The World and the Individual, First Series/Lecture 6

by Josiah Royce

LECTURE VI

VALIDITY AND EXPERIENCE

After having abandoned the abstractions of pure Realism and pure Mysticism, we went on, at the last time, to the study of a Third Conception of Being. We saw at all events how vain it is for any one to assume that, if you doubt metaphysical Realism, if you question whether the world can be real independently of knowledge, of ideas, and of definition, you must necessarily be a mere sceptic, and believe in no authority whatever, and in no world at all. On the contrary, as we saw, even ordinary conversation is full of assertions that objects have genuine Being which are explicitly not objects independent of experience, or of definition, or of ideas. Such supposed genuine beings, which are still not realistic entities, we found exemplified by the prices, debts, and credits of the commercial world, by analogous facts in the world of valid social estimates, and by the moral law. And then, passing from common sense to science, we pointed out the still more marvellous types of existence that people the eternal fairyland of mathematical construction. We saw how the mathematical entities appear to have all the variety, the stubbornness, and the frequently unexpected characters which, in the ordinary world, are said to belong to real beings. The mathematician’s realm is in one sense his free creation. In another sense it is a world where that comes to light which he, in his private capacity, had neither intended nor anticipated. In that world he can long go astray, can hold false views as to his own creations, and, just as if he were working in a laboratory, can have these views set right by the outcome of further carefully planned experience, whose instruction he submissively awaits as if he were in no sense the creator of any object present. Like any other student of Real Being, he observes and experiments. The nature with which he deals is at once ideal and eternal, at once rigid and free. The most surprising analogies are often discovered linking together its most widely sundered and seemingly independent regions. The mathematician too has his news of the day, his unexpected events, his fortune, so to speak, even in the realm of a Being that explicitly is only in so far as it is conceived.

Plainly, then, the realm of Validity has a good many persuasively ontological characters. When we enter it, we need not come as sceptics or as mere victims of fantasy. What we there learn is that constructive imagination has its own rigid and objective constitution, precisely in so far as its processes unite freedom with clear consciousness.

And so, as we saw, it is possible, at least by way of trial, to undertake to define Being wholly in terms of validity, to conceive that whoever says, of any object, It is, means only that a certain idea, — perhaps an idea suggested by passing experience, perhaps the thought of an empirically discovered law in a natural science, perhaps a free construction of an ideal object in mathematics, — but in any case an idea, is valid, has truth, defines an experience that, at least as a mathematical ideal, and perhaps as an empirical event, is determinately possible. The truth, validity, or determinate possibility of the experience in question, may be, so far as yet appears, either transient or eternal, either relative or absolute, either something valid for a limited group of people, or something valid for all possible rational beings. But in any case, this third definition of Being attempts to identify the validity of the idea with the true Being of the fact defined by the idea.

 

I

Our Third Conception of Being has been thus stated and illustrated. It remains here next to follow in the briefest outline its history as an ontological conception, before trying to estimate its final value.

As now repeatedly recognized in these lectures, our Third Conception of Being is, in European thought, partly an indirect result of Plato’s doctrine.^[1] But it is also probably the historical fact, as we saw in our discussion of Realism, that Plato himself did not, on the whole, conceive his own Ideas in this way. The original Platonic argument about the Ideas amounts in general to saying, on the one hand, that only what Plato calls the Ideas are of such nature as to be truly and eternally independent realities, and on the other hand, that the Ideas, while thus independently real, are to be so defined as to explain the universality of knowledge, and the eternal validity of truth. The Platonic Ideas were therefore realistic entities, in the sense of our first conception of what it is to be. They constituted an incorporeal world of independent realities. But the arguments used for their reality, and the relations which they bore to ethical and to other permanent truths, as well as the fact that they corresponded, not to our individual but to our universal conceptions, gave them characters which inevitably led them, in the later Platonic tradition, to assume forms more and more similar, either to beings of the type now in question, or to the sort of Being yet to be defined by our Fourth Conception of Reality, and hereafter to be treated. The Neo-Platonic doctrine identified the Platonic Ideas with the thoughts of the divine Intelligence. St. Augustine, in a proof of God’s existence, identified God with Veritas. St. Thomas, in explaining the relation of the Ideas to God, was led to an interesting form of our present or Third Conception of Being; and post-Kantian idealism has remodelled the Platonic Ideas, on the whole, after the plan first suggested by the Neo-Platonic doctrine. In brief, then, Plato’s concept of Being, while technically realistic, contains tendencies that inevitably lead to the differentiation of other ontological conceptions. And so our present or Third Conception of Being is, in large part, indirectly due to Plato.

Nearer to our present form of the ontological predicate comes, however, Aristotle’s conception of Possible Being, a conception which plays a great part in the whole Aristotelian theory of Nature. The ens in potentia of the Aristotelian system occupies a place in a realistic doctrine. Aristotle insists that possibilities are in one sense real beings. Is not an architect a house-builder even when he is not building houses? Is not the sleeper potentially awake? Is not every natural process the realization of possibility?

But the doctrine of course has its obscurities. Where, in the independently real world, which Aristotle all the while assumes, are the mere possibilities when they are not yet realized? If one fairly faces this question, one finds that the possibilities appear to be in some sense ideal. They suggest even to Aristotle his theory of Nature as desiring or willing the yet unfulfilled possibilities, — a theory to which he nowhere gives a perfectly rounded expression. And it often seems as if the Possible Being of this Aristotelian doctrine would have to be expressed in terms of validity rather than in terms of the mere realistic entities themselves. It is true that the architect can build, the sleeper wake. These truths are valid. They are, for Aristotle, valid about independently real beings; and his doctrine is that there is also an independent or realistic type of Being corresponding to their validity; but this sort of Being, this ens in potentia, tends on the whole to assume the essentially ideal form of our present conception of what it is to be. Aristotle, in any case, never really solved the problem of the relation of these two types of being. A good while later, in the history of thought, the Scholastic Theory of Being, as I a moment since observed, met with still a new instance of our present sort of reality. This instance brings us directly on to theological ground.

