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THE PHILOSOPHY
OF FREEDOM
ORIGINAL UNEDITED EDITION
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Introduction copyright © Tom Last 2012
ISBN 978-1-105-94726-1
INTRODUCTION
This first English translation of Rudolf Steiner's Die
Philosophie der Freiheit has only been available if you were
fortunate enough to locate one of the rare 1916 books. For
this reason alone its seems appropriate to republish it now,
yet this edition is distinct in other ways. It is the only
translation sanctioned by Rudolf Steiner himself. The joint
translators, Prof. and Mrs. R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, were selected
for their outstanding qualifications.
“their thorough knowledge of philosophy and _ their
complete command of the German and English
languages enabling them to overcome the difficulty of
finding adequate English equivalents for the terms of
German Philosophy.” H. Collison, 1916 Editor’s Note, The
Philosophy of Freedom
R. F. Alfred Hoernlé was trained in philosophy at Oxford and
taught it at Harvard. He was familiar with the philosophical
issues of Steiner's day. A review of Hoernlé's book Studies in
Contemporary Metaphysics (1920) said he had a flexible and
assimilative mind and:
“He has had quite exceptional opportunities for seeing
contemporary philosophies in the making and for
understanding, from personal experience, how far a set
of philosophical opinions can bear transplanting from
one country to another... a very staunch believer in the
truth of the philosophical tradition.” 1921 Oxford
University Press
This Hoernlé translation is based on the original, unrevised
German Die Philosophie der Freiheit published in 1894. The
other translations, available up to now, are not based on the
original Die Philosophie der Freiheit, instead they are based
on the 1918 revised edition. Rudolf Steiner revised the
original German text twenty-five years after it was originally
published. The Hoernlé translation is also unique to the extent
that later translations have been influenced by the thought
and terminology of theosophy and spiritual science.
To explain why The Philosophy of freedom was revised and
came under the influence of theosophy it is necessary to
understand the two different periods of Rudolf Steiner's life.
The first is his ascent to freedom that began with training in
mathematics, science, and philosophy culminating in his
philosophy of life founded upon individualistic truth and
ethical individualism. The Philosophy of Freedom describes his
path to freedom and contains the ideas he formed in this first
period. In the second period of his life Steiner converted to
theosophy and began speaking of his clairvoyant research into
spiritual realms.
Steiner intended that this first period, as it is expressed in The
Philosophy of Freedom, stand independent of his later work in
theosophy and spiritual science. In 1906 he says:
"You will find nothing at all in The Philosophy of
Freedom that is derived from _ clairvoyant
communications of spiritual science. It is written for
the express purpose of disciplining thinking without
any mention of theosophy." Rudolf Steiner, Berlin Oct. 20,
1906
Rudolf Steiner's original aim in The Philosophy of Freedom is to
justify individualistic truth. This is presented in Chapter I, The
Aim of Knowledge, that was part of the original 1894 edition:
“Tt is no longer enough merely to believe, we want to
know. Belief demands the acceptance of truths that are
not quite clear to us. But the individuality that seeks to
experience everything in the depths of its own being, is
repelled by what it cannot understand. The only
knowing that satisfies us is one that does not submit to
outer norms, but rather springs from the inner life of
the personality.” Rudolf Steiner, in the original Philosophy of
Freedom, Chapter I, The Aim of Knowledge.
In 1900 Steiner entered the second period of his life and his
work took a new direction. He began lecturing on his
clairvoyant research into spiritual realms to the Theosophical
Society (later in the Anthroposophical Society that he started
with a group of theosophists). Before this, Steiner seemed
willing to speak to any group on a variety of topics, but now
he gave lectures regularly on spiritual science to members of
the Theosophical Society. This new direction likely led to his
revising Die Philosophie der Freiheit in 1918 for the benefit of
his theosophy followers who he regularly encouraged to read
the book, but without much success as they were having great
difficulty with it.
“Changes of text have been made only where it
appeared to me that I had said clumsily what I meant
to say a quarter of a century ago.” Rudolf Steiner, 1918
Preface to the Revised Edition
The principles of individualistic truth found in the first
chapter of the original Die Philosophie der Freiheit were
removed and replaced with a new preface giving the book a
new aim, that of justifying his later research into the spiritual
realm. Steiner explains in the new preface added in 1918:
“The aim of this book is to demonstrate, prior to our
entry upon spiritual experience, that knowledge of the
spiritual world is justified.” Rudolf Steiner, 1918 Preface to
the Revised Edition
Other 1918 revisions included the books fundamental opening
“question of freedom” which was revised to include a
theosophy based preconception with the addition of “spiritual
being”:
1894 original: Ist der Mensch in seinem Denken und
Handeln frei.,...
1918 revision: Ist der Mensch in seinem Denken und
Handeln [ein geistig freies Wesen]...
1894 original: Is man, in his thinking and action free,...
1918 revision: Is man, in his thinking and action [a
spiritually free being].,...
The circle of the Anthroposophical Society became the
authority to sanction and publish future translations after
Steiner's death in 1925. The encroachment of theosophy
continued in 1936 with revisions made to the Hoernlé
translation by theosophist/ anthroposophist Hermann
Poppelbaum, Director of the Anthroposophical Society, such
as always translating “Geist” as “spirit” rather than “mind”.
While recognizing the excellence of the Hoernlé translation,
Poppelbaum's aim was to correct it according to the Society’s
developing perspective on Steiner thought. Poppelbaum's
objective was to,
“check certain words and phrases from the strictly
Steiner point of view." 1939 The Philosophy Of Spiritual
Activity, Editor's Preface to the Fourth Edition
Theosophy enters again in 1964 with the popular Michael
Wilson translation:
“Any work describing Steiner's point of view in terms of
English philosophy would have to deal with the mind
as a central theme, but here our task is to introduce
readers to Steiner's concepts of spirit and soul.” Michael
Wilson, 1964 The Philosophy of Freedom, Introduction by translator
Michael Wilson
In 1995 Zen Buddhist and Anthroposophist Michael Lipson
brings a Zen philosophy to his translation by avoiding
attachment to words. Lipson's flexibility with words permits
him to re-title the book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path:
“By approaching Steiner through inadequate and
changing English terms, we are the more likely to face
the inadequacy of all terms, and leap to his meaning.”
Michael Lipson, 1995 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path,
Translator's Introduction
The unedited Die Philosophie der Freiheit and Hoernlé's first
English translation remain true to the individualistic mood of
thought out of which the book was originally written. This is
what makes the first edition of The Philosophy of Freedom
distinct from others. It was written for everyone who is
striving to “live and let live” as free human beings, including
those who may not have an interest in Steiner's later
spiritualistic writings.
“this book occupies a position completely independent
of my writings on actual spiritual scientific matters...
What I have said in this book may be acceptable even
to some who, for reasons of their own, refuse to have
anything to do with the results of my researches into
the spiritual realm.” Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom,
1918 Preface to the Revised Edition
May, 2011 TOM
LAST
THE PHILOSOPHY
OF FREEDOM
A MODERN PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
DEVELOPED BY SCIENTIFIC
METHODS
BY
RUDOLF STEINER
Ph.D. (Vienna)
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
Mrs. & Mrs. R. F. ALFRED HOERNLE
EDITED BY
H. COLLISON
1916
EDITOR'S NOTE
THE following pages are a translation of Dr. Steiner's
Philosophie der Freiheit, which was published in Germany some
twenty years ago. The edition was soon exhausted, and has
never been reprinted; copies are much sought after but very
difficult to obtain.
The popularity of Dr. Steiner's later works upon ethics,
mysticism and kindred subjects has caused people to forget his
earlier work upon philosophy in spite of the fact that he
makes frequent references to this book, and it contains the
germs of which many of his present views are the logical
outcome. For the above reasons, and with the author's
sanction, I have decided to publish a translation.
