that of end and means. T h e plan is the contemplated means to the desired end. A n d with desire goes the notion of a good or value. T h e good is the desired, so long as it is really felt and acknowledged to be a good: and the desired is felt to be a good. L e t us not here wander off into the old issue whether the end is good because it is desired or desired because it is good. W e are here recording the traits of m i n d as felt and verified and admitted in imprecise and practical h u m a n conscious striving. T h e r e may very well be some ideal goods that we men do not desire in the least; many of the things we do desire are probably not ideal goods at all. W e are now asking only: what is the concrete experience of us men, and how do we feel about the things we desire? A n d the answer is, they are felt to be good, at least when we plan for them: for ordinary everyday life certainly what we desire is felt to be a good and what we feel to be a good (not just 12 The Fourth Ennead,

tr. by Stephen McKenna, London, 1924, p. 29.

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theoretically admit to be) we desire. T h e category of value has entered the lists; our experience of value is born in our desires, even though it may later grow far beyond them. Values are inherent in action, just as facts are intrinsic objects of thought. Action is impossible (in mind, of course) without values, goods sought and evils shunned, just as thought is impossible without its object, fact. Otherwise put, value is given directly in all experience on the dynamic s i d e — it is inherent in the process-aspect of mind; it is, so to speak, mind in process. It is neither prior to being nor derivative from being, for us temporal creatures. It is the end-means situation, the situation of final cause. W e recall that the reason the earlier modern scientists objected to the scholastic final causes was the supposed implication of mind. Final cause is indeed a category of mind, as it is a value-category. T h e contrast to final cause, however, is efficient cause. And this we find characterizing the physical realm. But let us be clear about this business of efficient causes. Epistemologists have sought in vain for some logical proof of them. T h e y have been graveled by the analysis offered by Hume and Kant. Hume pointed out that when we see with the eye one billiard ball hitting another, we see with the eye no necessary connection between impact and rebound. He was, of course, taking only the visual or contemplative view of the matter. And Kant, taking also the contemplative point of view, saw that the one possible way of justifying our belief in necessary connection was to postulate it as an implicate of physical order. (He called the postulate a category of mind.) Now the fact is that everybody does believe in necessary connection between impact and rebound of billiard balls, between the pushing of a man over a cliff and his subsequent fall, between the incidence of a light ray on a mirror and its subsequent reflection, and so on for all of what we call nature's causal laws. And everybody believes so because the belief is forced on him when he acts. Indeed, Hume himself said this, being a commonsense Scotsman. Efficient cause is accepted on practical, not

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primarily on theoretical, grounds. We might have said this in Chapter ι when we stressed the practical attitude as our first source of information about the real world. We saw that there is no merely theoretical demonstration of matters concerning reality. But there is a practical one—and after all, who cares whether it is practical or theoretical so long as we have got it, so long as we cannot avoid the belief in efficient causation? No, we cannot be troubled by our inability to show that the cause logically implies the effect. We know that it has power to bring about the effect. Now, to compare final cause as it appears in mind with efficient cause as it appears in body. Clearly, each is the reverse of the other. I intend to take the noon train; I look at the clock, take a bus to the station, buy a ticket. Here a possible future event dictates the actual present events. The possible controls the actual; the future, the present. So it is in mind, where alone the future has an actual status (though not the status of act). Now I take the train, and it starts and runs along, with its chain of efficient causes. The pressure of a button in the engine, the turning of a lever, is followed in accord with physical laws by the passage of the current and the magnetic attraction that turns the wheels, which turning by the law of inertia, continues until stopped by the external force of friction. Here the actual present determines the possible future. Physically speaking, that future is not at all actual: the train is here, not where it will be, and the potentiality of its future position is not in any way a present observable fact. In mind, it is in a way a present observable fact—we think of the next station where the train will be, and we observe and verify the fact of our thinking. But we do not observe and verify the potentiality of the next stopping place as a physical fact—until we get there. As Montague has well shown,13 there is a converse relation of actual and potential as between body and mind. The control of present by future and of actual by pos13 W. P. Montague, The

ÌVays of Things,

New York, 1940, pp. jRa-^io.

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1ο1

sible characterizes mind: the control of future by present and of possible by actual characterizes body. This reversal of direction between mind as active and body as active is decidedly analogous to the contrast first pointed out between mind and body as things or terms in their static aspect. Mind, we saw, in its contemplative phase, entertains wholes which determine their parts or elements; body is a whole whose traits are determined by their parts. It is a striking resemblance. It is like the difference (long noted) between right and left hands: lay them flat, palms down, on the table and the direction from left thumb to little finger is the reverse of the direction from right thumb to little finger. Let this suffice for the purpose of the outline map we are here constructing. Certainly it needs much filling in. We have not gone into details at all. What of such phases of mind as introspection, selection, intelligence, personality, association, motivation, emotion, sense perception? What of the specific properties of body such as cohesion, elasticity, gravitation, magnetism, electricity? Truly our account is schematic and meager in the extreme. Granted! We are not now arguing that the principle here set forth is absolutely thoroughgoing—still less, exhaustive. We urge only that it is true and fundamental. Of its truth, let the preceding statements be witness. As to its basic character, is it not clear that the traits of mind and body here singled out are outstanding in general significance and importance? For they are the differentiating or diagnostic traits, which do in the last analysis distinguish mental from physical being. Remember the goal: a significant map of the world, a map revealing the main highroads by which we may learn to adjust ourselves to the great environment. Keeping this in mind, we return to the relationship just brought out. Well, it seems natural to call this relationship by the name "polarity." But the word is old, it has been used in the past by some very loose thinkers and thereby gained some discredit, and it certainly needs to be more specifically defined

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than it has been. If it seems to be a rather fundamental character of our world, surely it deserves further examination. DEFINITION

OF

POLARITY

As between Mind and Body So far polarity appears as a relation of opposition, analogous to the north and south poles of a magnet. T h e north pole repels another north pole and attracts a south pole; the south pole attracts a north pole and repels a south pole. Otherwise, so far as is now known, the two are on an even footing—a balanced system, each element equal in force to the other, quite symmetrically related. Polarity certainly includes the note of balance with which we started in Chapter 1. A n d so far as history of this term "polarity" goes, its meaning seems to have been no further developed. But a little examination will show features as yet unrecognized which are of deep import for a progressive metaphysic. Polarity is balance, but it is more; it points toward process, even though it is not itself process. Unlike the poles of a magnet, the mind and body are in many ways not symmetrically related. As the world goes on, one of t h e m — m i n d — t a k e s a more leading rôle, shows more initiative, is productive of more novelty. T h e point has often been made—notably by Bergson; we need not give much detail. Consider the history of a body like the moon, or some uninhabited planet, and compare it with the history of the earth, inhabited by minds. H o w many more changes have occurred on the earth, quite apart from those of geological history, changes even in its physical conformation, such as the altered course of streams, the blasting of rocks, tunneled mountains, pyramids, vast areas of cultivated land, new varieties of plant life produced by breeders. And not just change alone; cumulative change also. Minds remember and leave records, they learn by experience, the experience of other minds and past minds—they store up more and more knowl-

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edge of the ways of nature and of their own ways, too. They modify the environment increasingly. Mind is essentially cumulative. There is nothing in body corresponding to this, at least, in comparable degree. True, we shall in the next chapter see a certain cumulative tendency even in the inorganic realm; but it has no such degree of rapid qualitative productivity. And not only is there more of differentiation and novelty in the realm of mind, there is an initiative, an originality, so to say, not present in the world of mere bodies. The originality is found in the category of final cause. Minds want things which they haven't got, but which they envisage as ends. And as they grow in knowledge, their wants also grow—as a large cell wants more food than a small cell. Want or desire is an instigator of change, not merely of repetition. Man, the aspiring animal, aspires more and more, as the spiral exceeds the closed circle. Asymmetry in respect of the whole-part contrast is evident, too. For we can truly say that mind, even in its static phase, is bigger than body. It reaches back over the past and projects its ends into the future; all that body has is the forces, kinetic and potential, in the present event. Yes, even if mind had no active phase, it would contain more than the physical world contains; it contains the past in its mental manner. And it is aware of many possibles which physical reality does not possess. There is a third trait: co-operation between mind and body. Here the facts are obvious enough to common sense: the constant interplay between the two, the melancholy mood due to a bad liver, the brightness following a few cocktails, the turning of the head in order to see the expected friend—these would be accepted as good evidence in an instant, but for the purely theoretical objections that have grown up around the mind-body problem, like weeds in an otherwise fertile garden. These objections, as we all admit, turn on the logical postulate that, as Spinoza said, cause and effect must have a common nature, wherefore body and mind cannot interact. But, of course, it is the very revolt against this dictation by the con-

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templative mind to reality, telling how reality must behave, that we are here conducting. T h o u g h t is not of itself a power at all; it becomes mighty only when fertilized by the active phase of mind, desire—and desire does not create the world to which it has to adapt its methods. No, we can lay down no dictum that the cause must be like the effect: we can only look to see whether or not they are alike. In the region of bodies alone, they seem to be so; in the embodied minds, they seem not to be so. Taking, then, the well-verified facts of interaction, we do find that mind and body work together. Mind, by its desires, helps body to persist; body, by its nourishment, helps mind to desire more effectively. T h i s is the one fundamental fact about the mind-body situation in man and probably in at least the higher animals. Mind supplies just what body lacks — a foresight that avoids many pitfalls and gets needed goods. Body supplies just what the mind lacks—being physical, it preserves the situation which has been reached, in more or less stable fashion. As we have seen, body—macroscopic b o d y — tends to continue as it is unless acted upon by external forces. T h e registered gains due to mind's initiative are stored up as potential energy in the rather stable system of the living body; as W . B. Cannon has shown, homoeostasis is the body's rule of conduct." Yet in this matter of co-operation there is something more than the magnetic-pole relation: there is a productive energy and fertility, a cycle of events that tends to enlarge itself. A man grows from infancy to manhood; at first the inherited bodily responses do more, perhaps, than the mind to increase the richness of experience, physical growth being involuntary and indifferent to our awareness of it or desire for it; though in fact the conscious desires for food, play, even work are a considerable and a necessary factor. But after bodily maturity is reached, mind plays for a time an increasing part in producing maturity of experience, of knowledge, and foresight. T h e daily round repeats itself, but (up to a point) in cycles that grow 14

W. B. Cannon, The

Wisdom of the Body, New York, 1932.