St. Augustine, who stands historically on the boundary line between the earlier and later philosophy of the church, proved God’s existence by this noted argument: — There must be a Veritas, a Truth. For if you deny that there is a truth, you assert that it is true that there is no truth; and then you contradict yourself. The sum total of truth, conceived as a unity, is, however, the very essence of God. This argument, in one direction, looks backwards towards Neo-Platonic doctrine. St. Augustine’s world of Veritas is the Nous of Plotinus. In another direction, the Augustinian proof of God’s existence leads on to St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof. The representative philosophy of the greater Scholastic period abandoned both St. Augustine’s and St. Anselm’s proof as invalid, but retained the conception of Veritas as part of the definition of the divine nature.

The result is the form of our Third Conception, to which we next mean to call attention. In the classic doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas, the theory of the nature of God, to which we referred in our second lecture, is a very skilful synthesis of mystical, Platonic, and Aristotelian elements, influenced, of course, by still other traditional motives. According to this doctrine, the divine Essence, the Godhead as it is in itself, is above all, like the Hindoo Atman, simply one and perfect; and when we assert a mere plurality of attributes in God, the variety of these attributes is, as variety, due to the point of view, and to our imperfect comprehension of the divine unity. One very remarkable apparent plurality, however, which our understanding finds in God, is brought to light by the theory of the Divine Knowledge, when viewed in relation to the Creative Will of God. God as Knower, not only knows all truth, but he somehow knew in advance of creation, both all things to be created, and all the possible beings that he has left or will leave uncreated. This knowledge of many facts, viewed as a plurality, constitutes for St. Thomas the realm of the divine Ideas. As the divine ideas, in the created world, receive discrete and individual embodiments, it seems at first natural to say that God, by various acts of knowledge, comprehends, and, by various acts of will, realizes, or leaves unrealized, the beings whom his wisdom, in advance of creation, conceives. But this way of stating the case not only would endanger the absolute unity of the divine essence, but also would seem to give the various ideas of the possible created beings a certain independence of one another, and of the divine essence itself; so that it would seem as if God were, so to speak, forced to know the essences or natures of the finite facts, and as if these finite entities, even in advance of creation, had their own stubborn ideal independence over against God’s unity. Hence arose the scholastic problem whether the essences of created things, in advance of creation, constituted a true term, or, as it were, an eternal limitation of the divine knowledge. St. Thomas’s way of escaping this consequence involves a theory of Possible Being, as it is in God, in advance of creation. The theory is to preserve the unity of the divine essence, is to explain the variety of finite beings, and is to show the relation of the created beings to God, in such wise as to avoid the apparent eternity and relative independence of the essences of finite beings.

In advance of creation, any possible being is known to God, — but how? God primarily and perfectly knows himself, and so knows his own absolute fulness of being. But this nature of God is One and Simple. In knowing this his own nature, even in its unity, God however views this nature, by virtue of its very fulness of Being, as Imitable now in this, now in that aspect, — as imitable in countless fashions and degrees, and thereby as imitable by various orders of possible beings that God could create. The divine knowledge of these finite beings not yet created primarily has, then, God’s own nature as its immediate object. God first knows just himself. But, secondarily, indeed, this nature can be viewed, not only as one, and as immediately present to God’s insight, but also, so to speak, as rendering valid countless true possible assertions about possible imperfect imitations of the Divine nature. The validity of these countless views of the one divine nature is implied, just as a type of genuine possibility, in the divine perfection, and is accordingly said to be, as it were, known to the divine insight in one act with the simple self-knowledge of God. And in this sense are the created beings viewed as possible in advance of creation. God knows not these beings as mere data of his knowledge, but as truths valid only through his own perfection. After creation, these same beings assume, with reference to finite knowledge, just the independent type of reality characteristic of Realism, and so the Thomistic conception of Real Being employs, it would seem, all the three types of reality so far in question in our discussion. God’s reality as directly viewed by himself is of the mystical type. The created world is of the realistic type. The divine Ideas are, from our point of view, of the third type. I need not say that St. Thomas himself is not to be made responsible for our definition of these types.

But now at length I pass to the point in the history of philosophy where this our Third Conception of Real Being assumes at last its most explicit form. I refer to a doctrine remote enough from that of St. Thomas, and of direct interest for all modern discussions about the philosophy either of religion or of science. This is the doctrine of Kant.

 

II

To speak of Kant’s theory of what he called the realm of Possible Experience, of Mögliche Erfahrung, is to come at once into the full light of the present, that is, into the midst of the doctrines that we have inherited from Kant, and which are current to-day. Whoever wearies of Platonic or of Scholastic subtleties, must recognize, if he knows how to read the meaning of current science, that the notion of Possible Being, or of Being whose reality lies in its validity, or in its value as making assertions about it true, is, as I said at the last time, the favorite type of reality in the writings of a great number of the recent philosophical expositors of the meaning of natural science. Such writers may or may not recognize their Kantian affiliations; but their position is one whose ontology is almost altogether Kantian, whatever may be their Psychology or their Theory of Knowledge. And such theories are so important for the whole position of religious thought, especially in its relations to scientific thought, that our future fortunes in this research largely depend upon seeing how we are related to this characteristic modern opinion.