I have had the good fortune to have been able to secure as
joint translators Mrs. Hoernlé, who, after graduating in the
University of the Cape of Good Hope, continued her studies in
the Universities of Cambridge, Leipzig, Paris, and Bonn, and
her husband, Mr. R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, M.A., B.Sc. (Oxon),
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University,
U.S.A., formerly Jenkyns Exhibitioner, Balliol College, Oxford,
their thorough knowledge of philosophy and their complete
command of the German and English languages enabling them
to overcome the difficulty of finding adequate English
equivalents for the terms of German Philosophy.
I am glad to seize this opportunity of acknowledging my
indebtedness to these two, without whom this publication
could not have been undertaken.
March, 1916 HARRY
COLLISON
CONTENTS
THE THEORY OF FREEDOM
I. THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE
13
II. CONSCIOUS HUMAN ACTION
Ill. WHY THE DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE IS
FUNDAMENTAL
26
IV. THOUGHT AS THE INSTRUMENT OF
KNOWLEDGE
32
V. THE WORLD AS PERCEPT
45
VI. OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD
VIL. HUMAN INDIVIDUALITY
76
VUI. ARE THERE ANY LIMITS TO KNOWLEDGE?
THE REALITY OF FREEDOM
IX. THE FACTORS OF LIFE
94
X. THE IDEA OF FREEDOM
98
XI. MONISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM
XII. WORLD-PURPOSE AND LIFE-PURPOSE
(THE DESTINY OF MAN)
XIII. MORAL IMAGINATION
(DARWINISM AND MORALITY)
XIV. THE VALUE OF LIFE
18
61
81
115
(OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM)
XV. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GENUS
ULTIMATE QUESTIONS
XVI. THE CONSEQUENCES OF MONISM
162
135
157
THE THEORY OF FREEDOM
I
THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE
[1] I BELIEVE I am indicating correctly one of the
fundamental characteristics of our age when I say that, at the
present day, all human interests tend to centre in the cult of
human individuality. An energetic effort is being made to
shake off every kind of authority. Nothing is accepted as valid,
unless it springs from the roots of individuality. Everything
which hinders the individual in the full development of his
powers is thrust aside. The saying “Each one of us must
choose his hero in whose footsteps he toils up to Olympus” no
longer holds for us. We allow no ideals to be forced upon us.
We are convinced that in each of us, if only we probe deep
enough into the very heart of our being, there dwells
something noble, something worthy of development. We no
longer believe that there is a norm of human life to which we
must all strive to conform. We regard the perfection of the
whole as depending on the unique perfection of each single
individual. We do not want to do what anyone else can do
equally well. No, our contribution to the development of the
world, however trifling, must be something which, by reason
of the uniqueness of our nature, we alone can offer. Never
have artists been less concerned about rules and norms in art
than today. Each of them asserts his right to express, in the
creations of his art, what is unique in him. There are
dramatists who write in dialect rather than conform to the
standard diction which grammar demands.
[2] No better expression for these phenomena can be found
than this, that they result from the individual’s striving
towards freedom, developed to its highest pitch. We do not
want to be dependent in any respect, and where dependence
must be, we tolerate it only on condition that it coincides with
a vital interest of our individuality.
Note: The paragraph numbering indicates Rudolf Steiner's original
paragraphing in the German addition.
[3] Truth, too, will be sought in an age such as ours only in
the depths of human nature. Of the following two well-known
paths
described by Schiller, it is the second which will today be
found most useful:
Wahrheit suchen wir beide, du aussen im Leben, ich innen
In dem Herzen, und so findet sie jeder gewiss.
Ist das Auge gesund, so begegnet es aussen dem Schopfer;
Ist es das Herz, dann gewiss spiegelt es innen die Welt.
Truth seek we both — Thou in the life without thee and
around;
I in the heart within. By both can Truth alike be found.
The healthy eye can through the world the great creator track;
The healthy heart is but the glass which gives creation back.
BULWER
A truth which comes to us from without bears ever the stamp
of uncertainty. Conviction attaches only to what appears as
truth to each of us in our own hearts.
[4] Truth alone can give us confidence in developing our
powers. He who is tortured by doubts finds his powers lamed.
In a world of riddle of which baffles him, he can find no aim
for his activity.
[5] We no longer want to believe; we want to know. Belief
demands the acceptance of truths which we do not wholly
comprehend. But the individuality which seeks to experience
everything in the depths of its own being, is repelled by what
it cannot understand. Only that knowledge will satisfy us
which springs from the inner life of the personality, and
submits itself to no external norm.
[6] Again, we do not want any knowledge that has encased
itself once and for all in hide bound formulas, and which is
preserved in Encyclopedias valid for all time. Each of us
claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand,
from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to
a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty
in knowledge, but each in his own way.
[7] Our scientific doctrines, too, are no longer to be
formulated as if we were unconditionally compelled to accept
them. None of us would wish to give a scientific work a title
like Fichte's A Pellucid Account for the General Public concerning
the Real Nature of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Compel
the Readers to Understand. Nowadays there is no attempt to
compel anyone to understand. We claim no agreement with
anyone whom a distinct individual need does not drive to a
certain view. We do not seek nowadays to cram facts of
knowledge even into the immature human being, the child.
We seek rather to develop his faculties in such a way that his
understanding may depend no longer on our compulsion, but
on his will.
[8] I am under no illusion concerning the characteristics of
the present age. I know how many flaunt a manner of life
which lacks all individuality and follows only the prevailing
fashion. But I know also that many of my contemporaries
strive to order their lives in the direction of the principles I
have indicated. To them I would dedicate this book. It does
not pretend to offer the "only possible" way to Truth, it only
describes the path chosen by one whose heart is set upon
Truth.
[9] The reader will be led at first into somewhat abstract
regions, where thought must draw sharp outlines if it is to
reach secure conclusions. But he will also be led out of these
arid concepts into concrete life. I am fully convinced that one
cannot do without soaring into the ethereal realm of
abstraction, if one's experience is to penetrate life in all
directions. He who is limited to the pleasures of the senses
misses the sweetest enjoyments of life. The Oriental sages
make their disciples live for years a life of resignation and
asceticism before they impart to them their own wisdom. The
Western world no longer demands pious exercises and ascetic
practices as a preparation for science, but it does require a
sincere willingness to withdraw oneself awhile from the
immediate impressions of life, and to betake oneself into the
realm of pure thought.
[10] The spheres of life are many and for each there develop
a special science. But life itself is one, and the more the
sciences strive to penetrate deeply into their separate spheres,
the more they withdraw themselves from the vision of the
world as a living whole. There must be one supreme science
which seeks in the separate sciences the elements for leading
men back once more to the fullness of life. The scientific
specialist seeks in his studies to gain a knowledge of the world
and its workings. This book has a philosophical aim: science
itself is to be infused with the life of an organic whole. The
special sciences are stages on the way to this all-inclusive
science. A similar relationship is found in the arts. The
composer in his work employs the rules of the theory of
composition. This latter is an accumulation of principles,
knowledge of which is a necessary presupposition for
composing. In the act of composing, the rules of theory
become the servants of life, of reality. In exactly the same
sense philosophy is an art. All genuine philosophers have been
artists in concepts. Human ideas have been the medium of
their art, and scientific method their artistic technique.
Abstract thinking thus gains concrete individual life. Ideas
turn into life forces. We have no longer merely a knowledge
about things, but we have now made knowledge a real, self-
determining organism. Our consciousness, alive and active,
has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.