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larger. Man's experience, efficiency, judgment go on increasing after his physical powers begin to decline. If the successive cycles were superposed, they would form a spiral. But note the words just used: "mind plays for a time an increasing part" and "the daily round . . . (up to a point)." These show another factor at work in our polarity. Co-operation, both as mutual effectiveness and mutual aid, we do observe. But, of course, within decided limits. Mind affects body directly for the better when it chooses proper food, and beneficial exercise. Body helps mind to work better by distributing a sufficient blood supply to the brain. But too often the mind hinders the body's effective working by a wrong choice of food, by neglect of needed exercise, by worry. Also, the body fails to co-operate with the mind, by inherited disease, by accidental sickness, or any other of a hundred physical causes. Body does not always measure up to mind, nor mind measure down to body. T h e positive fact of co-operation is stressed, and rightly stressed, in a number of present-day answers to the mind-body problem; and indeed these theories are largely correct. Such are the scholastic doctrine of mind-body as form-matter, the nearly allied view defended by G. F. Stout of the embodied self, and Hocking's definition of mind as the organization of the body. These views state what is to a high degree the fact, but beyond that they are idealized. In a perfectly wellregulated body-mind, mind would be the form actuating the body's potentialities, the self would be an embodied mind, and the mind would be the organization of the body. But as things are, this ideal co-operative union fails, often enough, to be realized. T h e mind fails to organize the body; the body disorganizes the mind; the body prevents the mind from actuating the physical potentialities; the mind fails to embody its needs and wishes. We might insist that a perfect or ideal arrangement of the mind-body situation would show a complete polarity; but such polarity as we do find falls short of completeness. T h e most we can say is that polarity in its co-operative phase is a verified tendency, and a very powerful one, apparently

POLARITY native to the life of the higher organisms. But there is also another tendency working against it—there is a certain deepseated incompatibility between the mind and the body, deepseated because in the end every higher organism dies. If polarity is a pretty general rule of the real world so far as we know it, it is certainly not the sort of all-commanding rule which too many past systems of metaphysic believed they had discovered. A n d this suggests a needed caution for every philosophy: let no metaphysician claim to have unearthed the one absolute all-consuming principle that dominates every reality, actual or possible. For polarity we can make no such claim. W e affirm only that it is a very widespread phenomenon, fertile and suggestive for discovery and indeed, being polarity, indicating a counter-principle (which in the next chapter we shall see is the principle of process). T h e r e is, however, besides this failure of co-operation between mind and body one more character that must be pointed out, namely, a degree of independence between the two. (Perhaps in fact the deficit just noted is due in part to this independence.) Obviously the laws of physics and chemistry do their work in our living bodies quite independently of our minds. Poisons clog the blood stream, lightning kills. W h e t h e r these and other physical agencies harm or help is, so to speak, to them a matter of complete indifference. Also, it is the case that some of our native desires neither concern the welfare of the body nor work against it, b u t are quite indifferent to it. Surely pure curiosity is one of these: the love of knowledge for its own sake. We do not wish to know more and more only because the knowledge will benefit our health or the health and strength of anyone else. It may turn out to be so helpful, as the study of chemistry has been of great use in giving men better foods—calories, vitamins, and so forth. But the knowledge we gain, of the behavior of nature's order, we feel to be good in itself. T h e man who thanked God that his discovery of a new theorem in mathematics was not of the slightest practical use to anybody, celebrated this independence of

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mind. Probably the like is true of art values, too. Great music may make a better man of me, as salt savors my food and makes it better digested and makes my body stronger. But its value does not wait on this result. D e w e y has rightly emphasized the practical effectiveness of plays, poems, novels, in social reconstruction; we need to be reminded of it. For it shows that what is a good in itself may also be good for its consequences. It points out just what these chapters are trying to insist on: there is no necessary opposition between independence and co-operation. O n l y let us not forget that also there is no completely necessary connection between them. A n d this is the point where the organistic philosophy falls down. Polarity, though partly, yes mainly if you like, an organic connection of two poles, is not wholly so. A g a i n we must beware of falling victims to idealization (as did Schelling, Hegel, and other polarists). T h o s e thinkers, getting hold of this category of systematic unity, were so obsessed by it that they could see nothing else. It is the universal liability of the p h i l o s o p h e r — that is, of the contemplative philosopher w h o has lost the everyday sense of verification in the details of active life. H e will seek one absolutely dominating principle. But if he only carried his reflection a little further he would see that reality has another character besides being object of t h o u g h t — namely, the trait of power; and from this aspect thought is seen to be receptive and empirical. So an empirical survey of this mind-body polarity is showing us a kind of duality not sensed by the classic polarists: a duality of partly independent and largely co-operative units. Indeed, could there be free co-operation without some degree of independence? C o u l d each factor contribute something of its own to the union unless it were something of itself? Is not a voluntary or gratuitous co-operation better than a forced one? Here lies the difference between a democratic and a Nazi philosophy. In the latter, as in a rigid polarity, there is no room for grace. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that this independence

POLARITY is very fundamental. For body and mind are separable, and in the vast majority of actual things so far as we can see, separated. T h e nebulae, the stars and planets, the light rays, ocean, air—these which are innumerably more than all the conscious minds in the world—show no sign of mind within them. Or if the panpsychists declare that there is life and mind there, they show no specific evidence. And even if they were right, such life or mind is so extremely tenuous as to have no verifiable efficacy. On the other hand, is there good evidence of mind apart from body? Our present-day technical philosophers are so averse to the supernatural that a long story would be needed before they could listen impartially to testimony from the Society for Psychical Research. But we may point to the long tradition of mystical experience, surviving as it does today in many intelligent Christians. Surely the mystic's experience is of something, some influential presence guiding his conduct, which as he feels it, is not in any way physical. In sum, polarity means a relation between two opposites, each of partly independent status, asymmetrical and productive because of their co-operation, and also just because each has already a being, power, and efficacy of its own which enables it to contribute something in the co-operation. If polarity did not involve this element of independence, of ultimate duality, it would not have the productive power. For to be independent is to have some quality irreducibly one's own, not in the least derivable from the other. This was in fact foreshadowed in the asymmetry of the two poles, for asymmetry points to an irreducible difference. And just this bit of independence is what enables one of the factors—mind—to proceed ahead of the other, to see new possibilities and better ways of ordering man's earthly life. Through this small inlet enters the note of process or progress; a category not included in polarity, yet complementary to it and thereby forming a new polarity. So far we have treated polarity as found in the mind-body relation only. But our thesis is that the same applies to the

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one-many pair and to the process-order pair. A n d , of course, this remains to be shown; the former (as already stated) in this chapter, and the latter in the next. Indeed, we might have got our definition from either of these pairs; but it was natural to draw it first from the mind-body relation, both because of the seniority of the idealism-materialism issue and because the facts are, so to speak, close at hand and, apart f r o m theoretical preconceptions about causality, rather obvious. Polarity

between

Mind

as System and Mind

as

Plural

T h e one-many issue w i t h i n idealism, we affirm, is a merely human conflict: it is due to an exclusive emphasis u p o n one of two traits of the actual world which are polar opposites in the above sense. T h e keynote of monistic idealism is: reality is one system, a single individual of interlocking and wholly interdependent parts or phases—which is to say, reality is one m i n d or spirit, since system = rationality = mind. T h i s mind is not conscious, as we understand consciousness, for conscious minds as we know them are not organically one with their objects; it is above that level. N o r is it anything apart from this w o r l d of many and changing things; it is the organic unity of all these things, and they are its necessary expression or manifestation. T h e y have no b e i n g apart f r o m it, nor it apart from them. N o r is it ever experienced in its fullness and individuality by any one of us: it is not a datum for us, but an implicate of each and every datum. A n d it alone is reality, over against the "appearances" which are i t s — t o us m e n — m o r e or less dissociated fragments. T h e claim of this monism, we see, is an absolute one, an allor-nothing affair, uncompromising, permitting no other type to combine with it unless as a lesser truth which views the world from some partial and in the end inadequate perspective. Unconditional surrender—then a generous disposal of each type according to its relative merit. W h a t can our dualist-polarist proposal do with this? It will

1 1o

POLARITY

only say to us: "your polarity is no doubt true, but it is already included. For I am not one of a polar couple. I am the couple itself, as one single organic individual." Well, this inevitable answer suggests the inevitable reaction. Polarity, as we have felt obliged to define it, is not included in organic monism. W e found polarity to be a relation of co-operation between asymmetrical opposites, each of which contributes something independently its own. And the reason why we were led to this empirically derived definition was that we started from a primarily practical attitude toward reality. T h e monist, we have seen, does not do so. For him reality is primarily and ultimately object of thought—hence it must be systematic, as thought loves system and order. But, of course, he will exclaim: "isn't philosophy thinking?" And we have answered: "not wholly." Man gets his sense of reality from action, and he learns what is real by action which reveals to him the powers in nature to which he must adjust himself. If you start your philosophy Avith thought alone, you will end with thought alone—and the demands of thought, based on what it loves, will appear to you supreme. But in that case you have never got down to first principles. No, the extreme claim of alldevouring inclusiveness cannot be allowed. It is based on a misunderstanding of what reality means. As such, it is just plain error, and we mark it off the books. On the other hand, we don't follow the unconditionalsurrender method of the monist; we don't declare that his thesis of system is a lower-level truth. It is just as true that there is a great deal of organic unity in the world as that there is polarity in the sense here defended. If we should find that polarity to be an all-inclusive formula (we have not made that claim), even then its inclusiveness would not be of the monistic sort. Even then it would say only: all things belong to some polar couple or other, but they also have a freedom of their own, an aspiration which lets them wander off in novel excursions—finding and doing things which their polarity could

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not predict, but which need not deny its truth. (This last is the note of process, yet to be brought out.) So in asking whether the principles for which the monist and pluralist idealists stand, display a relationship like the one between mind and body, we must consider instances of organic unity and instances of individuality, and both within the sphere of mentality. And clearly the region where such instances are found is the human one; man as a more or less organized social group, yet a group composed of private individuals. Much of the evidence here is so commonplace and imprecise as to seem hardly worthy of respect. It is given only because it appears to be true and significant. Consider man as a socius and as a personal individual with a private hidden conscious mind. (Remember that we argued above against the naturalist's exclusive view of mind which denies it real hiddenness.) Take the four points of the definition of polarity in order. Opposite direction.—Man as socius determines his acts from the point of view of the social order, be it the laws of his nation, the customs of his fellows, the public good as it is prevalently viewed, and so forth. T h e control is from the whole to the part. As individual with his private likes and dislikes, native capacities and spontaneous choices, he radiates an influence— no matter how slight—on the whole social body. Society is here influenced by the individual; the part to some degree controls the whole. We do not argue that either of these is the higher good; only that both are facts. T h e case is analogous to the relation between the individual electron or positron, and the field due to its neighbors. Each element contributes to the field, each is influenced by the field. The reversal of direction is patent. Asymmetry.—In the onward march of man, the obviously important gains are contributed by individual initiative— backed, to be sure, by social approvals to some extent. But mass approval comes later. It is not as a rule the originating factor.