Kant was, by early training, a realist. God, nature, the soul, are all in his early works, realities whose independence of even the truest and most certain external thoughts about them is for him obvious. As Kant grew critical, he long pondered over the problems of Time and of Space, and, in 1769, largely in consequence of the discovery of what he took to be fundamentally contradictory characters in space and in time, he came to deny that these so-called forms of our experience can be valid for “Objects as they are in themselves.” Later Kant became still more critical, and questioned how, if the Noumena, or objects as they are in themselves, are so remote as his new theory now maintained from our empirical world of time and space phenomena, those real things, independent as they are of our understandings, can be known to us at all. The consequence of this new doubt, and of an interest in nevertheless maintaining the genuine validity of the mathematical and empirical sciences, was the theory expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781.

In this theory, Kant comes definitely not only to recognize, as every one interested in philosophy knows, a twofold world, — a world of “things in themselves” on the one side, and of “phenomena” on the other; but also to define a very important distinction between two sorts of what he still regarded as genuinely objective reality. For it is very noteworthy that, for Kant, both regions of his twofold world are real. That is, both the things in themselves, and the phenomenal facts, are explicitly called by him objective. Neither is a matter of your private view or of mine. Neither, so Kant directly says, is subjective. It is wrong to suppose that Kant viewed his phenomenal world as a merely inner experience of any one man. The question whether or no there are inhabitants in the moon is, for the Kant of the critical philosophy, as much a question about objective facts as it is for any ordinary scientific observer of the moon. Yet this question is, in his opinion, no longer a question about things in themselves; for the moon is a phenomenon in space; and the unknowable things in themselves have no spatial characters. Precisely so the Newtonian theory of gravitation, or a problem about the innermost constitution of matter, is, for the critical Kant, a discussion about real facts, but not about the things in themselves.

In brief, the former realist, Kant, has now come, not to resign his Realism, but to add thereto the definition of another sort of reality. Besides his independent reals, which he never abandons as unreal, but which he now regards as wholly unknowable, he asserts as critical philosopher the objective character of beings that are of a wholly different type from the absolutely independent realities.

And what are these new objects? Kant tells us in a very explicit way. They are the objects of Mögliche Erfahrung, of Possible Experience. The natural sciences are busy with these objects. The latter do not depend upon our will. They are plainly independent of our private individuality. But they are dependent upon the constitution of our experience.

For our experience, — that is, Kant’s supposed discovery, — has, quite apart from any things in themselves, its own universal and fixed constitution. It is like a well bounded island in the ocean of mystery. The simile is Kant’s. It is like a well ordered state, whose constitution and laws predetermine those facts, such as debts and credits, or such as ranks and social status, — those facts of which we earlier made mention in this discussion. Were it not for this universal constitution of our experience, our momentary opinions would wander like the nomads to whom Kant compares the sceptics in philosophy. As it is, the understanding gives law to nature. Universal assertions are valid. Science is possible.

We have no concern here with the manner in which Kant undertook to define how experience won this, its constitution. Enough, the universality is for him there. And as a result, if you ask whether there are inhabitants in the moon, Kant holds that you are not rightly inquiring about any sort of absolutely independent real beings, for in science you have no business with realistic beings of any sort. The things in themselves exist, but you can never win any sort of idea about them. On the other hand, in thus questioning, you are indeed asking a perfectly fair scientific question, and one in no wise relating to mere states of your own private mind. You are asking, as Kant expresses it, just this, viz., whether, “In the progress of possible experience, you would come to perceive the presence of such inhabitants?” An answer to that question is even now true or false. And the objects of the one boundless realm of possible experience, — a realm which the sciences of nature study, are real, precisely in so far as all such propositions, quite apart from your present empirical observation or mine, but not independently of the predetermined constitution of all experience, are even now true or false.

A quotation from Kant’s discussion of the second of his so-called Postulates of Empirical Thought (Kr. d. r. V. 2d edit., p. 273) will help to bring his thought before you in his own way. “Perception,” says Kant, “which gives to a concept its material embodiment, is the only test of actuality. But one can, nevertheless, in advance of the perception of an object, and consequently in a relatively a priori fashion, know the existence of this object, in case the thing in question is connected with any of our perceptions according to the principles of the empirical synthesis of phenomena (i.e. according to the law of Causality, one of the other fundamental principles). For then the existence of the things is linked with our percepts in a possible experience, and by virtue of our general principles we can pass from our actual perception to the thing in question by a series of possible experiences. Thus we may recognize the existence of a magnetic substance pervading all matter, by virtue of our perception of the magnetic attraction of iron, although an immediate perception of the magnetic matter is impossible to us in consequence of the constitution of our sense organs. For in consequence of the laws of sensation, and of the context of our perceptions, we should come directly to observe the magnetic matter, were our organs fine enough. But the form of our possible experience has no dependence upon the mere coarseness of our actual sense organs. And thus, just so far as perception and its supplementation by virtue of empirical laws together suffice, so far extends our knowledge of the existence of things. But unless we begin with actual experience, and unless we proceed according to the laws of the empirical connection in experience, we vainly seek to guess or to investigate the existence of anything.”

So much, then, in general, for Kant’s statement of our present conception of the real. The novelty of Kant’s account, as against previous approaches to the same philosophical idea, lies in the fact that earlier metaphysic, in trying to define the realm of truth as truth, the realm of the Possible Being of Aristotle or of the Scholastic Theology, had almost always made this conception a mere incident in the account of a world defined either in realistic or in mystical terms, while Kant’s region of possible experience is sharply sundered from the realistic universe, and is quite as clearly distinguished from anything resembling that mystical limbo whose Schwärmerei Kant himself so much dreaded.