[11] How philosophy, as an art, is related to freedom; what
freedom is; and whether we do, or can, participate in it —
these are the principle problems of my book. All other
scientific discussions are put in only because they ultimately
throw light on these questions which are, in my opinion, the
most intimate that concern mankind. These pages offer a
"Philosophy of Freedom".
[12] All science would be nothing but the satisfaction of idle
curiosity did it not strive to enhance the existential value of
human personality. The true value of the sciences is seen only
when we have shown the importance of their results for
humanity. The final aim of the individuality can never be the
cultivation of any single faculty, but only the development of
all capacities which slumber within us. Knowledge has value
only in so far as it contributes to the all-round unfolding of
the whole nature of man.
[13] This book, therefore, does not conceive the relation
between science and life in such a way that man must bow
down before the world of ideas and devote his powers to its
service. On the contrary, it shows that he takes possession of
the world of ideas in order to use them for his human aims,
which transcend those of mere science.
[14] Man must confront ideas as master; lest he become
their slave.
II
CONSCIOUS HUMAN ACTION
[1] IS man free in action and thought, or is he bound by an
iron necessity? There are few questions on which so much
ingenuity has been expended. The idea of freedom has found
enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty.
There are those who, in their moral fervour, label anyone a
man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as
freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the
acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the
uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human
action and thought. One and the same thing is thus
proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity,
now as its most fatal illusion. Infinite subtlety has been
employed to explain how human freedom can be consistent
with determinism in nature of which man, after all, is a part.
Others have been at no less pains to explain how such a
delusion as this could have arisen. That we are dealing here
with one of the most important questions for life, religion,
conduct, science, must be clear to every one whose most
prominent trait of character is not the reverse of
thoroughness. It is one of the sad signs of the superficiality of
present-day thought, that a book which attempts to develop a
new faith out of the results of recent scientific research (David
Friedrich Strauss: Der alte und neue Glaube), has nothing
more to say on this question than these words:
"With the question of the freedom of the human will
we are not concerned. The alleged freedom of
indifferent choice has been recognized as an empty
illusion by every philosophy worthy of the name. The
determination of the moral value of human conduct
and character remains untouched by this problem."
It is not because I consider that the book in which it occurs
has any special importance that I quote this passage, but
because it seems to me to express the only view to which the
thought of the majority of our contemporaries is able to rise in
this matter. Every one who has grown beyond the
kindergarten-stage of science appears to know nowadays that
freedom cannot consist in choosing, at one's pleasure, one or
other of two possible courses of action. There is always, so we
are told, a perfectly definite reason why, out of several
possible actions, we carry out just one and no other.
[2] This seems quite obvious. Nevertheless, down to the
present days the main attacks of the opponents of freedom are
directed only against freedom of choice. Even Herbert
Spencer, in fact, whose doctrines are gaining ground daily,
says
"That every one is at liberty to desire or not to desire,
which is the real proposition involved in the dogma of
free will, is negatived as much by the analysis of
consciousness, as by the contents of the preceding
chapters" (The Principles of Psychology, Part IV, chap. ix,
par. 219).
Others, too, start from the same point of view in combating
the concept of free will. The germs of all the relevant
arguments are to be found as early as Spinoza. All that he
brought forward in clear and simple language against the idea
of freedom has since been repeated times without number, but
as a rule enveloped in the most sophisticated arguments, so
that it is difficult to recognize the straightforward train of
thought which is alone in question. Spinoza writes in a letter
of October or November 1674,
"I call a thing free which exists and acts from the pure
necessity of its nature, and I call that unfree, of which
the being and action are precisely and _ fixedly
determined by something else. Thus, e.g., God, though
necessary, is free because he exists only through the
necessity of his own nature. Similarly, God knows
himself and all else as free, because it follows solely
from the necessity of his nature that he knows all. You
see, therefore, that for me freedom consists not in free
decision, but in free necessity.
[3] But let us come down to created things which are
all determined by external causes to exist and to act in
a fixed and definite manner. To perceive this more
clearly, let us imagine a perfectly simple case. A stone,
for example, receives from an external cause acting
upon it a certain quantity of motion, by reason of
which it necessarily continues to move, after the impact
of the external cause has ceased. The continued motion
of the stone is due to compulsion, not to the necessity
of its own nature, because it requires to be defined by
the impact of an external cause. What is true here for
the stone is true also for every other particular thing,
however complicated and many-sided it may be,
namely, that everything is necessarily determined by
external causes to exist and to act in a fixed and
definite manner.
[4] Now, pray, assume that this stone during its
motion thinks and knows that it is striving to the best
of its power to continue in motion. This stone which is
conscious only of its striving and is by no means
indifferent, will believe that it is absolutely free, and
that it continues in motion for no other reason than its
own will to continue. Now this is that human freedom
which everybody claims to possess and which consists
in nothing but this, that men are conscious of their
desires, but ignorant of the causes by which they are
determined. Thus the child believes that he desires milk
of his own free will, the angry boy regards his desire
for vengeance as free, and the coward his desire for
flight. Again, the drunken man believes that he says of
his own free will what, sober again, he would fain have
left unsaid, and as this prejudice is innate all men, it is
difficult to free oneself from it. For, although
experience teaches us often enough that man least of
all can temper his desires, and that, moved by
conflicting passions, he perceives the better and
pursues the worse, yet he considers himself free
because there are some things which he desires less
strongly, and some desires which he can easily inhibit
through the recollection of something else which it is
often possible to recall."
[5] It is easy to detect the fundamental error of this view,
because it is so clearly and definitely expressed. The same
necessity by which a stone makes a definite movement as the
result of an impact, is said to compel a man to carry out an
action when impelled thereto by any cause. It is only because
man is conscious of his action, that he thinks himself to be its
originator. In doing so, he overlooks the fact that he is driven
by a cause which he must obey unconditionally. The error in
this train of thought is easily brought to light. Spinoza, and all
who think like him, overlook the fact that man not only is
conscious of his action, but also may become conscious of the
cause which guides him. Anyone can see that a child is not
free when he desires milk, nor the drunken man when he says
things which he later regrets. Neither knows anything of the
causes, working deep within their organisms, which exercise
irresistible control over them. But is it justifiable to lump
together actions of this kind with those in which a man is
conscious not only of his actions but also of their causes? Are
the actions of men really all of one kind? Should the act of a
soldier on the field of battle, of the scientific researcher in his
laboratory, of the statesman in the most complicated
diplomatic negotiations, be placed on the same level with that
of the child when he desires milk? It is, no doubt, true that it
is best to seek the solution of a problem where the conditions
are simplest. But lack of ability to see distinctions has before
now caused endless confusion. There is after all a profound
difference between knowing the motive of my action and not
knowing it. At first sight this seems a self-evident truth. And
yet the opponents of freedom never ask themselves whether a
motive of action which I recognize and understand, is to be
regarded as compulsory for me in the same sense as the
organic process which causes the child to cry for milk.
[6] Eduard van Hartmann, in his Phanomenologie des
Sittlichen Bewusstseins (p. 451) asserts that the human will
depends on two chief factors, the motives and the character. If
one regards men as all alike, or at any rate the differences
between them as negligible, then their will appears as
determined from without, viz., by the circumstances with
which they come in contact. But if one bears in mind that men
adopt an idea as the motive of their conduct, only if their
character is such that this idea arouses a desire in them, then
men appear as determined from within and not from without.
Now, because an idea, given to us from without, must first in
accordance with our characters be adopted as a motive, men
believe that they are free, i.e., independent of external
influences. The truth, however, according to Eduard von
Hartmann, is that
"even though we must first adopt an idea as a motive,
we do so not arbitrarily, but according to the
disposition of our characters, that is, we are anything
but free."