11 2

POLARITY

T h e religious leaders, the military geniuses, scientific discoverers, social organizers—all are examples. In their private minds first arise wishes, dreams of a possible future. Somehow we cannot imagine a group of people sitting together in silence (for discussion is by individuals) and by the mere fact of copresence suddenly sensing all at once an important new truth. No; advance, so far as we know, starts in the hidden regions of the individual consciousness. Co-operation.—This is really too evident to need argument. An example is any discussion between intelligent men if they are open-minded at the time. But a democracy is generally a vast repository of co-operative activities, of mutual influences to and fro, both between groups and between individuals. Independence.—While the dependence of men upon one another in the social milieu is very large, it is far from allembracing. This follows from the privacy of mind. However small that privacy may be—and in our modern so-gregarious American life it tends to diminish, so that the "naturalists" would deny it altogether—however small, there is still a region (though not a still region) where a man at times communes with his own thoughts and feelings and these alone. It is from this region that self-love (a necessity and a good so far) draws its animus: each man wants to preserve his own consciousness —quite as much as his bodily life—unless extreme pain attends it; to preserve it as his own, too. This motive is probably deeper in man than any other, giving rise to self-seeking against altruism when interests of men conflict. In that case the independence turns into interference, which, of course, too often happens. Yet even when there is no opposition there is a degree of independence, as when one enjoys good music alone and also is glad to have others share the enjoyment, while at the same time he enjoys it no less alone. In confirmation of the essential privacy of this impulse toward self-continuation, note that it stems from memory, which is essentially private (as we have seen). For memory is a self-cxperience. My memory of an earthquake is a memory of my having seen an earth-

POLARITY

ι ι 3

quake. I saw the houses shake, and I felt the tremor of the ground on which I stood. This sense of self, originating as a datum in memory, turns into a sense of a reality when the power of this datum shows itself in the force of its tendency to continuation. Here, as always, it is the practical test that witnesses the reality. What is suggested by memory—that the earthquake-experience is in part (the private and hidden or psychical aspect) continuous with the present experience—becomes a tested reality when the impulse toward continuation is found working in that same private aspect. Because the memory is private, the impulse or desire-aspect of it is private too. Normally, everyone wants to preserve some of the memory experiences and so far to preserve his own self—and for that matter, to enlarge it too. One does not, therefore, love himself because he is a member of society; nor does he love other men because they are, as members of society, organic to himself (useful to him). He loves other men because he senses in them a worth in themselves and would help to make that worth greater. That alone is true benevolence. And the self-love that would increase the worth of one's self is the true self-love. By "true" we mean, of course, properly adapted to the forceful tendency toward selfcontinuation and self-enlargement in all men. And equally of course, when these tendencies become antagonistic, so far they become evil. Evil is what works against the preservation and enlargement of the individual, and thus against the polar balance of individual and social life. Evil is that which works against polarity, and as such is not the polar opposite of good. T h e above dwells on the individual's partial independence of his fellows. And as this independence goes with the fact that new and progressive ideas arise in individual minds, we put it first. But there is also independence in the other direction: society goes its way to some degree irrespective of the individual. Popular movements illustrate this. A fashion in dress, a prevailing type of humor—these may go against the grain of some, but what does that matter? Vulgarity overcomes taste. In

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more devastating ways, a people is swayed by a wave of mass emotion—Nazism, Fascism, and so forth—even against the judgment of the individual few. Mob psychology affords the typical case. Not that such independence is always bad. Some mass emotions, such as a slowly rising indignation against a class that would exploit the other citizens, may be quite just. But all these have a momentum which once imparted rolls on blind and deaf to individual foresight and protest. Here is where society as such, as it were an entity by itself, not organized to include individuals—an abstraction, as Hegel would call it—shows itself naked. There is no evidence that it is a conscious person, but it is a powerful force—good when intelligently directed, bad otherwise, and in any case somewhat independent of the individuals that move with different degrees of resistance in its stream. Finally, note that the individual and society show a contrast resembling that of the motives of balance and aspiration. Society is relatively slow and stable: it does not aspire and mark out new reforms as individuals do. Typically, it has more of stability. A well-organized group endures by its organization. A person endures because he desires and seeks to prolong and to better his own life. Let this suffice for relationship between the positive factor in reality, the organic factor, which monist idealism stands for and mistakenly makes too exclusive because too inclusive, and the corresponding factor for which pluralist idealism stands, the irreducible individual conscious self. The question is a large one, and the evidence adduced is far from rigid demonstration. Plausible, yes; furnishing a feasible plan of action for man's conduct, yes. It avoids the extremes of an organic socialism which is unfair to individual enterprise and an individualism too little mindful of social obligations. And it is the elements of asymmetry and partial independence between the two poles, the distinctive mark of the definition of polarity here offered, which give the via-media quality, the ability to

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be fair to the two factors often so bitterly opposed in the theories and practices of men. Incidentally, we remark that this view seems rather close— in spirit, if not in letter—to the scholastic ethics so far as concerned with the natural virtues. And if that is the case, it is what we might expect. For scholasticism is par excellence the philosophy of the via media, of balance, of something not far removed from the above conception of polarity. More of this in the next chapter. True, we have said nothing of the supernatural virtues: we are not here treating of man's relation to God, but only of the world-map drawn from investigation of the creatures. We hope on another occasion to make up this deficit. Look now at the idealism-materialism issue summarily, and see how the rôles are shifting. Idealism and materialism defend polar opposites; within idealism, monist and pluralist do likewise. Within idealism, the two types emphasize, respectively, the motives of a stable organized society and of the individual's aspiration for new and better modes of life. And idealism as a whole is the philosophy of aspiration as over against materialism, the philosophy of balance. But now scholasticism, synthesizing these polars, becomes a new philosophy of balance, and process a new philosophy of aspiration. For scholasticism is the via media, the golden mean, the steady view of a steady universe of fixed outline and structure. And process envisages ever a fuller and better world. T h e dualism of scholasticism gives it balance, as the calmly gazing man stands still on two feet—a dualism itself based on a prior union of balance and aspiration, giving a balance as it were in a higher dimension. Process, sensing the need of a new aspiration in this dimension, finds it in the inclusive change, change in a dimension above the old kinesis which gained its future only by loss of its past. Can this new and higher balance-aspiration couple be shown to reveal a new polarity, verified in the cosmos so far as we know it? That is the problem of the next chapter.

Chapter

Five

P O L A R I T Y IN PROCESS, OR, POLARITY PROCEEDING THE

L

PROBLEM:

POLARITY

STRUCTURE

AND

BETWEEN

FIXED

PROCESS

ET US repeat the caution given in Chapter 4: the evidence here presented is too scanty to claim anything like ^ d e m o n s t r a t i v e force. For that, if it were possible, a large volume not within the scope of this work would be needed. B u t in any case n o metaphysical scheme should or could claim a rigid proof such as is (perhaps) to be had in an abstract well-defined realm of possibles like the materia mathematica. Metaphysics deals with reality, and (we must often reiterate) reality is a practical thing, verified primarily as object of action. Metaphysics is a plan of action with respect to the universe at large so far as k n o w n to us, and at best it is a very plausible plan constructed in accord with specific evidence drawn from all available sources. And, of course, as w e said at the beginning, it is man's duty to form such a plan, so far as his circumstances permit. Plausibility, suggestiveness, fertility for future discovery—these we do affirm of the worldmap here offered. W e do believe that a favorably disposed thinker could, if he tried, find m u c h further evidence for it than we have been able to collect. W e believe this to be as true as the counter-assertion: an unfavorably disposed thinker can easily show that we have not proved our contentions. A plausible trial-and-error m a p — t h i s is the utmost man can provide. B u t at least the present chapter does base its conclusions to a large extent on specific acknowledged facts—at any rate tries, however inadequately, to do so. It draws no sharp line between

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philosophy and the sciences and the verities of daily living; these are the food of philosophy which it must digest and make into its own bodily substance. A n d if it fails to digest them, it will remain but a skinny outline, thin-blooded, alien in spirit to the concrete world in which it has to live; yes, even though true so far as it goes, it has not the strength to go very far. W h a t a metaphysic needs to give it a substantial body is just those specific traits of reality w h i c h cannot be spun out of the general presuppositions of thought. N o w , to be sure, the type scholasticism has done this more than any of the other types; and to its undying credit. W h i c h is why we place it so high and feel the need of showing its truth so far as we may to those w h o devoutly follow in the camp of its opponent, process-philosophy. A n d equally the truth of the latter, as being the latest reflection on the whole situation. H o w e v e r misdirected our pursuit of it, the empiricalpractical method that builds on specific acknowledged traits of reality—as the motto heading these chapters announces—this must be the guide of any philosophy. T o the problem, then. A n d first a bit of orientation. So far we have brought out the polar relation between m i n d and body. In the fullest example we know, namely, man, they typically form a co-operative union, with mind more in the initiative phase, the factor of aspiration, and body more of the needed stable basis, the factor of balance. But the polarity is not quite organic. Each factor is somewhat independent of the other, following its o w n tendencies, even sometimes existing apart from the o t h e r — i n man, when asleep or dead; in the inorganic world, always. In fact, this independence allows m i n d to go ahead "on its o w n , " to add its gratuitous contributions, enlarging the range of the body's efficacy, as when man's knowledge adapts him better to nature. But there is also more than independence; there is interference. Even in man, where mind and body are to a high degree organic to each other, there is no small opposition between them. Man's eagerness to learn keeps h i m awake when he should sleep; his frail body,

ι 18

POLARITY

IN

PROCESS

with its pains, distracts his attention from the higher things, or his too healthy body, burning for action, will not let him meditate on those things. Polarity, then, is not the one single all-sufficing world formula. Beside it, there is something that frustrates it, something evil. And here, as we are to see, is where process comes into the scheme. For process is nature's great remedy, the healing potion supplementing the imperfections that mar the polar order, the hope and lure of the future and the basis of a working confidence in progress. It is the office of the processprinciple to remove the clash and conflict beUveen the polar opposites, restoring their energy for the free variation they should have unmolested. And this free variation means more novelty, ministering in turn to the phase of process; even as in walking the loss of balance or variation from the perpendicular is restored by the forward step and marks advance. Process comes in to help out polarity, and in so doing helps itself also. And now we are to see that this holds with respect to the world order, the fixed hierarchical structure proclaimed by scholasticism, and the never-ceasing change within that world order upon which the process-philosophy stands. W e are to see that these two type-systems are only emphasizing opposite aspects, complementary phases, of the same facts. Those aspects or phases are themselves polars, in the sense above defined. T h i s is fairly easy to see in respect of ordinary events in nature that change back and forth in a cyclical manner—as a planet around its sun, air blowing back and forth as the wind varies, bodies lifted and again falling, atoms combining into molecules, and molecules breaking up into atoms. It is not so easy to see as regards things that grow indefinitely, such as man's knowledge and, at the other extreme, entropy. For the changes in the world are of these two sorts, reversible and irreversible, cyclical and incremental; and the note of incremental change, which is the unique discovery of modern process, does at first seem to clash rather fundamentally with the note of a fixed and permanent compartment-universe. But

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the clew to resolving this discord into a harmony will be found in the simpler case. With that we begin. CYCLICAL

CHANGES

In reversible changes we obviously find original forms or structures restored; indeed, this is tautology. When one atom of H and another atom of H join an atom of O to form a water molecule, the atoms of H (or the atom of O) might seem to have passed away, lost their identity. But they can be recaptured by chemical analysis. There is, then, something in the H 2 0 that makes possible the reappearance of the H. H is potentially contained in the water. It does not entirely pass out. The case is like that of potential energy, as in gravitation. A body lifted high up and held there has so far no kinetic, but only potential energy; but the energy is there as a verifiable pressure on the supporter. In scholastic phrase, the H is virtually, but not actually, present in the water. Such instances show how it is possible for a substance to remain in a sense permanent even while passing over into or being supplanted by another substance. And of course nature is full of these cases. Chemical elements combine and are broken up; plants use up energy in forming their own substance, which again provides energy to continue the vital cycle; animals do likewise in obtaining their supply of potential energy. Matter, perhaps, is transformed into radiation in the stars; cosmic rays from interstellar space seem to turn into matter—a great inorganic cycle. And if these cycle-processes seem to be inherent in the rays and the bodies, inorganic and living alike, it seems to be a pervasive principle in nature to display permanence through and by means of change. In fact, a cycle here is or means a co-operation of these two. So far from being inconsistent, these opposites work together in mutual support. Surely there is here no conflict between constant change and constant substantial form. On the contrary, the change is of such a nature as to reconstitute the original form. The two opposites co-operate: one criterion of polarity.