Subtle and difficult as Kant’s new ontological conception has been, it has simply dominated the most popularly influential treatments of the philosophy of science ever since. Men who have spoken lightly of Kant have in this respect followed his footsteps. Mr. Spencer’s Unknowable is, on the whole, a realistic conception, although sometimes spoken of in mystical terms. But Mr. Spencer’s world of the Knowable has a reality of the Kantian type. It is a world of valid empirical truth. John Stuart Mill elaborated our Third Conception in his famous chapter on the “Psychological Theory of Our Belief in an External World,” in his Review of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. His definition of matter as a permanent possibility of sensation is altogether of our present type. Several of the writers most prominent in the recent logical movement have used what is essentially this view of the nature of scientific truth. So, notably, Wundt, in his discussions of the fundamental ideas of the physical sciences, for example, the ideas of Substance and of Cause. In a very different spirit, Avenarius, while rejecting absolute validity, reaches a view of the real which is much of our present sort.^[2]

 

III

The conception now in question, as you see, is indeed technical in its character; but it has so many bonds of connection with popular thinking and with exact science, that, when once defined, as our century has learned to define it, it is sure to have a great practical potency in affairs. In earlier lectures I called the typical realists the partisans of strict conservatism, the philosophical defenders of the extreme Right of any social order. The disciples of the new definition I have already called, as they appear at the present day, Critical Rationalists. As a fact, they are critical rather than dogmatic, but they are rather seldom of the extreme Left. Very often they belong to what one might venture to call the left centre of the parliament of thought, — to the moderate Liberals of doctrinal discussion, although the converse of this proposition does not hold true. For there are moderate liberals who are either mystics or constructive idealists.

The characteristics of the ontology of our critical rationalists can now easily be summed up. The Real for the metaphysical Realist, in case he attempts to be thoroughgoing, has to be, if anything, the Independent Individual, for, since it is beyond all our ideal determinations, it has to be in itself absolutely determinate. That the controversy of Aristotle with Plato proved. The Platonic Ideas, as universals, early perished from among the entities of the realistic world, to transmigrate, as it were, to this new realm, or also to reappear, with their own immortal vitality, in that realm of genuine Idealism which we shall later explore. The One Being of the mystic is as One, an Individual, although, as the ineffable goal of all desire, it enjoys all the advantages of a Universal, and is indifferent to all our distinctions. But the present, the Third Conception of Being, has amongst all the four conceptions the unique character that it alone, so far as it has more fully come to understand itself, consciously attempts to define the Real as explicitly and only the Universal.

Those who have imagined that the controversy about the reality corresponding to our general ideas and about the universal and the individual (the controversy of Nominalist and of the unhappily so-called Realist), is a wholly antiquated mediaeval absurdity, have curiously failed to observe the signs of our own times, and the trend of this characteristic ontology of our present century and of current science. What are Mill’s Permanent Possibilities of Sensation, if you view them as objectively valid at all, and not as mere private expectations of our present feeling, — what are they, I ask, but explicit universals? What sort of an individual fact or being is a mere “possibility”? Kant’s empirical objects, or Gegenstände der Möglichen Erfahrung, — his substances, causes, and the rest, what are they but products of the categorizing Understanding, empirically valid general truths? If one passes from the more abstract formulas to the concrete cases, glance, if you please, at that most potent conception, the modern notion of Energy. I ask not here as to its empirical basis nor as to its outcome, but solely as to its ontological character as a mere conception. Energy, one may say, is indeed phenomenally real. Professor Tait’s remarkable words as to the objective reality implied by the permanence of Energy have often been quoted. But nobody of any authority, I suppose, is yet prepared to maintain in any decisive way that the energy of the physical world consists of a collection of ultimate individual units or bits of energy, which retain their individual identity, and as individuals transfer themselves from one part of matter to another. The idea has been suggested, but so far not vindicated. In whatever sense energy is real, in that same sense an unindividuated entity, whose very essence is universal, is real. In vain then does one merely scoff at the early mediaeval fashion of speaking of universal principles as if they were real. In a new sense, to be sure, and for new reasons, the ontology of the moment, in the concrete form of the sciences, is constantly recognizing, as in one sense real, objects which, as they are defined, are universals, and which cannot be individuals without altering their definition.

The grounds of this modern recognition of the new universals cannot indeed be judged upon the older scholastic bases. One cannot be fair to these newer concepts without recognizing the changed situation that has resulted from Kant’s labors, and from the prominence now given in thought to the conception of Validity as a basis for the interpretation of our Experience. I mention the issue only to show, by a comparison of various problems, in what world we ourselves, at this stage of our study, are moving.

The Real in this sense is furthermore, as we have all along seen, identical with the determinately Possible only in so far as by that term you mean not indeed the fantastically or provisionally possible, such as a golden mountain, but that which would be observed or verified under exactly stateable, even if physically inaccessible, conditions. At the outset of an inquiry, you to be sure define as possible much that you later find to be unreal. Yet so far you have only the provisionally possible. But, for instance, the liquid or solid state of the interior of the earth, or the liquefaction of air, or the melting of snow, is a possible experience, when you have once proved that possibility in no provisional sense. For such possibilities, once recognized, are viewed as really valid and objective physical characters of air or of snow or of the earth. And now, finally, you may once more see what we summarized at the outset, namely, how this conception must on the whole stand related to theology and to religion.

The partisans of our third notion of the real have, indeed, as we have observed, a stately tradition behind them. They can well assert that they are not mere sceptics or destroyers of faith. Yet a theology that has been deeply influenced by this conception will no longer share the realist's absolute dogmatic assurance, whether positive or negative, nor yet the mystic’s inexpressible communion with his ineffable and immediate truth. Our critical rationalist lives in a world where nothing in the realistic sense is real, but where it is as if there were independent realities, which, when more closely examined, prove to be merely more or less valid and permanent ideas. The truth, whether transient or eternal, always arouses in such a world a twofold response or reaction in us who observe it. It imposes its presence upon us as if it were an independent reality; and hereupon we submit. But then it alters its countenance as we consider it critically, and becomes more and more like a mere product of our point of view, a mere creation of our experience and our thought. And hereupon we wonder. This truth seems to be at first an individual fact. But it transforms itself as we watch it into an universal principle. After we have watched such changes awhile, we begin to question whether this whole conception is at all capable of finality. The truth is, indeed, valid; but is it only valid? The forms are eternal; but are they only forms? The universal principles are true; but are they only universal? The moral order of the world seems genuine; but is it only an order? Is God identical with the world of Forms?

