Part 15 (1/2)
Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward kins.h.i.+p, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
Each a.s.serts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest, which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do the materials lend themselves under certain circ.u.mstances to aesthetic manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached. I mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of s.p.a.ce. In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself, and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is not lost.
Consider, for example, s.p.a.ce. It is a unit. No force can in any way break, wound, or tear it. It has no joints between which you can pa.s.s your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split, Try to make a hole in s.p.a.ce by annihilating an inch of it. To make a hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive through s.p.a.ce except what is itself spatial?
But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, s.p.a.ce in its parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each part is one again, but only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the s.p.a.ce between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a dumb-bell both unites and divides the two b.a.l.l.s. But the union and the division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out of the s.p.a.ce between, it unites them by keeping them out of the s.p.a.ce beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
Self-contradiction in s.p.a.ce could only ensue if one part tried to oust another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2] Beyond the parts we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the beyond is h.o.m.ogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law; so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from s.p.a.ce's womb.
Thus with s.p.a.ce our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the ego and of time. But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the standard set by our knowledge of s.p.a.ce is what governs our desire.[3]
Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised from other things and leave them unitary like the s.p.a.ce they fill?
Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we find the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins.
Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough. The laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get even that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be rationalized in some way.
But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of distinguis.h.i.+ng between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts of thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only differences, and ident.i.ties of thought the only ident.i.ties there are.
Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium quid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their existence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive, they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ calls for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268} in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling, as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost wholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, ”I am that I am,” and each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego, s.p.a.ce, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they possess.
It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction of the discontinuity. If the white must partake of s.p.a.ce, the heat of time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and s.p.a.ce, heat and time, mutually call for or help to create each other?
Yes; a few such _a priori_ couplings must be admitted. They are the axioms: no feeling except as occupying some s.p.a.ce and time, or as a moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like. But they are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill _this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pa.s.s over the facts of the world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the truth.
In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it, to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be the ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is absolute: ”Either--or!” Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or poorer without any intermediate degrees pa.s.sed over; just as my wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible living in the suns.h.i.+ne, the 'unb.u.t.toning after supper and sleeping upon benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all their sudden completeness.
Must we then think that the world that fills s.p.a.ce and time can yield us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty s.p.a.ce and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly derived from the fact that the world is _in_ s.p.a.ce and time and 'partakes' of them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening itself? Can we gain no antic.i.p.atory a.s.surance that what is to come will have no strangeness? Is there no subst.i.tute, in short, for life but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth and thickness?
In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense finds no difficulty in acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of s.p.a.ce and time?
To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as {271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at all. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe to me? By what insatiate conceit and l.u.s.t of intellectual despotism do I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the Lord's anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
And shall it be given before they are given? _Data! gifts!_ something to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all, and, by means of the time and s.p.a.ce of which our minds and they partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must pause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
{272}
Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpa.s.s! Data! facts that say, ”Hands off, till we are given”! possibilities we can't control! a banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world.
The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which G.o.ds take vengeance, is in temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an _intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod over the whole?