12O

P O L A R I T Y IN

PROCESS

See, then, that the scholastic account of change is so far quite true. An individual substance—say a molecule of salt (NaCl) —changes in its accidents, while its substantial form and prime matter remain unchanged as long as the substance lasts. T h e salt has the same chemical properties (valency, molecular weight)—due to the intrinsic nature of NaCl, its essence or substantial form—from beginning to end, while the salt may become damp or dry, may savor our meat, or what not. Accidents change; substantial form endures. But what is this form? It is the source of the essential properties, the potentialities that may develop, the liabilities to change; it is never sensed, but only inferred. It is a name registering the (to us men) very important fact that salt may be expected to behave in very definite ways. It is the registration of our knowledge, our scientific certainty, of the characteristic traits of the salt. Hidden from sense it is, because sense sees only the traits, not the practical certainty of their appearance. Entity it is, on good pragmatic grounds; because men find it indispensable to dignify with a special name this principle of persisting characteristic traits; they term it substance. Scholasticism is a termphilosophy. Apart from its manifestations in the changing accidents the substantial form certainly is not—rather, it is the inner spring and source of those accidents and of their hanging together, tending always to express itself in them. Substantial form includes in one nature all the changes that may happen to the salt, all the capacities that may come out of it. Hence there is no contradiction in the permanent form undergoing change. It is, so to speak, the formula for all the changes, analogous to the equation of a curve, which equation is no observable shape, yet contains by implication all the points through which the curve will pass and all the shapes it will display. And let no one say that the category substance is of no use as an illuminating factor. T h e cynical fiction of the doctor who would explain the effect of opium by a soporific power has no bearing on the question. Substance is not an explanation; it

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is a true description. We of today realize that the natural scientist no more explains nature's ways than does the substantialist. He only gives more detail. By measuring minutely, he discovers small discrepancies and thereby unearths many properties not open to inexact everyday vision. But he no more accounts for the sleep-effect of opium by discovering the numerous stages between the inhaling of smoke and diminished blood supply to the brain than he accounts for the fall of a body by finding out just where it was at each half-second of its descent. He simply gives more information than the older formula gives. But that does not make the latter either false or useless. Measurement is no magic wand of truth; it is but the attempt to discover more detail. Useful indeedl But quantity is no truer than quality. Yes, substance records a genuine fact, the fact of regular behavior; and its usefulness lies in emphasizing that fact. T h e scholastic is, on empirical-practical grounds, irrefutable. Rather, it is the modern critic (here the process-philosopher) who is the sinner. In fact, this is one of those silly bickerings that have played so large a part in the history of philosophy and witness, not man's logical acumen, but his obstinacy. Well, this shows us that the two categories, substance and function, record the same facts, but, like mind and body, work in opposite directions. Substance takes the facts of a body's behavior as a total unit; quantitative experiment takes them as distinct elements in a continued process. And the opposite directions are even more evident in the contrast between final and efficient cause. Substance carries with it the category of entelechy, or final cause. T h e mechanistic account of nature does the same; for it finds the effect necessarily following the cause, that is, logically speaking, present all through (το π ψ civai) from the beginning. Final cause simply reads the series in the reverse direction: the end is here the cause. Efficient cause, the process-category, makes the beginning the cause. Both view the same facts, but in opposite directions. That, we recall, is another criterion of polarity.

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Furthermore, their relation is asymmetrical. T h e changeaspect contributes more information, even though it is no truer; it is more fertile for discovery. It represents the restless search for more and more d e u i l , the factor of aspiration, the romance of science. Permanence, the cyclical aspect, is the guarantee to man of safe prediction, of fixed laws of nature he can count on; it is the balance motive, giving man a firm and confident standing on the solid ground of natural law. B u t aspiration takes a step beyond balance, and here lies the asymmetry. A s to the independence: do not changes sometimes occur to a substance which no natural law will account for? Here we pass beyond the mechanistic situation, for such changes w o u l d be matter of chance. Is there evidence for chance? T h e question will be answered w h e n we come to the irreversible phenomena; for these are the region where chance appears. So far, then, with the reservation that we have not yet shown the independence-criterion, the opposition of the two types w o u l d seem to give way to a polarity relation, in respect, that is, of nature's cyclical processes. B u t we haven't quite probed to the bottom of the conflict. Let us recall some things we learned in Chapter 3, and they will show that we have not. A n d in showing it, they will also show that the conflict can be fully resolved only in the region of the irreversible processes of nature. For the scholastic, we learned, each substance has its potencies. Yes, but they are definitely limited. N o rock can become a tree; no sheep a man; no man an angel. Potency is limited by substantial form; substantial form dictates the limits, and potency has a lesser dignity and reality. For process, on the other hand, potency passes such a limit, at least in the higher regions. A rock may not become a tree, but a sheep might in the long ages evolve into a man. Potency is a positive tendency, passing the limits of the particular substantial form. It is the same old question of primacy here. T h e idealist admitted the b e i n g of material things, but insisted that mind was primary;

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and the materialist, conversely. T h e substantialist makes potency secondary; the functionalist makes form secondary. Each is the other reversed, indeed; the directions are opposite. B u t the two schools find them opposed, contradictory. Obviously, this conflict brings us to the irreversible changes. For an irreversible change does not restore the original situation; how, then, can there be irreversible process without destruction of the old? O r , to put it from the angle of substance, how can a fixed definite formula include more than itself? T h e answer is suggested by those very changes themselves, as they occur in nature: in the inorganic field, as well as the field of living things. T o forestall it for clearness' sake: these processes will be seen to have the incremental character which joins novelty to permanence—retention of the old, undiminished, plus something new, and again, retention of these plus something more of ne\v, and so forth. T h e permanent contributes to growth, and growth increases the store of permanent things. T h i s mutual contribution or polarity, which at the same time is more than mere polarity, is the keynote. It is the inclusive and progressive attitude w h i c h is the very principle of modern process. IRREVERSIBLE

CHANGES

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WORLD

Let us then look at the irreversible processes of nature. A n d we begin with the inorganic realm. It will be useful first of all to note how men came to discover the noncyclical phenomena; it will help us to realize their significance in nature. T h e mechanical scheme, with its reversible changes, was in the main drawn from observation of things open to unaided h u m a n vision; bodies whose size was of the order of the stones, trees, mountains, even the earth itself and the planets. Falling bodies, colliding billiard balls, these were the type-events on which the scheme was modeled. B u t the laws governing these events had to be discovered by experiment. Nature rarely, if ever, shows a single law operating alone. N o body on earth falls

124 P O L A R I T Y IN P R O C E S S by the law of gravity alone; always the resistance of the air interferes. T o verify a law, remove the interference; let the feather and the stone fall together in the vacuum of an air pump. But again, to prove the law, the interference must be wholly removed; no jot or tittle must remain. "Exactness" is the word; and this implies measurement. It was inevitable that experiment enthrone the category of quantity with its ideal of precision. But the more precise our measurements, the more we see that there are always minute discrepancies which must be accounted for. Once on the road of precision, we begin an endless search for the minute and the ever-more minute, till we enter the region of corpuscles whose size is of an order far below that of the region where we started: the atoms, electrons, positrons, photons. And in this region new types of events and things occur, new laws hold, the clean-cut scheme of dynamics no longer suffices. It was the very essence of the mechanist method that it should lead beyond itself; a striking example, indeed, of irreversible sequence in respect of human knowledge. So far toward the microphenomena, as we may call them. Equally the original mechanist scheme leads in the opposite direction, to the region of the macrophenomena, so to say. Experiment on the larger things—earth, planets, stars—we cannot; as also we cannot experiment on the more serious human values. True, a doctor may give his own life for science, testing the results of some new drug; but this cannot be done on a large scale. But human ingenuity now experiments on its own vision by joining it to the lens of the telescope and gains a larger view. And as the knowledge of the properties of the lens became more minute, the human eye gained greater and greater power. The great spiral nebulae were discovered, island universes at distances apart of the order of millions of lightyears. And as we shall see, in this new region, about as much greater than our native environment of sense-observed things as the other is smaller, there is evidence also of phenomena not wholly fitting the simple mechanical scheme.

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Yet that scheme long remained firmly seated, true to its own law of inertia—roughly speaking, up to the twentieth century. And if it were correct, there would be no genuine process in the inorganic realm. In the science of dynamics, all sequences are, at least theoretically, reversible. And,it was this dynamical account which Bergson, pioneer of process, had in mind when he declared the world of inorganic matter to be essentially static. Only after the turn of the century was there sufficient evidence of irreversible development and a one-way time in the lifeless. Look now at the evidence drawn from the microphenomena. Remember, we just noted how the ideal of precision leads to the revelation of the imprecision of nature. Minute events always deviate from exact law. T h e scientist came to study these minute deviations; to frame hypotheses as to their source. And here came forth a notion quite opposed to the rigorous determinism of the mechanist, namely, the notion of probability or chance. This is a quite modern notion, even as process is a modern notion. In fact, the two belong together. For modern chance does not, like the old notion of chance, mean only that anything may happen. It does not mean that a billiard ball left alone on a table is just as likely to fly up as to stay still. That is the wholly negative notion of indétermination. And it refers only to single events. T h e modern notion, the notion used in the physical sciences, applies to a whole class of events also. It states that if a certain type of event is repeated indefinitely, the elementary events that compose it will occur with a fairly equal frequency. If we toss one thousand coins a very great number of times, each particular coin will come down heads about as often as it comes down tails. That all should be heads at once is plainly a rather rare occurrence; but it will happen if we try long enough. That there should fall somewhere around five hundred heads and five hundred tails at once will be a very frequent event, for it can happen in so many different ways: coin A might be head and Β tail, and C head and D tail, and so on, or coin A might be

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tail and Β head, and C tail and D head, and so on, and so on. Where all elementary possibles occur with equal frequency, some combinations of possibles are bound to be much more frequent than others. And these are the ones that approximate an even distribution. As the number of tosses grows, the nearer on the whole does the total result approach an even distribution. And yet it does not approach such a distribution in any regular way. See, then, where the modern meaning of chance differs from the older and quite negative notion. For the older notion, anything could happen at any time; as the number of tosses increased, there might just as well be a gradual increase in the number of heads, or an increase in the number of tails, or a trend toward three times as many heads as tails, or any proportion you please. T h e older notion was wholly negative. T h e modern notion is of a positive tendency, a tendency toward equal balance of all possibles; and that means a gradual predominance of cases of even distribution. It is in this respect a temporal notion; as time goes on, even distribution comes nearer. T h e more cases occur, the further away we are from the uneven distribution that often appears in any small number of instances. Gradually every possible, every combination of possibles, has its opportunity and avails itself of that opportunity by appearing somewhere near the number of times allotted to it. If we could apply human terms here, we might describe the situation as a democratic one: equal opportunity to all possibles, all candidates for existence. But the point to dwell on now is the temporal application of the category of chance. True, an indefinitely great number of coins tossed all at once would presumably verify the even distribution. We do not deny that chance holds also of simultaneous events. Enough that it does apply to sequences; for these are what we are now studying. And here chance indicates a one-way affair, an irreversible process in nature. And it is so, precisely because the latest results of the series include the earlier: it is the total, and the total only, that can be counted on to display the fact of even distribution. If we may call this tendency a law, it is a