These questions arise in all sorts of ways in our age. They remind us that our problem is here once more a problem about the meaning and the place of individuality in the system of Being, and about the relation of individual and universal in our conceptions.

 

IV

And now, upon what basis shall we judge the conception at present before us? In one sense it appears to be peculiarly fortified against attack. Unlike Realism, it is from the beginning an essentially reflective and critical conception of Being. It attributes reality to objects only at the very moment of recognizing, as in some sense real, the ideas that relate to these objects. And, unlike Mysticism, it recognizes that to lose sight of the value and positive meaning of finite ideas, is to render naught the very objects which the ideas seek. It observes that when you declare any object to be real, you are in possession of an idea, however exact, or however inexact, however transient and relative, or however universal and eternal, — an idea to which you attribute an essentially teleological significance; since you assert that this idea is true, is valid, or in other words, is adapted to its ideal end. Our present conception regards this adaptation of the idea to its own end as the primary topic of any ontological assertion, and as the object which any one who asserts Being first of all inevitably means. And in making this comment upon our universal human relation to truth, the present conception of Being is indeed insisting upon perfectly obvious and empirical facts.

When the realist says, “The world is first of all independently real, whether or no ideas refer to it, and it only becomes secondarily and per accidens the object of ideas,” the realist, in his whole view of the nature of Being, begins by abandoning the realm of experience. He can therefore never empirically verify for you his independent Beings. He can only presuppose them. You ask him to show you an Independent Being. He points at the table or at the stars. But those, for you, and for him alike, are empirical objects, bound up in the context of experience. Nor could any possible enlargement of experience ever show anybody a Being wholly independent. The only way to judge Realism, since experience is thus abandoned by the realist, is to examine the inner consistency or inconsistency of realistic doctrine. And we have seen that Realism is wholly inconsistent. But our present conception begins by observing that an experience of facts which send you beyond themselves, and to further possible experience, for their interpretation, is the only conscious basis for any assertion of a Being that is beyond the flying contents of this very instant. The Third Conception of Being refuses to ignore this conscious, this empirical element, present wherever the assertion of Being is made; for the only possible warrant for any ontological assertion must be found in this element. What is, fulfils the meaning of the empirically present idea that refers to the Being in question, and except as fulfilling such a meaning, Being can be neither conceived, nor asserted, nor verified. In recognizing this fact of experience, lies the strength of the Third Conception.

In consequence of this reflective considerateness so characteristic of our Third Conception, it frequently appears, in its history, as the immediate outcome of a polemic against Realism. Thus, the negative arguments of Berkeley derive their force from a well-known series of comments upon the nature of the experiences by which we become acquainted with Being. The primary and secondary qualities attributed by many realists to matter, Berkeley analyzes into mere complexes of immediate data and of ideal construction. He then asks the realist the question: — “What do you mean, then, by your independently existing world?” And Berkeley thereupon shows how, primarily, all that Realism consistently means by matter has to be expressed in the form of an assertion that certain empirical ideas of ours are valid, and that their validity is a matter of possible experience. The distant church-tower, for instance, is a hint to the sense of vision of a long series of possible experiences. The assertion that these experiences, of approach to the church, of touch, of entrance to the church, are conditionally possible for any human being, this assertion is valid. And herein lies, for Berkeley, the primary reality of the material world. In order to explain still more exhaustively the validity in question, Berkeley is indeed led to his well-known hypotheses as to the souls, and as to the direct influence of the Divine Will; and these hypotheses, as Berkeley states them, are once more essentially realistic in their type, since the God of Berkeley appears, in his relation to our valid experience of the natural order, as an independently real creative power, and since the souls, also, in Berkeley’s account, get a distinctly realistic sort of Being. But his realistic type of theology is the halting and inconsequent side of Berkeley’s doctrine. His critical study of the conception of matter is a contribution to the historical development of our Third Conception of what it is to be. In a similar way, our Third Conception appears in Kant himself, as the result of an attack upon every realistic interpretation of the world of common sense and of physical science, and as a development of the thesis: Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit; only Experience furnishes the ground for truth.

And in fact, if viewed merely as a negative criticism of the realistic conception, the argument for the Third Conception has often been stated, in the history of recent philosophy, in an unanswerable form. How, in fact, shall you maintain that Reality is independent of ideas which refer to it, while at the same time these ideas are other than itself, — how shall you maintain this, when the least reflection shows you that you are using ideas at every step of your discussion of reality, and that whatever you assert of the reality, you can give warrant to the assertion only by first showing reason for regarding your ideas as valid? Suppose, for instance, that you say, as realists have often said: — “Some independent cause for ideas must be assumed. This independent cause has Being. And its being is therefore the same as its independence as a cause.” What is this assertion except an insistence that a certain more or less well-known empirical relation, already regarded as valid within your realm of experience, namely the relation called causality, has validity beyond your present range of experience? And what is this again but merely saying that if your senses were improved, if your horizon were widened, you would then directly observe how the so-called external facts, which would then be merely contents of your enlarged experience, would appear as empirical causes of what you had formerly called your ideas. Thus restated, however, your Realism turns at once into what Kant called a judgment about the texture of Mögliche Erfahrung. Whatever, then, you may attempt to assert, all that your Realism will ever succeed in articulating, is your belief that experience as a whole, that realm of truth of which you regard your present experience as a case and as a fragment, has a certain valid constitution. What Kant says remains then so far the whole outcome of the critical study of Being. You speak of objects, indeed, and these are not the objects of this instant’s experience. But they are also not objects merely independent of the ideas that refer to them. For your assertion that the world is, involves a judgment that your present experience is interwoven in the whole context of the realm of valid or of possible experience. This context, however, is not independent of its own fragments. Your ideas are recognized by the whole that they with validity define.