Here again the difference between motives, which I allow to
influence me only after I have consciously made them my
own, and those which I follow, without any clear knowledge
of them, is absolutely ignored.
[7] This leads us straight to the standpoint from which the
subject will be treated here. Have we any right to consider the
question of the freedom of the will by itself at all? And if not,
with what other question must it necessarily be connected?
[8] If there is a difference between conscious and
unconscious motives of action, then the action in which the
former issue should be judged differently from the action
which springs from blind impulse. Hence our first question
will concern this difference, and on the result of this inquiry
will depend what attitude we ought to take up towards the
question of freedom proper.
[9] What does it mean to have knowledge of the motives of
one's actions? Too little attention has been paid to this
question, because, unfortunately, man who is an indivisible
whole has always been torn asunder by us. The agent has
been divorced from the knower, whilst he who matters more
than everything else, viz., the man who acts because he
knows, has been utterly overlooked.
[10] It is said that man is free when he is controlled only by
his reason, and not by his animal passions. Or, again, that to
be free means to be able to determine one's life and action by
purposes and deliberate decisions.
[11] Nothing is gained by assertions of this sort. For the
question is just whether reason, purposes, and decisions
exercise the same kind of compulsion over a man as his
animal passions. If, without my doing, a rational decision
occurs in me with the same necessity with which hunger and
thirst happen to me, then I must needs obey it, and my
freedom is an illusion.
[12] Another form of expression runs: to be free means, not
that we can will what we will, but that we can do what we
will. This thought has been expressed with great clearness by
the poet-philosopher Robert Hamerling in his Atomistik des
Willens.
"Man can, it is true, do what he wills, but he cannot
will what he wills, because his will is determined by
motives! He cannot will what he wills? Let us consider
these phrases more closely. Have they any intelligible
meaning? Does freedom of the will, then, mean being
able to will without ground, without motive? What
does willing mean if not to have grounds for doing, or
striving to do, this rather than that? To will anything
without ground or motive would mean to will
something without willing it. The concept of motive is
indissolubly bound up with that of will. Without the
determining motive the will is an empty faculty; it is
the motive which makes it active and real. It is,
therefore, quite true that the human will is not 'free,'
inasmuch as its direction is always determined by the
strongest motive. But, on the other hand, it must be
admitted that it is absurd to speak, in contrast with this
'‘unfreedom,' of a conceivable 'freedom' of the will,
which would consist in being able to will what one
does not will" (Atomistik des Willens, p. 213 ff.).
[13] Here again only motives in general are mentioned,
without taking into account the difference between
unconscious and conscious motives. If a motive affects me,
and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the
"strongest" of its kind, then the idea of freedom ceases to have
any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a
thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it? The
primary question is, not whether I can do a thing or not when
impelled by a motive, but whether the only motives are such
as impel me with absolute necessity. If I must will something,
then I may well be absolutely indifferent as to whether I can
also do it. And if, through my character, or through
circumstances prevailing in my environment, a motive is
forced on me which to my thinking is unreasonable, then I
should even have to be glad if I could not do what I will.
[14] The question is, not whether I can carry out a decision
once made, but how I come to make the decision.
[15] What distinguishes man from all other organic beings is
his rational thought. Activity is common to him with other
organisms. Nothing is gained by seeking analogies in the
animal world to clear up the concept of freedom as applied to
the actions of human beings. Modern science loves these
analogies. When scientists have succeeded in finding among
animals something similar to human behaviour, they believe
they have touched on the most important question of the
science of man. To what misunderstandings this view leads is
seen, for example, in the book Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit,
by P. Ree, 1885, where, on page 5, the following remark on
freedom appears.
"It is easy to explain why the movement of a stone
seems to us necessary, while the volition of a donkey
does not. The causes which set the stone in motion are
external and visible, while the causes which determine
the donkey's volition are internal and _ invisible.
Between us and the place of their activity, there is the
skull cap of the ass... The causal nexus is not visible,
and is therefore thought to be non-existent. The
volition, it is explained, is, indeed, the cause of the
donkey's turning round, but is itself unconditioned; it is
an absolute beginning."
Here again human actions in which there is a consciousness of
the motives are simply ignored, for Ree declares, "that
between us and the sphere of their activity there is the skull
cap of the ass." As these words show, it has not so much as
dawned on Ree that there are actions, not indeed of the ass,
but of human beings, in which the motive, become conscious,
lies between us and the action. Ree demonstrates his blindness
once again a few pages further on, when he says, "we do not
perceive the causes by which our will is determined, hence we
think it is not causally determined at all."
[16] But enough of examples which prove that many argue
against freedom without knowing in the least what freedom
is.
[17] That an action of which the agent does not know why
he performs it, cannot be free goes without saying. But what
of the freedom of an action about the motives of which we
reflect? This leads us to the question of the origin and
meaning of thought. When we know what thought in general
means, it will be easier to see clearly the role which thought
plays in human action. As Hegel rightly says, "It is thought
which turns the soul, common to us and animals, into spirit."
Hence it is thought which we may expect to give to human
action its characteristic stamp.
[18] I do not mean to imply that all our actions spring only
from the sober deliberations of our reason. I am very far from
calling only those actions "human" in the highest sense, which
proceed from abstract judgments. But as soon as our conduct
rises above the sphere of the satisfaction of purely animal
desires, our motives are always shaped by thoughts. Love,
pity, and patriotism are motives of action which cannot be
analysed away into cold concepts of the understanding. It is
said that here the heart, the soul, hold sway. This is no doubt
true. But the heart and the soul create no motives. They
presuppose them. Pity enters my heart when the thought of a
person who arouses pity has appeared in my consciousness.
The way to the heart is through the head. Love is no
exception. Whenever it is not merely the expression of bare
sexual instinct, it depends on the thoughts we form of the
loved one. And the more we idealize the loved one in our
thoughts, the more blessed is our love. Here, too, thought is
the father of feeling. It is said that love makes us blind to the
failings of the loved one. But the opposite view can be taken,
namely that it is precisely for the good points that love opens
the eyes. Many pass by these good points without notice. One,
however, perceives them, and just because he does, love
awakens in his soul. What else has he done except perceive
what hundreds have failed to see? Love is not theirs, because
they lack the perception.
[19] From whatever point we regard the subject, it becomes
more and more clear that the question of the nature of human
action presupposes that of the origin of thought. I shall
therefore, turn next to this question.
Ill
WHY THE DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE
IS FUNDAMENTAL
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine halt, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammerden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
FAUST, I, 1112—1117.
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces.
Faust, Part I, Scene 2.
(Bayard Taylor's translation)
[1] IN these words Goethe expresses a trait which is deeply
ingrained in human nature. Man is not a self-contained unity.
He demands ever more than the world, of itself, offers him.
Nature has endowed us with needs, but left their satisfaction
to our own activity. However abundant the gifts which we
have received, still more abundant are our desires. We seem
born to dissatisfaction. And our desire for knowledge is but a
special instance of this unsatisfied striving. Suppose we look
twice at a tree. The first time we see its branches at rest, the
second time in motion. We are not satisfied with this
observation. Why, we ask, does the tree appear to us now at
rest, then in motion? Every glance at nature evokes in us a
multitude of questions. Every phenomenon we meet presents a
new problem to be solved. Every experience is to us a riddle.
We observe that from the egg there emerges a creature like
the mother animal, and we ask for the reason of the likeness.
We observe a living being grow and develop to a determinate
degree of perfection, and we seek the conditions of this
experience. Nowhere are we satisfied with the facts which
nature spreads out before our senses. Everywhere we seek
what we call the explanation of these facts.
[2] The something more which we seek in things, over and
above what is immediately given to us in them, splits our
whole being into two parts. We become conscious of our
opposition to the world. We oppose ourselves to the world as
independent beings. The universe has for us two opposite
poles: Self and World.