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law of increase; it guarantees an opportunity for every kind of fact that the situation permits, as time goes on. In the case of the coins, the kind of fact is narrowly limited to head and tail and permutations and combinations thereof. But in other regions where chance has been found to apply, the kinds of fact permitted are more various. For instance, in the kinetic theory of gases, each molecule or atom has many possible directions to move in and many degrees of velocity open to it. But given a very large number of these molecules or atoms, and a sufficiently long time, every direction and velocity will be realized. T h e meaning of chance in the modern sense, as applying to sequences, is then: a tendency toward realizing gradually, more and more as time goes on, all the possibilities germane to a given situation. It reveals itself as an incremental tendency, a principle of plenitude, or progress toward maximum fullness of being, in the region concerned. Naturally this does not mean that a single toss of many coins, just because it comes late in a long series of tosses, will show a more nearly even distribution of heads and tails than any or even many of the earlier tosses showed. T h e former tosses are past and gone, and the particular distributions that occurred in each are no longer preserved. T h e incremental tendency toward maximum realization applies to later cases in the series only in so far as the earlier cases are preserved. Often in nature they are so preserved—for instance, in radiation of heat between two bodies in a closed system, where no heat energy is lost. It is such cases to which we are referring in the preceding paragraph. As is well known today, the new category of chance applies to many, many sorts of things. Of course it applies wherever the statistical method is found useful for prediction—and this includes phenomena of life and mind—actuarial curves, averages in height of men, and so forth almost ad infinitum—but our interest is now in the inorganic. There it is believed to hold of such events as the formation of molecules out of atoms or other molecules, radioactive decay, motion of electrons in

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a current, quantum phenomena, heat conduction and radiation, and other processes involving magnitudes of an order far below that of observable bodies. Now consider for a moment the unique property of radiation. Radiation of heat (in a closed system) tends toward a maximum of unavailable energy, a state in which potential differences between parts of the system have disappeared and as a consequence no changes occur. There is every evidence of such a tendency in nature, and it is a statistical phenomenon. T h e law states that as time goes on and energy is radiated back and forth from all parts of a closed system, the number of instances where radiation given off is equal to radiation received becomes greater and greater. The interest of this special case lies in its relation to the macrocosm. The velocity of radiation is the maximum velocity—so great as to pass in a definitely measurable time from one end of the physical universe to the other, so to speak. No body is capable of such a feat. Hence radiation is a recognizable factor in the macrocosm; and if it shows an irreversible process, so perhaps does the universe at large. Let us then betake ourselves to this grandest of all panoramas, the macrocosm disclosed by astronomy. What is the structure here, and what are the trends? The macrocosm is a collection of widely spaced nebulae— most, but not all, of spiral form. They range, in fact, from globular through ellipsoid to the apparently unwinding spiral. All seem to be rotating and so far separated as to have minimum gravitation even between the nearest neighbors. Hence the common name "island universes." "Nebular distribution over the sky is revealed as uniform, or isotropic (the same in all directions)." 1 Of this collection our galaxy is one member, though it is associated with two others, the Magellanic clouds. Now, all these nebulae, naturally, vary considerably in size and composition: some are rather closely grouped in (relatively) small clusters, others single. But on the whole there is a strong ι E. Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae,

New Haven, 1936, p. 50.

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family resemblance between them, and the individual differences vary about a certain average. " T h e nebulae are scattered at average intervals of the order of two million light-years or perhaps two hundred times the mean diameters. T h e pattern might be represented by tennis balls fifty feet apart." 2 Note particularly this rather uniform distribution; it suggests that chance—chance in the modern sense—may be here at work. The realm of the nebulae, or at least the portion that has been explored, thus appears as a vast region of space in which comparable systems are uniformly distributed. T h e scale of nebular distances is known. Intrinsic luminosities have been discussed at considerable length, but the results may be summarized for convenience. The nebulae average about eighty-five million times as bright as the sun. The brightest are about ten times brighter than the average and the faintest are about ten times fainter, but about half the nebulae are within the narrow range from one half to twice the average luminosity of them all.® Also the nebulae "are found singly, in groups, and, occasionally, in great clusters, but when very large regions are compared, the tendency to cluster averages out and one region is very much like another." * So much for the structural arrangement. Now for what, so far as we know, is going on. T o begin with, as said above, the nebulae are rotating. Our own galaxy, for instance, is "in rapid rotation about an axis perpendicular to the galactic plane—a flattened swarm of stars, dust and gas." 5 Whence then the rotation? W e read in the work of an eminent mathematician: It is difficult to imagine that the spiral nebulae were created precisely as they now are, and if we try to peer back one stage further into the history of the universe, the picture to which we are naturally led is that of matter scattered uniformly in space. It is satisfactory to find that if this matter were in the gaseous state, its molecules moving with reasonable velocities of thermal agitation, then the next stage in the evolution of the universe would be the formation of distinct aggregations having masses comparable with those of the spiral nebulae.® 2 Ibid., p. 31. n Ibid., p. 177. * Ibid., p. 182. s Ibid., p. 129. β J. Η. Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmogony, Cambridge, 1928, p. 545.

i

3

o

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T h e s e aggregations would naturally rotate. Any currents or motion in the original medium would contribute angular momentum to the nascent nebulae.7 Thus we can imagine the original nebular medium to condense, under gravitational instability, into nebulae of approximately equal mass M, rotating with different angular velocities. T h e minor axes of these masses will be all equal, but their major axes will depend on the varying degrees of rotation.8 Jeans takes gravitation to be one of the causes, but declares that the spiral form is not quite explained by gravitation. No satisfactory explanation has so far been advanced as to why the spiral arms should have these particular shapes . . . even if open orbits, such as equiangular spirals, could be obtained, they ought continually to increase in length with increasing age, and nebulae of average age ought to show many thousands of convolutions, whereas in fact almost all nebulae show just about two convolutions and no more.8 But whatever be the source, rotation plus gravitation plus radiation seem to form together a one-way course of events. As the spiral nebulae rotate, stars develop from the arms and the equatorial belt, but are not found in the central portion. Our own galaxy represents perhaps a late stage in the history of one of these nebulae. Its form "receives a simple and natural explanation in the hypothesis that the main part at least of the system represents the final stage of development of a single huge spiral nebula." 10 T h e star clusters in our galaxy are probably relics of very large condensations in the outer parts; the globular clusters are the ones which early escaped from the main mass and so held together. As cooling off by radiation proceeded, there occurred a gradual condensation into the solid state, and with this the formation of atom combinations or molecules which would have been impossible at the earlier high temperatures. In smaller bodies, such as the planets of our solar system, this solidification would take place more rapidly and would give rise to many kinds of molecules such 11bid.,

p. 346.

8 ¡bid., p. 348.

* Ibid., p. 351.

10

Ibid., p. 370.

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as are f o u n d on o u r earth, and their combination into crystalloid and colloid bodies of the order of size of terrestrial bodies. In still smaller bodies or satellites of planets the cooling and condensation w o u l d be still more rapid and would relatively soon reach a stage where the temperature differences are too small and the temperatures too low to sustain living bodies. B u t o n some planets the temperature conditions would favor the colloidal forms, and organic life might well arise and continue. Nevertheless such forms must be considered only a late product of inorganic evolution. By and large, throughout the k n o w n universe there are to b e f o u n d only photons, electrons, and other corpuscles, frequently c o m b i n e d into atoms. Says H . Shapley: Atoms are ubiquitous . . . molecules, the combinations of atoms, are specialized and localized systems. We find molecules, to be sure, on the surface of the earth in amazing variety; the kinds of compounds are almost numberless in the organic and inorganic kingdoms. But throughout the visible universe, molecules are uncommon forms of matter, for planets appear to be rare phenomena and in stars matter is mainly atomic and corpuscular. 11 Of the stars we are told: below the surfaces, where most of the known material of the universe lies, there is no possibility of molecules. Atoms, though more stable, can exist inside the stars only in battered condition. . . . Even on the surfaces of stars like the sun, where nearly all terrestrial molecules would be dissociated, the susceptible atoms are thoroughly stripped of their outer electrons . . . the normal condition of matter throughout the known universe is the highly ionized gaseous state . . . involving positively charged nuclei moving in a medium of radiation and free electrons negatively charged. 12 T h e satisfied neutral atoms of the planetary crust and of the meteorites represent an exceptional cooled-off condition in the material universe. Very uncommonly, it appears, do the gases have the opportunity of liquefying and freezing into the waters, rocks and organic phenomena of a planetary surface. Organisms, congealed out of normally gaseous substances, exist exotically in a world that is chiefly composed of hot and hungry atomic nuclei, 11 Harlow Shapley, Flights from Chaos, New York, 1930, p. 44. 12 Ibid., p. 45.

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of the electrons which they forever capture and lose again, and the radiant energy that arises from those violent activities below the surfaces of the stars.13 Earth-like planets are about the only suitable domiciles, in a hard material world, for delicacies like plants and animals. Stars are too vigorously hot, nebulae are too thin and cold. Meteorites, comets, moons, and minor planets are all naturally hostile to organisms.1* See then the general picture of the process of the macroscopic world. T h e forces of radiation and gravitation, and perhaps others unknown to us, acting on matter scattered in a roughly uniform manner throughout space, lead to the following stages: vast rotating nebulae; fairly definite bodies or stars condensing out of the spiral arms; planets sometimes out of these. T h e gradual congealing of the gaseous-corpuscular material gives rise to a corresponding evolution from electron, photon, and so forth, to neutral atoms, molecules more and more complex, finally in the colloid state upon which life supervenes. T h e record is a striking one: it shows a trend in the inorganic toward a very special and probably rare situation, the occurrence of the organic. As Jeans puts it, "We see the universe gradually evolving from a single chaoticallyspread primeval gas of extreme tenuity, down to comparatively small dense bodies such as our earth which form possible abodes for life." 15 Thus, in a sense, does the inorganic evolve into the organic. And on the macro side, so to speak, by the gradual formation of smaller bodies out of larger, while on the micro side, by the gradual formation of larger bodies out of smaller. Each proceeds toward the middle region. It seems as if that region were the culmination of the process—for the inorganic realm. While strict proof of this picture is scarcely to be expected, the evidence—especially the recent evidence drawn from 15 Ibid., pp. 45-46. 1< Ibid., p. 46. is J . H. Jeans, "An Evolving Universe," in Smithsonian Institution, Report, 1931, p. 238.

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photographs through modern giant lenses—seems sufficiently strong. True, there is no generally accepted explanation of the planets of our solar system. But the tendency toward consolidation, due to gravitation and radiation, is well established. True, also, there is no proof that the hitherto trend will not some time be reversed—as some old cyclical theories suggested. But of that we have no positive evidence. T o be sure, it seems probable that the electrical corpuscles (or wave-groups) are being converted into radiation, and it may be that radiation as found in cosmic rays, turns into matter—photon giving rise to electron and positron. There are many quite reversible processes in the scene. But also there is one very general irreversible trend, so far as our knowledge goes; and it is of that only that we here speak. Note the real significance of this irreversible process. T h e irreversibleness is due to the factor of radiation (and perhaps of the unwinding spiral, but this is not known). Now, radiation is an affair of chance, in the modern sense above described. T h e second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. T h e number of possible cases in which all bodies are of approximately equal temperature vastly exceeds the number in which they differ in temperature. As time goes on, the cases of equal temperature will increasingly outnumber the rest; and this is an irreversible sequence. As we saw above, a series of chance-events tends toward a maximum of even distribution of all possible combinations of the elements. That is the meaning of chance. And it is a verified fact in nature, as well verified as any causal law of dynamics such as gravitation or inertia. Thus we have, wherever a statistical law applies, an irreversible sequence. Irreversibility is the very meaning of chance in its temporal aspect. T o quote from a recent treatise on physics: Reviewing the situation as a whole we are led to two conclusions regarding the nature of dynamical and statistical laws, or theories: (1) Dynamical laws though not necessarily restricted to the field of mechanics are strictly deterministic and operate with absolute

I34 P O L A R I T Y IN PROCESS certainty; statistical laws are capable of establishing probabilities only . . . (s) Dynamical laws describe reversible processes; statistical laws deal with irreversible phenomena. . . . , · Speaking generally of the inorganic field, it seems to be the chance factor or principle of plenitude that is responsible for the incremental change, the process that in some cases culminates in the formation of living matter. Nonliving nature is not, as Bergson and others have thought, merely repetitive and without durée reelle; the modern discoveries of physics and astronomy give evidence for genuine process in the lifeless as in the living. See, then, how structure and process co-operate and in cooperating show the polar relation as above defined. T h e laws which determine the structural properties of atom, molecule, and so forth—their mutual attraction or repulsion, their masses and volumes—these laws give the stability factor to material things, their predictability and their endurance. On the other hand, the tendency to form ever-new combinations provides more and more new structures embodying the same laws and structural properties. T h a t tendency is the productive or emergent factor in the inorganic realm, analogous to the aspiration phase in man: the same asymmetry appears here as there. And that tendency is latent in the substances or things themselves; they contain—at least many of them—the tendency to form new combinations, as has already been brought out. Thus, many things include in themselves a tendency to pass beyond themselves as they now are. T h e scholastic might well admit this. Does not the outgoing spiral tend to become larger and larger as it revolves? Let the example of the closed curve, the circle, be replaced by that of the growing curve; for the latter has its equation as much as the former, but an equation which predicts its endless growth. And it shows how a fixed substantial form need not contradict ongrowing process, for the form may include a principle of specific growth. In fact, neither structure nor process is more ultimate than the ι» L M , p. 201.