And if you attempt to assert the Being of things in any more independent sense than this, you struggle in vain to articulate your meaning. You can then only take refuge in the dogmatism of the typical realist. You can, to be sure, call your Realism a “fundamental conviction,” or a “wholesome faith,” or a “truth that no man in his sane senses can doubt.” But the strange consequence which then besets your very dogmatism lies in the fact that even in repeating these confident speeches, you have merely asserted that, in your opinion, certain ideas now present to you are valid ideas. You have employed, then, and have admitted as the ultimate standard, your opponent’s conception of Being, even in the very act of refuting his view. You have appealed to the enemy’s theory as your sole warrant for asserting your own. Or perhaps you may choose, as in an earlier lecture we found Realism doing, — you may choose to call your opponent’s view mere “insanity,” and to hurl pathological epithets at all who doubt Realism. The device is easy. But this procedure once more is an express appeal to your adversary’s own conception of Being as the standard by which you are to be judged. For the very conception of insanity is an empirical conception, and all that your assertion means, comes to an expression of opinion that metaphysical views, other than realistic ones, when seriously entertained, psychologically tend to the possible experiences now called insanity. What you have said is then still nothing but that, in your opinion, the realm of Mögliche Erfahrung has for men a certain constitution, and that your idea of this constitution appears to you valid. In vain is all your Realism. Your very speech is in your adversary’s tongue. You come to curse his views. Your words are blessings. You are among your opponent’s prophets. For you appeal to his standards as your own.

An awakened realist, then, can readily see, if he chooses, that his Realism can get no coherent expression without becoming at once transformed into the very formulas of this our present and Third Conception of Being. In the third lecture of this course, to be sure, I made no attempt to express in this present form the criticism there undertaken of the conception of the Independent Beings. I deliberately refrained from that course in that place, because, as I ventured to say, Realism needs no such external refutation. Merely left to itself, it rends its own world to fragments in the very act of creating that world. I therefore preferred to let Realism first judge itself. We explored its empire under its own guidance, and found absolutely Nothing there. But the reason why the Independent Beings proved to be nothing whatever, now at last explicitly appears. It was because Realism, in defining Being, was actually only defining either Kant’s realm of Mögliche Erfahrung, or else indeed Nothing at all. As the realm of the Third Conception was not yet in sight, the realist had only the latter alternative. The Being of the third type is however distinctly not an Independent Being. It is objective, but not isolated from the realm of ideas.

Thus well fortified against attack is our Third Conception of Being. In fact, how could one attack it except by undertaking to show that it is invalid? And how could one undertake that task except by first admitting that Being essentially implies the validity of ideas? This reflection is conclusive indeed against a realist, whose Independent Being was first to be real whether or no any ideas were to be found in the universe, and consequently whether or no validity, which is essentially bound up with the Being of ideas, united reality and idea in one context. But this reflection still leaves open one line of possible criticism which may be applied to our Third Conception. Validity or truth may be, as the Scholastic philosophy also would have said, an essential aspect of true Being, without on that account furnishing the final definition of what constitutes the whole Being of things. And here is it indeed a fair matter for question. That the Third Conception, as far as it goes, has some degree of validity, is indeed obvious enough. But is it adequate and final? Can the realm of validity remain merely a realm of validity? Here is indeed the place where we begin the final stage of our journey towards an adequate view of the meaning of the ontological predicate.

We have now several times insisted upon the empirical basis which the Third Conception of Being, as we have said, inevitably presupposes. But one may here object to our account that, although in many cases our Third Conception rests its assertion that a given idea is valid upon an obviously empirical foundation, this is not always, nor even ever altogether the case. For the mathematician, as we ourselves saw, deals with a world far transcending our actual physical powers of empirical verification. And it is not uncommon to suppose that the very bases of mathematical science are certain ultimate necessities of thought, for which no empirical warrant can be given. The world of validity also often appears as a world containing an essentially eternal truth. But, as it may now be asked, does our experience, as such, ever compass eternity? Moreover, one who asserts the objective validity of an idea, even in a merely temporal sense, transcends by his very assertion the circle of his present experience. In brief, every form of Critical Rationalism involves a confidence in a reasoning process. But is reasoning identical with experience?

These considerations may serve to introduce a still further reflection upon the deeper meaning of our Third Conception. As a fact, it is far too easy to talk of validity without analyzing its foundation. But if you thus analyze, you are led to a view of the nature of ideas, and of the reasoning process, which indeed shows that our very conception of validity needs a further supplement before it can be accepted as at once consistent, and adequate to its own undertaking.