[3] We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as
soon as consciousness is first kindled in us. But we never cease
to feel that, in spite of all, we belong to the world, that there
is a connecting link between it and us, and that we are beings
within, and not without, the universe.
[4] This feeling makes us strive to bridge over this
opposition, and ultimately the whole spiritual striving of
mankind is nothing but the bridging of this opposition. The
history of our spiritual life is a continuous seeking after union
between ourselves and the world. Religion, Art, and Science
follow, one and all, this goal. The religious man seeks in the
revelation, which God grants him, the solution of the world
problem, which his Self, dissatisfied with the world of mere
phenomena, sets him as a task. The artist seeks to embody in
his material the ideas which are his Self, that he may thus
reconcile the spirit which lives within him and the outer
world. He too, feels dissatisfied with the world of mere
appearances, and seeks to mould into it that something more
which his Self supplies and which transcends appearances.
The thinker searches for the laws of phenomena. He strives to
master by thought what he experiences by observation. Only
when we have transformed the world-content into our
thought-content do we recapture the connection which we
had ourselves broken off. We shall see later that this goal can
be reached only if we penetrate much more deeply than is
often done into the nature of the scientist's problem. The
whole situation, as I have here stated it, meets us, on the stage
of history, in the conflict between the one-world theory, or
Monism, and the two-world theory or Dualism. Dualism pays
attention only to the separation between the Self and the
World, which the consciousness of man has brought about. All
its efforts consist in a vain struggle to reconcile these
opposites, which it calls now Mind and Matter, now Subject
and Object, now Thought and Appearance. The Dualist feels
that there must be a bridge between the two worlds, but is not
able to find it. Monism pays attention only to the unity and
tries either to deny or to slur over the opposites, present
though they are. Neither of these two points of view call
satisfy us, for they do not do justice to the facts. The Dualist
sees in Mind (Self) and Matter (World) two essentially
different entities, and cannot therefore understand how they
can interact with one another. How should Mind be aware of
what goes on in Matter, seeing that the essential nature of
Matter is quite alien to Mind? Or how in these circumstances
should Mind act upon Matter, so as to translate its intentions
into actions? The most absurd hypotheses have been
propounded to answer these questions. However, up to the
present the Monists are not in a much better position. They
have tried three different ways of meeting the difficulty.
Either they deny Mind and become Materialists; or they deny
Matter in order to seek their salvation as Spiritualists; or they
assert that, even in the simplest entities in the world, Mind
and Matter are indissolubly bound together, so that there is no
need to marvel at the appearance in man of these two modes
of existence, seeing that they are never found apart.
[5] Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of
the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin
with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the
world. Materialism, thus, begins with the thought of Matter or
material processes. But, in doing so, it is ipso facto confronted
by two different sets of facts, viz., the material world and the
thoughts about it. The Materialist seeks to make these latter
intelligible by regarding them as purely material processes. He
believes that thinking takes place in the brain, much in the
same way that digestion takes place in the animal organs. Just
as he ascribes mechanical, chemical, and organic processes to
Nature, so he credits her in certain circumstances with the
capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely
shifting the problem from one place to another. Instead of to
himself he ascribes the power of thought to Matter. And thus
he is back again at his starting-point. How does Matter come
to think of its own nature? Why is it not simply satisfied with
itself and content to accept its own existence? The Materialist
has turned his attention away from the definite subject, his
own self, and occupies himself with an indefinite shadowy
somewhat. And here the old problem meets him again. The
materialistic theory cannot solve the problem, it can only shift
it to another place.
[6] What of the Spiritualistic theory? The Spiritualist denies
Matter (the World) and regards it merely as a product of Mind
(the Self). He supposes the whole phenomenal word to be
nothing more than a fabric woven by Mind out of itself. This
conception of the world finds itself in difficulties as soon as it
attempts to deduce from Mind any single concrete
phenomenon. It cannot do so either in knowledge or in action.
If one would really know the external world, one must turn
one's eye outwards and draw on the fund of experience.
Without experience Mind can have no content. Similarly,
when it comes to acting, we have to translate our purposes
into realities with the help of material things and forces. We
are, therefore, dependent on the outer world. The most
extreme Spiritualist or, if you prefer it, Idealist, is Johann
Gottlieb Fichte. He attempts to deduce the whole edifice of
the world from the "Ego." What he has actually accomplished
is a magnificent thought-picture of the world, without any
empirical content. As little as it is possible for the Materialist
to argue the Mind away, just as little is it possible for the
Idealist to do without the outer world of Matter.
[7] A curious variant of Idealism is to be found in the theory
which F. A. Lange has put forward in his widely read History
of Materialism. He holds that the Materialists are quite right
in declaring all phenomena, including our thought, to be the
product of purely material processes, but, in turn, Matter and
its processes are for him themselves the product of our
thinking.
"The senses give us only the effects of things, not true
copies, much less the things themselves. But among
these mere effects we must include the senses
themselves together with the brain and the molecular
vibrations which we assume to go on there."
That is, our thinking is produced by the material processes,
and these by our thinking. Lange's philosophy is thus nothing
more than the philosophical analogon of the story of honest
Baron Munchhausen, who holds himself up in the air by his
own pigtail.
[8] The third form of Monism is that which finds even in the
simplest real (the atom) the union of both Matter and Mind.
But nothing is gained by this either, except that the question,
the origin of which is really in our consciousness, is shifted to
another place. How comes it that the simple real manifests
itself in a twofold manner, if it is an indivisible unity?
[9] Against all these theories we must urge the fact that we
meet with the basal and fundamental opposition first in our
own consciousness. It is we ourselves who break away from
the bosom of Nature and contrast ourselves as Self with the
World. Goethe has given classic expression to this in his essay
Nature. "Living in the midst of her (Nature) we are strangers
to her. Ceaselessly she speaks to us, yet betrays none of her
secrets." But Goethe knows the reverse side too: "Mankind is
all in her, and she in all mankind."
[10] However true it may be that we have estranged
ourselves from Nature, it is none the less true that we feel we
are in her and belong to her. It can be only her own life which
pulses also in us.
[11] We must find the way back to her again. A simple
reflection may point this way out to us. We have, it is true,
torn ourselves away from Nature, but we must none the less
have carried away something of her in our own selves. This
quality of Nature in us we must seek out, and then we shall
discover our connection with her once more. Dualism neglects
to do this. It considers the human mind as a spiritual entity
utterly alien to Nature and attempts somehow to hitch it on to
Nature. No wonder that it cannot find the coupling link. We
can find Nature outside of us only if we have first learnt to
know her within us. The Natural within us must be our guide
to her. This marks out our path of inquiry. We shall attempt
no speculations concerning the interaction of Mind and
Matter. We shall rather probe into the depths of our own
being, to find there those elements which we saved in our
flight from Nature.
[12] The examination of our own being must bring the
solution of the problem. We must reach a point where we can
say, "This is no longer merely ' I,' this is something which is
more than 'I.'"
[13] I am well aware that many who have read thus far will
not consider my discussion in keeping with "the present state
of science." To such criticism I can reply only that I have so
far not been concerned with any scientific results, but simply
with the description of what every one of us experiences in his
own consciousness. That a few phrases have slipped in about
attempts to reconcile Mind and the World has been due solely
to the desire to elucidate the actual facts. I have therefore
made no attempt to give to the expressions "Self," "Mind,"
"World," "Nature," the precise meaning which they usually
bear in Psychology and Philosophy. The ordinary
consciousness ignores the sharp distinctions of the sciences,
and so far my purpose has been solely to record the facts of
everyday experience. To object that the above discussions
have been unscientific would be like quarreling with the
reciter of a poem for failing to accompany every line at once
with aesthetic criticism. I am concerned, not with the way in
which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with
the way in which we experience it every moment of our lives.