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other; only the latter is the fertile aspect, the former the balance that keeps the evolving w o r l d in order. A n d at the same time there is a degree of independence between the two; for chance is not determined by any exact law between the events it provides. N o t e that this answers the question we raised and left hanging as we took leave of the reversible and entered the irreversible realm. Y e t the two w o r k together to make a richer world. If ever entropy should reach its m a x i m u m , the world of still and dead forms would have supplanted an incredible wealth of qualities. A t this point, if not before, the scholastic will naturally ask: W h a t of the source of this cosmic order with its laws and its tendencies to plenitude? Must there not be a perfect first cause, perfect because the fount of all possible beings, all that were and are and ever will be or can be? A n d if perfect, then immutable? A n d doesn't this rule o u t process in Deity? Must not the process-scheme then conflict w i t h the scholastic natural theology? Here we answer that the present w o r k is concerned only with the world of creatures. Evidence showing that there is no conflict between the notion of a perfect timeless (or, better, eternal) Creator and the notion of an imperfect growing world of creatures, we hope to give elsewhere. A n d be it remarked in passing that the relation between G o d and the world is not here conceived as one of polarity. T h a t relation is well put in the words of Confucius: " I t is the characteristic of Heaven to be the Real. It is the characteristic of man to be coming-to-be-real." 17 T o go on with the realm of nature. W i t h the higher chemical compounds, life came on the stage; and we are now to consider the irreversible phenomena w h i c h life displays. IRREVERSIBLE

CHANGES

IN

LIVING

THINGS

Plants, animals, and the simpler forms that hardly belong precisely in either kingdom (ultrafilterable viruses, bacteria, it Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, ed. and tr. by E. R. Hughes, New York, 1942, p. jg.

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flagellates) seem to share three traits: self-repetition, or perpetuation of the individual's life, growth, and reproduction. Self-repetition Self-repetition is the fact that in a living body the changes result typically in the preservation of the same structure and the same kind of behavior. T h u s : the animal uses up its stored energy—breaks down its contained molecules—in moving to get food, and the food restores the lost energy. T h i s is obviously a cyclical, not an irreversible, process. Death is an irreversible process, but death does not seem to be a necessary property of life, as the simplest living forms, under favorable conditions, appear to live for an indefinite time. W e pass on then to Growth Every living thing grows larger and more complex: some as long as they live, others only up to a mature stage. A n d this is normally an irreversible process. T h e form of plant or animal, its typical pattern of structure, is thus a growth-product; it is a way of growing. For example, in certain plants: T h e relative growth rate is consistently different in different races. In the Hercules club, length grows faster than width, so that the fruit becomes progressively more elongate. In the bottle gourd, on the other hand, width grows faster than length. . . . This constant relative growth rate segregates in inheritance and seems to be what the genes governing shape primarily control.18 But the process i s — i n plants at least—also very specifically incremental; incremental, that is, in a unique way. A plant grows from germ to maturity through distinct levels, each of which is to a degree independent of the preceding levels. Says Professor Sinnott: " T h e plant body is an indeterminate series of such multiple structures, their number depending on environmental factors but their particular characteristics being essentially autonomous." 19 T h u s "organization is not a single ι» E. W. Sinnott, "Morphology a« a Dynamic Science," Science, Vol. 85, Jan. •5· 1937. P· 65· 1» E. W. Sinnott, " T h e Cell and the Problem of Organization," Science, Vol. 89, Jan. 20.1939, p. 45.

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event but proceeds from level to level." 20 Again: "Perhaps the most distinctive feature of biological organization is that it occurs at successive levels. Cellular components are organized into cells, cells into organs, organs into organ systems, and organ systems into individual organisms, an arrangement which has been aptly termed a hierarchy." 21 T h i s is general and typical; of course there are reversals, b u t they are not the normal course of events. Here, then, w e seem to have irreversibles in the individual organism: ontogeny shows growth in size, in differentiation, and most strikingly in the graded series of levels. But this irreversibility comes to an end with the death of the individual, when the organic goes back to the inorganic, perhaps to enter the field of the organic again, in cycle fashion, in the guise of plant or animal food. It is, however, compensated by another irreversible, namely, Reproduction T h e individual fertilized germ cell, grown to a certain size, divides by mitosis, producing a new individual organism. T h e process is not reversed. A n d as to the evolution of species which now comes on the scene, the process-philosopher has already eaten of the fruit of this highly cultivated field. Enough to remind ourselves of it and to be clear as to just what it does signify and what it does not signify. W e need not, like Bergson and others, enter the lists for vitalism (in however moderate a form) in order to accept irreversible tendency in phylogeny. T h a t tendency is a verified fact, whatever the explanation. Experiments in breeding have revealed an incremental variation from generation to generation. T h e r e is a statistical law here. T h e facts of heredity show that all possible combinations of the Mendelian elements (genes) tend to occur with equal frequency, just as in inorganic nature in the law of entropy. It may be that there is a special vital force acting in the genes; we need not decide. But if there is, it operates, like the in20 Ibid., p. 46. 21 E. W. Sinnott, "The Cell-Organ Relationship in Plant Organization," in Growth Supplement, 1940, p. 77.

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organic forces, in accordance with the principle of plenitude. Let this suffice for the field of living things in so far as they are only living. We easily discern a co-operation of structure and process. While the life cycle, keeping the young plant or animal alive, makes its growth possible, that growth increases the complexity of the individual structure. T h e cycle gives stability, the growth a larger and more stable cycle. So for ontogeny. And for phylogeny, as has often been said, the more evolved species do, for the most part, inherit the powers of the lower, with new ones added. And we might go further and show how the two kingdoms, animal and plant, support each other in an analogous polar relationship. Plants are the more stable of the two; they attain larger bodies and they reach a greater life span; animals evolve more, adventure more, and develop higher powers. Each also lives on the other as its food, while the highest animal, man, cultivates more and more new varieties and species of plants. But that story is too long to be told now. And here, as in the inorganic, the other traits of polarity are fairly clear. The scholastic or structural account emphasizes the conservative cyclical phase; an oak tree that grows as long as it lives is still an oak tree, and the ape that evolves into man contains—whether already in himself or by the creative addition due to the Creator's fiat—that which may form the basis of homo sapiens. The evolutionary formula sees in the ape the "promise and potency" of man; and the scholastic may accept that formula as God's fixed plan. Process-philosophy does but emphasize the emergence, the radical or novel element in the ongoing of the great stream of life. And the asymmetry of emergence is obvious, though it does not prevent the retention of the powers of the lower in the higher grades. Also, the facts of evolutionary history show a degree of independence between stability and advance. Not all new variations give rise to a stable enduring type of organism; many blind alleys have been entered in the advancing course of life, many types, successful at one period of geological history, have proved ill-

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adapted to profound changes of climate that followed the rhythmic rise and fall of the earth's surface during the long ages. Yet despite all the failures, a type of organism did emerge which seems more adaptable than any previous type. Such is man, whose conscious intelligence gives a ground for hope as to the future not offered to the lower forms. As the irreversible sequence from the nebulae led up to life, so the irreversible sequence from the simplest living forms led up to the appearance of consciousness in the higher animals. Is there, then, any sign of irreversible sequence in the domain of conscious events? IRREVERSIBLE

CHANGES

IN

CONSCIOUSNESS

Let us take up in turn the two sides of it: the conative, volitional, or practical side, and the cognitive, contemplative, or theoretical side. And here we confine ourselves to human psychology, which presumably shows conscious life at its fullest. On the practical side, man pursues ends, that is, goods or values. He wants to build a house to live in; a house is a good thing to live in, for reason of protection, family life, and so forth. For simplicity, suppose him to be his own architect. T h e n he has pretty fully in mind the good thing he seeks to realize, and this determines the means by which he may make it real. It is a case of Aristotelian-scholastic entelechy. A l l is determined by the initial stage, the house planned in mind. So, at least, for a highly developed and intelligent pursuit of ends. In a world where everything is determined by natural laws, an educated man with the fullest knowledge of them and with his goods determined from the beginning by the constitution of human nature (itself determined by laws)—such a man would pursue the determined ends—that is, a college education, training, say, for medicine, marriage, a house, family, competence, old age, death—in a practically determined manner, and after maturity there would be little or no note of increment, no addition to the daily round. Of

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course, this is not a true picture of any man's life, but there are approximations to it, and they represent the conservative and cyclical side of conscious conduct. A smoothly flowing life, with no tragic breaks that compel him to seek some new and larger goal—loss of property or reputation making a man take a new job or emigrate, and so forth—this is, in fact, what most men do want and do work for. They want a comfortable place to die in, if no more. A stable life in a stable society, the Greekmedieval picture, my station and its duties—surely good in itself, and whatever man may say, it is prized and worked for in their practice—after the eagerness of youth has passed. Heaven was never, in popular religion, pictured as a place of adventure, of novelty after novelty. And on this side of man's life we find no intrinsic note of progress. Only when the goad of misery—one's own or another's—stings him does man try for a better status. But after all, a high degree of knowledge was here presumed. How much then? Just enough to provide a secure life? Now we begin to hear a very different note. It is sounded in the realm of man's cognitive or theoretical interests. Modern process-philosophy, with its pragmatic point of view, emphasizes the practical motive for man's thinking. But it need not deny the motive of knowledge for its own sake. For, of course, man has this sort of theory-motivation. He does love to know just for the sake of knowing, whether it is wrong to do so or not. And strangely enough, it is here that we find the irreversible process which is so lacking in the practical aspect. The note of irreversible process is found chiefly in two ways: with respect to knowledge of the past and with respect to future knowledge. T h e former has been properly and impressively expounded by the pioneer Bergson. Memory, the mark of mind, is cumulative like the rolling snowball. Our past life has recorded itself and left its imprint, and as time goes on that imprint is ever growing larger. Memory, in fact, means increase of mind: the past is preserved in our present consciousness, and thereby the wealth of conscious experience is in-