The theory of reasoning has received, in recent logical and scientific thought, an extensive reëxamination, which students of metaphysics can no longer ignore. Nowhere has this theory been more carefully revised than in the history of modern elementary mathematics. A frequent experience of inconsistencies and of apparent paradoxes, due to extremely subtle errors in exact method, has led mathematicians, within the past fifty years, to a thoroughgoing attempt at a review of the very bases of Arithmetic, of Geometry, and of Analysis. The modern study of the Algebra of Logic, founded by Boole, and continued by Jevons, by Mr. Venn, and by still others in Great Britain, by Mr. Charles Peirce in America, and by Schroeder in Germany, has also contributed to set the whole theory of exact reasoning in a light at once clearer than that of old, and of a nature to reveal new problems. No longer can you venture, in the exact sciences, to make your appeal to dogmatically asserted “ultimate necessities” of reason. The mathematician is no longer fond of mere axioms. And despite what we have just said about the way in which the mathematician seems to transcend our present form of experience, a closer study shows that it is still our very experience itself that is the mathematician’s only guide to concrete results. Experience is made better by no mean, but experience makes that mean. For in modern mathematical study, even when you deal with irrational numbers, like π, and estimate their properties with an exactness that no physical experience of ours can hope to follow, — yes, even if you take the wings of the Calculus, or of the Theory of Functions, and fly unto the uttermost parts of the realm of the quantitative infinite, even there, in an unexpected, but not the less compelling sense, actual experience guides you, presented facts sustain you.

For, strangely enough, the logical outcome of this whole recent review of the bases of mathematical science can be expressed by saying that the modern mathematician rightly doubts every attempt to prove any proposition in his science unless, in trying to prove, you can first empirically show him, in a fashion that he can accept, the actual process of construction belonging to, or creative of, the ideal object of which your proposition undertakes to give an account. Construction actually shown is, then, the test. This actual construction must be also not only shown, but carefully surveyed in present experience, before your proof can be estimated. The object of which you speak may be, like π, or like the total collection of all possible rational numbers, or like the quantitative infinite in any form, an object that nobody amongst us men directly observes. But, nevertheless, the fashion of its construction, the type to which it conforms, the law of its nature, the receipt for manufacturing this object, must be capable of adequate presentation in the inner experience of the mathematician, if any exact result is to be obtained. And as thus presented, the basis of the mathematician’s reasoning becomes so far the study of inner experience. The object with which he directly deals is a thing present, seen, given, tested. As our American logician, Mr. Charles Peirce has well said, exact reasoning is a process of experiment performed upon an artificial object, an object made indeed by the mathematician, but observed by him just as truly as a star or as a physiological process is observed by the student of another science, experimented upon just as truly as one experiments in a laboratory.^[3] But the marvel is that the present experience of the mathematician with his ideal object somehow warrants him in making assertions about an infinity of equally ideal objects which are not present to him, and which never will be present to any human being.

To illustrate, — suppose that a mathematician wants to prove something about the value of π, or about the universal laws of Arithmetic, or about the properties of a continuous function, or about the sum of an infinite series, or about the mathematical relationships of two infinite collections of ideal objects. What he is concerned to demonstrate, lies in the realm of the infinite, and of the eternally valid. And our direct experience gives us only the passing data and the fragmentary ideas of the moment. Does the mathematician then, like the rationalistic metaphysician of old, hereupon merely appeal to so-called first and fundamental principles? Does he write down axioms, and merely defy you to deny them? Does he assert a priori that this or that cannot or shall not be questioned? No, the modern mathematician has no dogmas. He waits for his facts. He asks you to construct, and then to observe these facts with him. What he does is to build up before your eyes something, as Mr. Peirce well says, that either is a diagram or else resembles one, — a collection of observable symbols, or of figures in space, arranged in a certain deliberately planned way. In brief, he shows you empirically present inner constructions. He builds up these artificial objects before your eyes, and then he experiments upon them, and asks you to watch the result of the experiment. This result he first reads off, with as much the sense that he is recording present facts of observation, as one would have who should observe, on the street, that yonder horse is in front of yonder cart. The difference so far is merely that the mathematician makes his empirical objects, and does not wait to see if ordinary natural processes will furnish them to him. His world, therefore, seems at first quite plastic. It is, as we have said, his fairyland. He plays with it. Yet none the less, as he plays, he observes the empirical results of his play. And while he does this, he is as much a student of given facts as is a chemist or a business man. The results of this observation are often unexpected. And once seen (just here lies the mystery of the realm of validity), — once seen, they are also seen to stand for unalterable truth. How this can be, is precisely our present problem. The mathematician, in his own exact way, is thus like Browning’s lover. His instant is an eternity. He sees in a transient moment. Every one of his glimpses of fact is like the flash of the moonlight on the water. Yet what he sees outlasts the ages of ages. But nothing in all this eternal validity of his outcome makes him less empirical in his actual scrutiny. The validity is to be eternal. But his form of his experience is precisely that of any other human creature of the instant’s flight. In examining his diagram, he is as faithful a watcher as the astronomer alone with his star. The mathematician has made his diagram, but he cannot wilfully alter its consequences. And they must first be seen. Then alone can they be believed. Here is the strange antithesis between the empirical form and the eternal content of the realm of mathematical validity.

The valid, then, even the eternally valid, enters our human consciousness through the narrow portals of the instant’s experience. Reasoning is an empirical process, whatever else it also is. One who observes the nature of a realm of abstractly possible experience, does so by reading off the structure of a presented experience. Necessity comes home to us men through the medium of a given fact. This is the general result of modern exact Logic. This is the outcome of the recent study of the bases of mathematical science.

And now, in a precisely similar way, the discovery of the more contingent, or, on occasion, of the more transient validity of the non-mathematical truths of the world of possible experience, has the same puzzling and twofold character. You examine, in the field or in the laboratory, a law of the physical world; you assure yourself that yonder ship observed out at sea is a reality; you find out the price of a commodity; you verify the credit of a business man. In any such case, what do you accomplish? What sort of Being do you assert, examine, establish? The answer is, — What you do is to test the validity of an idea about possible experience. You first predict that if you act so or so, if you watch the ship longer, if you make the scientific experiment under given conditions, if you offer the market price for the article, or if you attempt to negotiate the commercial paper, certain empirical results will follow, certain consequences will be experienced by you. This prediction is, for you, merely an assertion about possible perceptions, feelings, ideas. You will, under given conditions, see certain sights, hear certain words, touch certain tangible objects, — in brief, get the presence of certain empirical facts. This is all that you can find involved in very many of your statements about the Being of social and of physical realities. Having defined such ideas of possible experience, you then test them. If the result conforms to the expectation, you are so far content. You have then communed with Being. The Other that was sought appears to have been found.