IV
THOUGHT AS THE INSTRUMENT
OF KNOWLEDGE
[1] WHEN I observe how a billiard ball, when struck,
communicates its motion to another, I remain entirely without
influence on the process before me. The direction and velocity
of the motion of the second ball is determined by the direction
and velocity of the first. As long as I remain a mere spectator,
I can say nothing about the motion of the second ball until
after it has happened. It is quite different when I begin to
reflect on the content of my observations. The purpose of my
reflection is to construct concepts of the process. I connect the
concept of an elastic ball with certain other concepts of
mechanics, and consider the special circumstances which
obtain in the instance in question. I try, in other words, to add
to the process which takes place without any interference, a
second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere.
This latter process is dependent on me. This is shown by the
fact that I can rest content with the observation, and renounce
all search for concepts if I have no need of them. If, therefore,
this need is present, then I am not content until I have
established a definite connection among the concepts, ball,
elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., so that they apply to
the observed process in a definite way. As surely as the
occurrence of the observed process is independent of me, so
surely is the occurrence of the conceptual process dependent
on me.
[2] We shall have to consider later whether this activity of
mine really proceeds from my own independent being, or
whether those modern physiologists are right who say that we
cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the
thoughts and thought-connections determine, which happen
to be in our minds at any given moment. (Cp. Ziehen,
Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Jena, 1893, p.
171.) For the present we wish merely to establish the fact that
we constantly feel obliged to seek for concepts and
connections of concepts, which stand in definite relation to
the objects and processes which are given independently of us.
Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we are
determined to it by an unalterable necessity, is a question
which we need not decide at present. What is unquestionable
is that the activity appears, in the first instance, to be ours.
We know for certain that concepts are not given together with
the objects to which they correspond. My being the agent in
the conceptual process may be an illusion; but there is no
doubt that to immediate observation I appear to be active.
Our present question is: what do we gain by supplementing a
process with a conceptual counterpart?
[3] There is a far-reaching difference between the ways in
which, for me, the parts of a process are related to one
another before, and after, the discovery of the corresponding
concepts. Mere observation can trace the parts of a given
process as they occur, but their connection remains obscure
without the help of concepts. I observe the first billiard ball
move towards the second in a certain direction and with a
certain velocity. What will happen after the impact I cannot
tell in advance. I can once more only watch it happen with my
eyes. Suppose some one obstructs my view of the field where
the process is happening, at the moment when the impact
occurs, then, as mere spectator, I remain ignorant of what
goes on. The situation is very different, if prior to the
obstructing of my view I have discovered the concepts
corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can say
what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. There
is nothing in a merely observed process or object to show its
relation to other processes or objects. This relation becomes
manifest only when observation is combined with thought.
[4] Observation and thought are the two points of departure
for all the spiritual striving of man, in so far as he is conscious
of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the
most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two
fundamental pillars of our minds. Philosophers have started
from various ultimate antitheses, Idea and Reality, Subject
and Object, Appearance and Thing-in-itself, Ego and Non-Ego,
Idea and Will, Matter and Mind, Matter and Force, the
Conscious and the Unconscious. It is, however, easy to show
that all these antitheses are subsequent to that between
observation and thought, this being for man the most
important.
[5] Whatever principle we choose to lay down, we must
prove that somewhere we have observed it, or we must
enunciate it in the form of a clear concept which can be
rethought by any other thinker. Every philosopher who sets
out to discuss his fundamental principles, must express them
in conceptual form and thus use thought. He therefore
indirectly admits that his activity presupposes thought. We
leave open here the question whether thought or something
else is the chief factor in the development of the world. But it
is at any rate clear that the philosopher can gain no
knowledge of this development without thought. In the
occurrence of phenomena thought may play a secondary part,
but it is quite certain that it plays a chief part in the
construction of a theory about them.
[6] As regards observation, our need of it is due to our
organization. Our thought about a horse and the object "horse"
are two things which for us have separate existences. The
object is accessible to us only by means of observation. As
little as we can construct a concept of a horse by mere staring
at the animal, just as little are we able by mere thought to
produce the corresponding object.
[7] In time observation actually precedes thought. For we
become familiar with thought itself in the first instance by
observation. It was essentially a description of an observation
when, at the beginning of this chapter, we gave an account of
how thought is kindled by an objective process and transcends
the merely given. Whatever enters the circle of our
experiences becomes an object of apprehension to us first
through observation. All contents of sensations, all
perceptions, intuitions, feelings, acts of will, dreams and
fancies, images, concepts, ideas, all illusions and
hallucinations, are given to us through observation.
[8] But thought as an object of observation differs essentially
from all other objects. The observation of a table, or a tree,
occurs in me as soon as those objects appear within the
horizon of my field of consciousness. Yet I do not, at the same
time, observe my thought about these things. I observe the
table, but I carry on a process of thought about the table
without, at the same moment, observing this thought-process.
I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity, if
I want to observe my thought about the table, as well as the
table. Whereas the observation of things and processes, and
the thinking about them, are everyday occurrences making up
the continuous current of my life, the observation of the
thought-process itself is an exceptional attitude to adopt. This
fact must be taken into account, when we come to determine
the relations of thought as an object of observation to all other
objects. We must be quite clear about the fact that, in
observing the thought-processes, we are applying to them a
method, which is our normal attitude in the study of all other
objects in the world, but which in the ordinary course of that
study is usually not applied to thought itself.
[9] Some one might object that what I have said about
thinking applies equally to feeling and to all other mental
activities. Thus it is said that when, e.g., I have a feeling of
pleasure, the feeling is kindled by the object, but it is this
object I observe, not the feeling of pleasure. This objection
however is based on an error. Pleasure does not stand at all in
the same relation to its object as the concept constructed by
thought. I am conscious, in the most positive way, that the
concept of a thing is formed through my activity; whereas a
feeling of pleasure is produced in me by an object in a way
similar to that in which, e.g., a change is caused in an object
by a stone which falls on it. For observation, a pleasure is
given in exactly the same way as the event which causes it.
The same is not true of concepts. I can ask why an event
arouses in me a feeling of pleasure. But I certainly cannot ask
why an occurrence causes in me a certain number of concepts.
The question would be simply meaningless. In thinking about
an occurrence, I am not concerned with it as an effect on me. I
learn nothing about myself from knowing the concepts which
correspond to the observed change caused to a pane of glass
by a stone thrown against it. But I do learn something about
myself when I know the feeling which a certain occurrence
arouses in me. When I say of an object which I perceive "this
is a rose," I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I
say of the same thing that "it causes a feeling of pleasure in
me," I characterize not only the rose, but also myself in my
relation to the rose.
[10] There can, therefore, be no question of putting thought
and feeling on a level as objects of observation. And the same
could easily be shown of other activities of the human mind.
Unlike thought, they must be classed with any other observed
objects or events. The peculiar nature of thought lies just in
this, that it is an activity which is directed solely on the
observed object and not on the thinking subject. This is
apparent even from the way in which we express our thoughts
about an object, as distinct from our feelings or acts of will.
When I see an object and recognize it as a table, I do not as a
rule say "I am thinking of a table," but "this is a table." On the
other hand, I do say "I am pleased with the table." In the
former case, I am not at all interested in stating that I have
entered into a relation with the table; whereas, in the second
case, it is just this relation which matters. In saying "I am
thinking of a table," I adopt the exceptional point of view
characterized above, in which something is made the object of
observation which is always present in our mental activity,
without being itself normally an observed object.
[11] The peculiar nature of thought consists just in this, that
the thinker forgets his thinking while actually engaged in it. It
is not thinking which occupies his attention, but rather the
object of thought which he observes.