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creased. True, there is much that we do not recall, and perhaps never will recall. Who could remember all the dinners he has eaten during the past year? And how can we be sure that our forgetting does not keep even pace with our remembering, so that after all the mind retains just about the same volume, so to speak? Yet doubtless we should all agree that its volume does increase, normally, from infancy up to middle age. Perhaps in old age it decreases; perhaps as vitality diminishes, the individual mind approximates the state of earliest infancy. Even so, there is a cumulative race experience. Minds have language and leave records; intelligence, reading those records, becomes aware of events far transcending its own experience, and we have the documented history of mankind. Nor would any one question the growth of this history. So, where memory loses its incremental trend, intelligence comes to the rescue. If memory lives only in the individual, intelligence lives in the communication of minds. I cannot cause you to remember how I felt before you were born, but I can cause you to understand that I must have felt so and so, by writing down a record that you can read. The situation here is like the situation with the living body. The individual ceases to grow and dies; the species survives and evolves. Where ontogeny fails of increment, phylogeny provides it. So with memory. Being an individual affair, it eventually fails of increment; race experience in the form of intelligent communication makes up for the loss. The most deeply progressive trait of man, then, is intelligence. And this comprises knowledge on its future side, so to speak. Man aspires instinctively to more and more knowledge. Why? Just to satisfy pure curiosity. True, curiosity moves in different directions. Some boys love machines, some mathematics, some music. It is just a curiosity at work in these directions. That is the incremental factor. Nor is it confined so narrowly: it is, perhaps, the most fundamental and pervasive trait in all men. The baby in his carriage looks about him, and the adult travels abroad. We love a panorama, we want to know about our fellowmen, we gossip, we read the daily paper,

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hear the radio. These little straws show which way blows the wind of intellect: toward increase of knowledge. If we are to make any distinction between practical and theoretical, then no practical motive can be found here. Curiosity is mental aspiration. Pure curiosity, ubiquitous, though with varying direction, is, then, the incremental factor of mind. If it ceases in the senile, it survives in the offspring, and as man lives through the ages gives an ever-increasing volume of information. Much of this is systematized in the sciences; much remains loose, detached. T h e philosopher is the man who strives, however vainly, to find some way of attaching these latter to the rest, to piece them all together. T o do this is inborn in some men; their curiosity is there, and the metaphysical impulse can no more be rooted out than the love of music. Knowledge, indeed, more than anything else, grows by what it feeds on. T o him that hath shall be given. Now it needs no elaborate defense to say that knowledge of the ways of the world about us is the best guide for the practical conduct of man. Here man's aspiring phase ministers to his stability. And conversely, a stable life, with physical and social needs well met, releases energy for the pursuit of new knowledge. Thus do the two phases of man's mind co-operate. And hereby, as with the irreversibles of the inorganic and the living, we see the way in which the substance of scholasticism may join with the increasing process emphasized by its rival. Who shall say where is the limit of man's mind as it grows to know and feel and accomplish more and more? Is it not of the essence of human mind to increase indefinitely? Does not his substantial form itself contain a principle of growth? T h e evidence points that way. T h i n k again of the logarithmic spiral—an endless curve of steadily enlarging scope, yet having the principle of increase contained and defined in its timeless equation (logp = aô). Here the fact of emergence is potentially present at the start. Even so, there is no conflict between fixed substantial form and emergent evo-

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lution. T h e fixity of the form lies in the definite formula of increasing expansion. See, now, how the characteristics of polarity, as holding between fixed structure and process, the scholastic and the new point of view, may be verified. Substantial form, let us admit, contains in itself an impulse toward growth, and along specific lines. It is the warrant of a continuing personality. But the personality cannot continue unless the order of nature permits and unless the person is adjusted by his conduct to that order. Here the practical motive is primary: the urge for an enduring and prosperous existence which alone will liberate the intellect to realize its aspiration toward greater knowledge. Practical conduct is conduct that enables the individual—the maximum number of individuals—to survive. Thus we see that the underlying justification of the category of substantial form is a practical one; and this is in keeping with the religious and person-loving attitude which permeates, and rightly permeates, the scholastic point of view. Let us, then, take these two phases of man's nature as typical of the two points of view exhibited by these opposite systems. The fact of co-operation has already been brought out. And the other traits of polarity are not hard to verify. The incremental factor, intelligence, works in the direction opposite to that taken by the stabilizing factor, practical need. Intelligence seeks causes, sources, principles. It goes beneath and behind the data. T h e practical motive looks for results, consequences, events. It works from the underlying principle to the surface phenomenon. It would use the principles discovered by intellect to ensure the possession of lasting goods in a society so well ordered as to endure indefinitely. Yet no matter how well established the social order may become, intellect will go on seeking an ever-deeper and wider knowledge of the foundations on which it rests. And if God the Perfect Being is the one ultimate foundation of all orders, then man will seek more and more to comprehend the Divine nature; yes, if God's grace is needed to lift man's intellect to higher and yet higher

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dimensions, man will pray for that grace. It is deeply embedded in the substantial form of man the rational animal so to strive and to pray for this increasing knowledge. Let intellect mount to heaven and practice come down to the solid earth. Thus intellect outstrips its co-partner practice. If there were no practical problems, reason would create problems of its own. We see this in man today, too: as mentioned in Chapter ι, a man who is materially well off is bored unless he gives his mind some occupation, some problem to solve—be it only a problem of bridge or a cross-word puzzle. This is the asymmetry of the two phases. Intelligence would grow like the spiral, practice would rest content with the perfect unbroken circle of the balanced life. And this marks also a degree of independence. Intellect makes problems for the sake of solving them: it contemplates the solutions for the joy of contemplation. "What an elegant demonstration!" says the geometer. " T h e mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit." 22 It is of no avail for the instrumentalist to protest that many a mathematical theorem once deemed useless has turned out to have valuable practical application. Some certainly have not, yet they are prized none the less; for all such are prized for their own sake, as objects of knowledge. No, there is an independence about intelligence—which, indeed, is its glory. And a sincere empiricism, which is not bound to comprehend all under one ultimate, will recognize this ultimate duality in the human make-up. On the other hand, the practical-welfare motive easily discards the ideal possibilities of the thinker—it sees no need of considering them. Enough is as good as a feast. But we need dwell no further on the obvious. Yes, there is an independence to a degree between these two phases or motives in the human make-up. And too often it leads to a conflict. The theorist, indifferent as a theorist to practical consequences, becomes as a man indifferent to them, 22

T. Dantzig, Number

the Language

of Science,

2d ed., New York, 1933, p. a$i.

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and when he comes in his metaphysics to treat of reality, despises the everyday practical test of truth and demands a purely theoretical criterion. How frequently this has occurred in the history of philosophy and how prominent it is in the philosophers of today, we have already dwelt upon. On the other hand, the practical-minded man, observing these domestic feuds, comes to despise all inquiry that has no obviously verifiable practical result—and as he does not easily see the ultimate practical bearing of the great type-systems, comes to regard philosophy as the acme of time-wasting pursuits. But the spirit of the process-philosophy itself, with its watchword of preserving the old while adding the new—vetera novis augere—is the ray of hope that has already entered the scene. And if the present-day disciples of this philosophy are—so often—the most ardent refuters of all, condemning every type that has gone before—idealism, scholasticism, even materialism—well, let us remember, "corruptio optimi pessima." But the opportunity is theirs, if they would see it; and if they fail to see it, sooner or later someone else will. This completes the evidence here offered for the polar relationship of the fixed-structure phase and the process phase of our world, so far as known to us today. SUMMARY

RESULT

T o a survey of the whole course of the argument in these chapters, the following seems to stand out. The many systems on the whole tend to condense themselves into the two types, scholasticism and process. T h e former conserves the main positive values of both idealism (in its two forms) and materialism; it is the preservative philosophy par excellence. The second, being the latest product of reflection, introduces not only a new note but also the motive of harmony between the old and the new, between conservatism and progress. T h e old order may be expected to change to new orders, but these may and should preserve the elements of the old that have been attested as forces which may contribute to man's good life. It is the

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incremental factor of process-philosophy that alone enables it to teach this. Nature herself seems to sponsor such a program. She has her laws, and she has her tendency to form ever-new combinations—giving all positive possibles a fair chance. This is her principle of plenitude—let man follow it, guided by his knowledge drawn from past experience. Is this quite too vague? Well, a spirit, an attitude, is always vague and foggy; it is for man to precipitate it into definite programs and to attain definite results thereby. But without the right spirit, efforts will be misdirected, energy wasted in futile antagonisms. We may be a little more definite. The main attested values for man, so far as at present known, seem to be: a fairly stable order or state (monistic idealism and scholasticism here), individual personality with its private phases, person, family and property (pluralist idealism and scholasticism here), physical health and strength (materialism and scholasticism here), and finally, levels of being (scholasticism here). These, so far as we can see, ought to be conserved. They are man's witnessed specific values. Any plan that submerges one of them is wrong. This at once condemns extreme socialism or communism, anarchy, asceticism—unless for admittedly temporary emergencies (for example, war). Also it condemns any class rule. Differences of level there are among men; it is nature's way. Sentimentalists who deny this are simply not empirical. But no one class (not even the lowest!) should rule exclusively. Rule should harmonize with freedom, and so as to destroy neither. Well, we know that democracy respects these attested values, but is far from realizing them adequately. We know, for instance, that holders of public office love to continue in public office—and so they come to placate the class of citizens which has the largest vote. How can a democracy prevent this and similar evils? And they are legion. Here lies a practical task for the process-school: to discover new combinations of human motives that will make the temptation to power less powerful. But unless they keep in mind the polarized values,

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which is to say the due balance of the values above mentioned, their work will only make more trouble. True, there is no reason why the conservative should not do as much, but as things are he is not so likely to undertake it. And it is as well that he should do his part in insisting that none of these values be destroyed. For the process-philosopher is always tempted to overlook the value and the need of the scholastic message. Without that message, the nations perish. The great lesson of polarity is: respect each value and its counter-value, giving each the opportunity to develop freely. There is also a special lesson to be drawn from process. T h e roots of process in man, we saw, lie in his intellectual phase. Now intellect has the characteristic of going beyond fact— though it must begin with fact—to ideal possibilities. It is man's speculating, hypothesis-making function; the organ of advance to new information, new plans of living. Any special order, to conform to human nature, must then stress the opportunity for cultivating the artistic insight and imaginative construction that are as we saw in Chapter 1, the prerequisites of significant new hypotheses—hypotheses about nature's and about man's fundamental make-up. This opportunity is given chiefly in the studies that foster intuition and idealization rather than proof—in the humanities rather than the sciences. It is for the universities to emphasize these as indispensable to a sound education. Not to the neglect of the sciences—far from it. But we of modern days are in no danger of that: rather the sciences, with their practical utility, have given rise to a machine age that tends to crowd out the idealizing aspiring phase of man. And on the whole, as this is the forward-looking phase, it should receive slightly more emphasis: the young need inspiration as food for their aspiration to grow upon and their native enthusiasm should not be too much restrained by the stern requirement of rigid proof. New hypotheses come from younger men: it is to them we look as our main instrument of intellectual progress.