But no, it is not wholly right to view the matter merely thus. For there are countless possible experiences that you never test, and that you still view as belonging to the realm of physical and of social validity. In fact, just when you express your own contentment with your tests, you transcend what you have actually succeeded in getting present to your experience. The ship has for you, even as a merely valid object in the context of Kant’s Mögliche Erfahrung, more Being than you have ever directly verified. If it had not, you would indeed call it a figment of imagination. The prices and credits of the commercial world involve far more numerous types of valid possible experience than any prudent merchant cares to test; for, if these facts are valid as they are conceived, their very Being includes possibilities of unwise investment and of bankruptcy, which the prudent business man recognizes only to avoid. In fact, since our whole voluntary life is selective, we all the time recognize possibilities of experience only to shun the testing of them.

And so, in sum, the ordinary world of possible experience has this twofold character. We prove that it is there by testing empirically, from moment to moment, the validity of our ideas about it; but our very belief in its Being means that we recognize its possession of far more validity than, in our private capacity, we shall ever test. It is thus with common sense, much as it was with mathematics. The mathematician finds his way in the eternal world by means of experiments upon the transient facts of his inner and ideal experience of this instant’s contents. The student of science or the plain man of everyday life believes himself to be dealing with a realm of validity far transcending his personal experience. But his only means of testing any concrete assertion about that world comes to him through the very fragmentary observation of what happens in his inner life from instant to instant.

To generalize, then, the problem so far furnished us by our Third Conception of Reality, we find this as our situation. Ask me how I discover, in a concrete case, the validity of my idea, how I make it out for certain that a given experience is possible; and then I have to answer, “By actual experience alone.” When I say then, “A given idea is certainly valid,” I primarily mean merely, “A given idea is fulfilled in actual present experience.” But if you ask me what I regard as the range of the realm of validity, and what I think to be the extent of possible experience, and of the truth of ideas, then I can only say that the range of valid possible experience is viewed by me as infinitely more extended than my actual human experience. From the mathematical point of view the realm of truth is in fact explicitly infinite. From the point of view of natural science and of common sense, the world of valid possible experience is not only far wider than our concrete human experience, but is interesting to us precisely because we can select from its wealth of possibilities those that we wish, as we say, to realize. Now what our Third Conception so far fails to explain to us is precisely the difference between the reality that is to be attributed to the valid truths that we do not get concretely verified in our own experience, and the reality observed by us when we do verify ideas.

In brief, What is a valid or a determinately possible experience at the moment when it is supposed to be only possible? What is a valid truth at the moment when nobody verifies its validity? When we ourselves find the possible experience, it is something living, definite, — yes, individual. When we ourselves verify a valid assertion, it is again something that plays a part in our individual process of living and observing. But when we speak of such truths as barely valid, as merely possible objects of experience, they appear once more as mere universals. Can these universals, not yet verified, consistently be regarded as possessing wholeness of Being?

Or again, we formerly criticised Realism and Mysticism alike because neither of them sufficiently took account of the fact that our ideas of Being and the Being of which we have ideas, must occupy essentially the same ontological position. If, as Realism had said, Being is real independently of ideas, we saw that then ideas are themselves realities independent of Being. And if, as Mysticism had said, ideas are unreal, we saw that the Absolute, which Mysticism undertook to seek, must be unreal in the same sense in which the ideas about it are unreal. Now the former criticism of Realism and of Mysticism must once more be applied to test the adequacy of our present conception. We must see whether validity means the same in our experience as it means when asserted of Being in general. Validity, so far as it has yet appeared in our account, is an ambiguous term. As applied to the ideas that we actually test, it means that they are concretely expressed in experience whenever we test them. As applied to the whole realm of valid truth in general, to the world of nature as not yet observed by us, or of mathematical truth not now present to us, it means that this realm somehow has a character that we still do not test, and that never gets exhaustively presented in our human experience. But what is this character?

Or, once more, in our concrete experience, the validity of an idea, once seen, tested, presented, gets what we then regard as an individual life and meaning, since it appears in our individual experience. But in the realm of Being in general this same validity appears universal, formal, — a mere general law. Now can this view be final? Can there be two sorts of Being, both known to us as valid, but the one individual, the other universal, the one empirical, the other merely ideal, the one present, the other barely possible, the one a concrete life, the other a pure form? Is not the world real in the same general sense in which our life in the world is real? Can Critical Rationalism escape the test already applied to its rivals? And if the test is applied, must not all Being prove to be pulsating with the same life of concrete experience? We shall see. History shows that the rigid world of the Platonic Ideas, when viewed by later speculation, began erelong to glow, like sunset clouds, with the light of the Divine presence; and Neo-Platonism already called the Ideas the thoughts of God. Shall there be possible experience in the realm of validity, and the Lord hath not known its meaning?

This is at present a mere query. Upon the rational answer to this query depends our whole religious philosophy.

Notes

1. That what I here call the Third Conception of Being was in essence Plato’s concept, was the thesis, as is well known, of Lotze — a thesis which has often been discussed. Teichmüller and Zeller agree in rejecting Lotze’s interpretation of Plato; and, in the main, I here follow their authority.
2. The Reine Erfahrung of Avenarius constantly strives to become something merely Immediate, but in vain, just because Avenarius is no mystic.
3. A similar view of the nature of the reasoning process is illustrated in the remarkable discussions that fill part of Mr. Bradley’s Principles of Logic.