[12] The first point, then, to notice about thought is that it is
the unobserved element in our ordinary mental life.
[13] The reason why we do not notice the thinking which
goes on in our ordinary mental life is no other than this, that
it is our own activity. Whatever I do not myself produce
appears in my field of consciousness as an object; I contrast it
with myself as something the existence of which is
independent of me. It forces itself upon me. I must accept it as
the presupposition of my thinking. As long as I think about
the object, I am absorbed in it, my attention is turned on it. To
be thus absorbed in the object is just to contemplate it by
thought. I attend not to my activity, but to its object. In other
words whilst I am thinking, I pay no heed to my thinking
which is of my own making, but only to the object of my
thinking which is not of my making.
[14] I am, moreover, in exactly the same position when I
adopt the exceptional point of view and think of my own
thought-processes. I can never observe my present thought, I
can only make my past experiences of thought-processes
subsequently the objects of fresh thoughts. If I wanted to
watch my present thought, I should have to split myself into
two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking.
But this is impossible. I can only accomplish it in two separate
acts. The observed thought-processes are never those in which
I am actually engaged but others. Whether, for this purpose, I
make observations on my own former thoughts, or follow the
thought-processes of another person, or finally, as in the
example of the motions of the billiard balls, assume an
imaginary thought-process, is immaterial.
[15] There are two things which are incompatible with one
another: productive activity and the theoretical contemplation
of that activity. This is recognized even in the First Book of
Moses. It represents God as creating the world in the first six
days, and only after its completion is any contemplation of the
world possible: "And God saw everything that he had made
and, behold, it was very good." The same applies to our
thinking. It must be there first, if we would observe it.
[16] The reason why it is impossible to observe the thought-
process in its actual occurrence at any given moment, is the
same as that which makes it possible for us to know it more
immediately and more intimately than any other process in
the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the
characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the
process, in detail, takes place. What in the other spheres of
observation we can discover only indirectly, viz., the relevant
objective nexus and the relations of the individual objects,
that is known to us immediately in the case of thought. I do
not know off-hand why, for perception, thunder follows
lightning, but I know immediately, from the content of the
two concepts, why my thought connects the concept of
thunder with that of lightning. It does not matter for my
argument whether my concepts of thunder and lightning are
correct. The connection between the concepts I have is clear
to me, and that through the very concepts themselves.
[17] This transparent clearness in the observation of our
thought-processes is quite independent of our knowledge of
the physiological basis of thought. I am speaking here of
thought in the sense in which it is the object of our
observation of our own mental activity. For this purpose it is
quite irrelevant how one material process in my brain causes
or influences another, whilst I am carrying on a process of
thought. What I observe, in studying a thought-process, is not
which process in my brain connects the concept of thunder
with that of lightning, but what is my reason for bringing
these two concepts into a definite relation. Introspection
shows that, in linking thought with thought, I am guided by
their content not by the material processes in the brain. This
remark would be quite superfluous in a less materialistic age
than ours. Today, however, when there are people who
believe that, when we know what matter is, we shall know
also how it thinks, it is necessary to affirm the possibility of
speaking of thought without trespassing on the domain of
brain physiology. Many people today find it difficult to grasp
the concept of thought in its purity. Anyone who challenges
the account of thought which I have given here, by quoting
Cabanis' statement that "the brain secretes thoughts as the
liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc." simply does
not know of what I am talking. He attempts to discover
thought by the same method of mere observation which we
apply to the other objects that make up the world. But he
cannot find it in this way, because, as I have shown, it eludes
just this ordinary observation. Whoever cannot transcend
Materialism lacks the ability to throw himself into the
exceptional attitude I have described, in which he becomes
conscious of what in all other mental activity remains
unconscious. It is as useless to discuss thought with one who
is not willing to adopt this attitude, as it would be to discuss
colour with a blind man. Let him not imagine, however, that
we regard physiological processes as thought. He fails to
explain thought, because he is not even aware that it is there.
[18] For every one, however, who has the ability to observe
thought, and with good will every normal man has this
ability, this observation is the most important he can make.
For he observes something which he himself produces. He is
not confronted by what is to begin with a strange object, but
by his own activity. He knows how that which he observes has
come to be. He perceives clearly its connections and relations.
He gains a firm point from which he can, with well-founded
hopes, seek an explanation of the other phenomena of the
world.
[19] The feeling that he had found such a firm foundation,
induced the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, to base
the whole of human knowledge on the principle "I think,
therefore I am." All other things, all other processes, are
independent of me. Whether they be truth, or illusion, or
dream, I know not. There is only one thing of which I am
absolutely certain, for I myself am the author of its
indubitable existence; and that is my thought. Whatever other
origin it may have in addition, whether it come from God or
from elsewhere, of one thing I am sure, that it exists in the
sense that I myself produce it. Descartes had, to begin with,
no justification for reading any other meaning into his
principle. All he had a right to assert was that, in
apprehending myself as thinking, I apprehend myself, within
the world-system, in that activity which is most uniquely
characteristic of me. What the added words "therefore I am"
are intended to mean has been much debated. They can have
a meaning on one condition only. The simplest assertion I can
make of a thing is, that it is, that it exists. What kind of
existence, in detail, it has, can in no case be determined on
the spot, as soon as the thing enters within the horizon of my
experience. Each object must be studied in its relations to
others, before we can determine the sense in which we can
speak of its existence. An experienced process may be a
complex of percepts, or it may be a dream, an hallucination,
etc. In short, I cannot say in what sense it exists. I can never
read off the kind of existence from the process itself, for I can
discover it only when I consider the process in its relation to
other things. But this, again, yields me no knowledge beyond
just its relation to other things. My inquiry touches firm
ground only when I find an object, the reason of the existence
of which I can gather from itself. Such an object I am myself
in so far as I think, for I qualify my existence by the
determinate and self-contained content of my _ thought-
activity. From here I can go on to ask whether other things
exist in the same or in some other sense.
[20] When thought is made an object of observation,
something which usually escapes our attention is added to the
other observed contents of the world. But the usual manner of
observation, such as is employed also for other objects, is in
no way altered. We add to the number of objects of
observation, but not to the number of methods. When we are
observing other things, there enters among the world-
processes —among which I now include observation— one
process which is overlooked. There is present something
different from every other kind of process, something which is
not taken into account. But when I make an object of my own
thinking, there is no such neglected element present. For what
lurks now in the background is just thought itself over again.
The object of observation is qualitatively identical with the
activity directed upon it. This is another characteristic feature
of thought-processes. When we make them objects of
observation, we are not compelled to do so with the help of
something qualitatively different, but can remain within the
realm of thought.
[21] When I weave a tissue of thoughts round an
independently given object, I transcend my observation, and
the question then arises, what right have I to do this? Why do
I not passively let the object impress itself on me? How is it
possible for my thought to be relevantly related to the object?
These are questions which every one must put to himself who
reflects on his own thought-processes. But all these questions
lapse when we think about thought itself. We then add
nothing to our thought that is foreign to it, and therefore have
no need to justify any such addition.
[22] Schelling says: "To know Nature means to create
Nature." If we take these words of the daring philosopher of
Nature literally, we shall have to renounce for ever all hope of
gaining knowledge of Nature. For Nature after all exists, and if
we have to create it over again, we must know the principles
according to which it has originated in the first instance. We
should have to borrow from Nature as it exists the conditions
of existence for the Nature which we are about to create. But
this borrowing, which would have to precede the creating,
would be a knowing of Nature, and that even if after the
borrowing no creation at all were attempted. The only kind of
Nature which it would be possible to create without previous
knowledge, would be a Nature different from the existing one.