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Do you say: why is it necessary to go out into the great universe as we have done, to ground the above counsels? Answer: man is in nature and is nothing separate from nature. T o nature's ways he must adapt himself. If those ways are orderly, he will himself have to be orderly in his behavior. If they vary and produce novelty, he will have to devise new behavior to adjust his life to them. He will have to conform to law, and he will have to conform to chance. And the evidence shows that, like external nature, he himself has the phases of order and plenitude, of stability and of aspiration without end. So for the practical aspect of the world-map we have drawn. But there is a theoretical interest in it also. If sound, we may take joy in viewing it. And here be it said that there is evidence for polarity as a pervasive principle, far more than we have here given. W e confined ourselves—for reasons drawn from philosophy's self-mortifying habits—to the large perennial bones of contention, mind-body, one-many, structure-function. And, to be sure, these are probably the most fundamental couples we know. But polarity is not confined to these. It permeates the regions within each: it lies within the structure and behavior of the atom, of the living cell, of plant and animal, of man's intellect itself, of his language, and so forth. At a later date we hope to present this evidence; it cries out for notice, and one can only wonder that philosophers have made so little of it—especially today, when scientific discoveries have furnished a wealth of testimony. Doubtless the explanation lies in their distraction by the puzzles of epistemology, and the like. So for the polarity thesis in its theoretical aspect. Process on its theoretical side has at present far less of specific content. And naturally so. Its rôle is the comforter's: it is the gospel of hope, to be made concrete by what its disciples will do. Theoretically, it is but the assurance that nature tends to provide ever-new combinations of possibles in the irreversible stream of time. What these may be in this or that context, what ones

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may help us practically—this is for the future to tell. Dewey contents himself with urging the cultivation of intelligence; he offers no outline map of the world, no specific plan for human adaptation to that world. Even Whitehead's processmetaphysic, in spite of its polarist slant, offers no particular definition of polarity or indication of the particular types of "actual occasion" which we should try to preserve or destroy. Indeed, on theoretical grounds alone process has not nearly the standing of polarity. It is an attitude to the future, and who can prove the future from the past? Practically justified, no doubt—the world is swinging on to greater things, then let us adjust ourselves to the swing. Yet it is open to the theorist to say: "I don't believe this swing is going to continue very far. Particularly I don't believe man is going to progress beyond a definite limit." Nobody can refute him. The scholastic may take his stand here. True, the concrete evidence of the world-process, the emergence of novel and higher stages from primeval nebula to conscious man shows no sign of stoppage: man's stay on this earth is but a minute in the long days of the astronomic ages, and we may expect his progress to be slow, to need more than a few thousand years. Give him time! But the evidence is like the evidence of any moving object: it looks as if it would go on, and we had better get out of its way—or still better, go along with it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. So now the two notes with which we started, balance and aspiration in man, seem to have been verified as basic motives in external nature herself, and returning to man, with whom we began, we have drawn something from the world-chart of process and polarity which may serve in part as a guide to man's living and may also present an engaging scene for man to contemplate as well. Metaphysic, on the practical side a duty, becomes for contemplation a joy. And as we drew in Chapter 2 a map of the type-systems of metaphysics, let us now at the end proffer a simple diagram to symbolize the

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polarity-in-process which has been described only in words. Begin it thus:

The outgoing spiral naturally represents the process-motif; so to speak, it pries successively in all directions, exploring space for what it may find. And it is the logarithmic spiral, too, which compasses more and more in its spread. The more we know, the more we can know in addition. But the gains must be consolidated. The returning cycle must also be represented, in an integrity and unity like that which marks a firmly grounded personality. Let this be figured by lines joining the points of the curve to the center. Thus:

completes the diagram. For a parting word: spirals are found throughout nature— from the great nebulae in the inorganic to the shapes of plant growth and animal parts and shells. And gravitation also seems to be a general fact in the physical world. These two pervasive tendencies are in apparent agreement with the above suggestion. Is the suggestion then a fertile one for the understanding of nature, or must it be revised?

INDEX Absolutism, untested, 57 Action, importance of, 55 Aesthetics, value of in philosophy, 18 ft. Aquinas, Saint Thomas, see Thomas Aquinas, Saint Art, see Aesthetics Aspiration, 4; dangers of, 50 Asymmetry, 111 f. Asymmetry of mind and body, see Mind and body, asymmetry of Atoms, 131 f. Balance, t ff., 102 Balance (posture), 1 ff. Balance motive philosophy), 10 ff. Behaviorism, basis of materialism, 66 Bergson, Henri, 140 Body, nature of, 88, 94; definition of, 91; independence of, 106 Boredom, 3 f. Born, Max, Atomic Physics, 88n, gin Cannon, W. B., The Wisdom of the Body, 104η Certainty, 33; unattainability of, 17 Chance, 122, 125 Change: as interpreted in process philosophy, 80, 83 ff.; instigated by desire, 103; cyclical, u g ; irreversible, i*3 Conduct, 5 ff. Conduct of life, 13g f. Consciousness: defined as anergy, 66; irreversible change in, 139 Consistency, 33 f. Contemplation, χ S., 93 f. Co-operation, 112 Co-operation and independence, polar relationship of, 107 f. Creator, see God Curiosity, the incremental factor of mind, 141 f. Cycle-processes, see Change, cyclical

Dantzig, T . , Number the Language of Science, 144η Deity, see God Democracy, 146t. Desire, 104 Determinism, 43 Dewey, John, The Quest for Certainty, 33 DiSuseness, principle of, 8g f. Direction, reversal of, 111 Dualism, see Mind and body Dwarf types of philosophy, 41 ff. Dynamics, laws of, 133 Efficient cause, gg f. Electric field, gs Electrical corpuscles, 133 Electrons, 88, 131 f. Emergent evolution, spiral of nature, 14s f. Empiricism, 43 f. Ends and means, 98 Environment, man's understanding of, 9ff. Equilibrium, see Balance (posture) Escapism, characteristic of early idealism, 4g Evil, definition of, 113 Evolution, potency of, 138 Experience, as interpreted in process philosophy, 82 Extremes, man prone to, 12 Final cause, gg Free will, 43 Function, polar relationship to substance, 121 f. Future events, 100 God. >35· '43: conceived as finite, 57; relation to the world, 135 Good, scholastic view of, 75 Goods, 98 Goods of idealism, see Idealism, goods of

>52

INDEX

Growth, 104: as interpreted by process philosophy, 84 f.; principle of, 134 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 3* Historical verification, see Verification, historical Hobbies, 4 Hubble, E., The Realm of the Nebulae, 128η Hughes, E. R., Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times, 52η, 135η Hulme, Τ . E „ Speculations, 52η Humanities, indispensable to a sound education, 147 Idealism, 36 ff., 45 ff., 146; oriental, 47; goods of, 48 f.; defect of, 50; subjective, 5 1 ; western, 5 1 ; two species of, 52 ff.; the philosophy of aspiration, i'5 Idealists, success of, 46 ff. Increase, law of, 127 Incremental motives in man, see Man, two phases of his nature Independence, 1 1 2 f.; see also Body, independence of; Mind, independence of Indétermination, 125 Inference, 97 Instruraentalism, 95 f. Intellect, the organ of advance, 147 Intelligence, 141 Introspection, unreliability of, 65 f. Intuition, 19 ff. Irrationalism, 36 ff. Irreversibility, 133 f. Jeans, J . H., Astronomy and Cosmogony, 129η; An Evolving Universe, 132η Knowledge, 3, 140 ff. Levels, doctrine of, 75 Life, as interpreted by process philosophy, 84; irreversibility of, 135 Lindsay, R . B., and Henry Margenau, foundations of Physics, 89η Macrocosm, 128 ff. Macrophenomena, 124 Man: motives of, 1 ff.; two phases of his nature, 143 f., 148

Materialism, 36 ff., 146; the philosophy of balance, 1 1 5 Means, see Ends and means Measurement, 124 Mechanist method, 124 Memory: not accounted for by materialism, 64 f.; cumulative effect of, 140 f. Mental traits, g2 ff. Metaphysics, 6 ff.; proof impossible, 116 Method (in philosophy), 16 Microphenomena, 124 f. Mind: object of idealism, 49; idealist's view of, 54 ff.; privacy of, 65 f.; as interpreted in process-philosophy, 82 f.; nature of, 94 ff.: independence of, 106, 117 Mind and body, 44, 87 ff.; scholasticism's interpretation, 81; asymmetry of, 102 f.; co-operation between, 103 ff.; incompatibility of, 105 f., 117; polar relationship, 117 Molecules, 131 f. Monism, 40 f., 109 f.; often followed by pluralism, 56 Montague, W. P., consciousness defined by, 66; The Ways of Things, 100 η Motion, man's freedom of, 2 ff. Nature, man inseparable from, 148 Nebulae, 128 ff. New Testament, considered divine by scholastics, 73 Objectivity, 26 Ontogeny, 138 Panpsychism, 44 Perspective (in philosophy), 12 f. Phenomenology, 44 Philosophers: conflicting views, 13 ff.; dissension between, 20 ff.; urge toward wholeness, 13 f. Philosophic systems: survival value, 14 f.; pairs of, 35 ff.; diagram of, 37«· Philosophy: twofold function of, io f.; general nature of, 34; attitude of practical man toward, 145 Photons, 131

INDEX Phylogeny, 138 Physical being, see Body Physical traits, 91 f. Planets, 131 Plenitude, principle of, 127 Pluralism, 40 f. Polarity, 11 f., 16, 86 ff., 101 ff.; between animal and plant kingdoms, 138; a pervasive principle, 148 Polarity-in-process, diagram of, 150 Positrons, 88 Potency, 122; scholastic interpretation of, 78; see also Potential energy Potential energy, 119, 122 Power, result of idealism, 47 Practical motive in man, see Man, two phases of his nature Pragmatic test, see T r u t h , pragmatic test of Precision, unattainability of, 17 Probability, 91, 125; the guide of life, 34 Problem solving, 93 Process, 11 f., 79 ff., 102, 148 f.; scholastic interpretation of, 77 ff.; nature's remedy, 118 Process-philosophy, 36 ff., 145 ff.; polar relationship to scholasticism, 118; rôle in evolution, 138 Progress, 3 ff., 16 Progress motive (philosophy), 10 ff. Proof (in advance): not essential for practical purposes, 16 ff. Quantity, nature of, 92 Q u a n t u m mechanics, go Race experience, 141 Radiation, 128, 133 Realism, 42 f. Reality, 9 f., 34; demonstration of, impossible, 12 f. Reason, 54 f. Reasoning, 97 Relations, as interpreted in process philosophy, 83 Reproduction, 137 Robeson, F. L., Physics, 92η Scholasticism, 36 ff., 69 ff., 145, 146; philosophy of the via media, 115; value of, 117; polar relationship to

1

53

process-philosophy, 118; a term philosophy, 120 Science, measures, but does not explain, the ways of nature, 121 Sciences, 147 Self, 113 f. Self-love, 113 Self-repetition, 136 Series, in scholastic philosophy, 77 Shapley, H a r l o w , Flights from Chaos, 13 in Significance, 32 Sinnott, E. W „ The Cell and the Problem of Organization, 136η; The CellOrgan Relationship in Plant Organization, 137η; Morphology as a Dynamic Science, 136η Skepticism, 21; survival value of, 29 Skeptics, 8 Society, 114 Spiral, principle of, 134 Stability, see Balance Stars, 131 Static tendency, in nature, 85 Substance, scholastic category of, 78; nature of, 120; polar relationship to function, 121 f. Success, 28 Survival (of philosophic systems), 45; significance of, 14 f.; a test of value, 14,24 ff. Symbolism, 97 Synthesis (in philosophy), characteristic of scholasticism, 70 Theorists, indifference to practical consequences, 144 f. Thermodynamics, second law of, 133 T h o m a s Aquinas, Saint, 32; quoted, 72 T i m e , a positive principle of process philosophy, 84 T r u t h , philosophers' attitude toward, 14; pragmatic test of, 15, 44 Value, 5, 99 Verification: practical substitute for proof in advance, 16 f.; importance of, 19 ff.; applied to living, 31; historical, 44 Via media, see Scholasticism Wave-groups, see Electrical corpuscles W o r l d map, 10 f.