[23] What is impossible with Nature, viz., creation prior to
knowledge, that we accomplish in the act of thought. Were we
to refrain from thinking until we had first gained knowledge
of it, we should never think at all. We must resolutely think
straight ahead, and then afterwards by introspective analysis
gain knowledge of our own processes. Thus we ourselves
create the thought-processes which we then make objects of
observation. The existence of all other objects is provided for
us without any activity on our part.
[24] My contention that we must think before we can make
thought an object of knowledge, might easily be countered by
the apparently equally valid contention that we cannot wait
with digesting until we have first observed the process of
digestion. This objection would be similar to that brought by
Pascal against Descartes, when he asserted we might also say
"I walk, therefore I am." Certainly I must digest resolutely and
not wait until I have studied the physiological process of
digestion. But I could only compare this with the analysis of
thought if, after digestion, I set myself, not to analyse it by
thought, but to eat and digest it. It is not without reason that,
while digestion cannot become the object of digestion,
thought can very well become the object of thought.
[25] This then is indisputable, that in thinking we have got
hold of one bit of the world-process which requires our
presence if anything is to happen. And that is the very point
that matters. The very reason why things seem so puzzling is
just that I play no part in their production. They are simply
given to me, whereas I know how thought is produced. Hence
there can be no more fundamental starting-point than thought
from which to regard all world-processes.
[26] I should like still to mention a widely current error
which prevails with regard to thought. It is often said that
thought, in its real nature, is never experienced. The thought-
processes which connect our perceptions with one another,
and weave about them a network of concepts, are not at all
the same as those which our analysis afterwards extracts from
the objects of perception, in order to make them the object of
study. What we have unconsciously woven into things is, so
we are told, something widely different from what subsequent
analysis recovers out of them.
[27] Those who hold this view do not see that it is
impossible to escape from thought. I cannot get outside
thought when I want to observe it. We should never forget
that the distinction between thought which goes on
unconsciously and thought which is consciously analysed, is a
purely external one and irrelevant to our discussion. I do not
in any way alter a thing by making it an object of thought. I
can well imagine that a being with quite different sense-
organs, and with a differently constructed intelligence, would
have a very different idea of a horse from mine, but I cannot
think that my own thought becomes different because I make
it an object of knowledge. I myself observe my own processes.
We are not talking here of how my thought-processes appear
to an intelligence different from mine, but how they appear to
me. In any case, the idea which another mind forms of my
thought cannot be truer than the one which I form myself.
Only if the thought-processes were not my own, but the
activity of a being quite different from me, could I maintain
that, notwithstanding my forming a definite idea of these
thought-processes, their real nature was beyond my
comprehension.
[28] So far, there is not the slightest reason why I should
regard my thought from any other point of view than my own.
I contemplate the rest of the world by means of thought. How
should I make of my thought an exception?
[29] I think I have given sufficient reasons for making
thought the starting-point for my theory of the world. When
Archimedes had discovered the lever, he thought he could lift
the whole cosmos out of its hinges, if only he could find a
point of support for his instrument. He needed a point which
was self-supporting. In thought we have a principle which is
self-subsisting. Let us try, therefore, to understand the world
starting with thought as our basis. Thought can be grasped by
thought. The question is whether by thought we can also
grasp something other than thought.
[30] I have so far spoken of thought without taking any
account of its vehicle, the human consciousness. Most present-
day philosophers would object that, before there can be
thought, there must be consciousness. Hence we ought to
start, not from thought, but from consciousness. There is no
thought, they say without consciousness. In reply I would urge
that, in order to clear up the relation between thought and
consciousness, I must think about it. Hence I presuppose
thought. One might, it is true, retort that, though a
philosopher who wishes to understand thought, naturally
makes use of thought, and so far presupposes it, in the
ordinary course of life thought arises within consciousness
and therefore presupposes that. Were this answer given to the
world-creator, when he was about to create thought, it would,
without doubt, be to the point. Thought cannot, of course,
come into being before consciousness. The philosopher,
however, is not concerned with the creation of the world, but
with the understanding of it. Hence he is in search of the
starting-point, not for creation, but with the understanding of
the world. It seems to me very strange that philosophers are
reproached for troubling themselves, above all, about the
correctness of their principles, instead of turning straight to
the objects which they seek to understand. The world-creator
had above all to know how to find a vehicle for thought, the
philosopher must seek a firm basis for the understanding of
what is given. What does it help us to start with consciousness
and make it an object of thought, if we have not first inquired
how far it is possible at all to gain any knowledge of things by
thought?
[31] We must first consider thought quite impartially
without relation to a thinking subject or to an object of
thought. For subject and object are both concepts constructed
by thought. There is no denying that thought must be
understood before anything else can be understood. Whoever
denies this, fails to realise that man is not the first link in the
chain of creation but the last. Hence, in order to explain the
world by means of concepts, we cannot start from the
elements of existence which came first in time, but we must
begin with those which are nearest and most intimately
connected with us. We cannot, with a leap, transport
ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our
analysis there, but we must start from the present and see
whether we cannot advance from the later to the earlier. As
long as Geology fabled fantastic revolutions to account for the
present state of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only
when it began to study the processes at present at work on the
earth, and from these to argue back to the past, that it gained
a firm foundation. As long as Philosophy assumes all sorts of
principles, such as atom, motion, matter, will, the
unconscious, it will hang in the air. The philosopher can reach
his goal only if he adopts that which is last in time as first in
his theory. This absolutely last in the world-process is
thought.
[32] There are people who say it is impossible to ascertain
with certainty whether thought is right or wrong, and that, so
far, our starting-point is a doubtful one. It would be just as
intelligent to raise doubts as to whether a tree is in itself right
or wrong. Thought is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of
the truth or falsity of a fact. I can, at most, be in doubt as to
whether thought is rightly employed, just as I can doubt
whether a certain tree supplies wood adapted to the making of
this or that useful object. It is just the purpose of this book to
show how far the application of thought to the world is right
or wrong. I can understand anyone doubting whether, by
means of thought, we can gain any knowledge of the world,
but it is unintelligible to me how anyone can doubt that
thought in itself is right.
V
THE WORLD AS PERCEPT
[1] THE products of thinking are concepts and ideas. What a
concept is cannot be expressed in words. Words can do no
more than draw our attention to the fact that we have
concepts. When some one perceives a tree, the perception acts
as a stimulus for thought. Thus an ideal element is added to
the perceived object, and the perceiver regards the object and
its ideal complement as belonging together. When the object
disappears from the field of his perception, the ideal
counterpart alone remains. This latter is the concept of the
object. The wider the range of our experience, the larger
becomes the number of our concepts. Moreover, concepts are
not by any means found in isolation one from the other. They
combine to form an ordered and systematic whole. The
concept "organism," e.g., combines with those of "development
according to law," "growth," and others. Other concepts based
on particular objects fuse completely with one another. All
concepts formed from particular lions fuse in the universal
concept "lion." In this way, all the separate concepts combine
to form a closed, conceptual system within which each has its
special place. Ideas do not differ qualitatively from concepts.
They are but fuller, more saturated, more comprehensive
concepts. I attach special importance to the necessity of
bearing in mind here, that I make thought my starting-point,
and not concepts and ideas which are first gained by means of
thought. These latter presuppose thought. My remarks
regarding the self-dependent, self-sufficient character of
thought cannot, therefore, be simply transferred to concepts.
(I make special mention of this, because it is here that I differ
from Hegel, who regards the concept as something primary
and ultimate.)
[2] Concepts cannot be derived from perception. This is
apparent from the fact that, as man grows up, he slowly and
gradually builds up the concepts corresponding to the objects
which surround him. Concepts are added to perception.
[3] A philosopher, widely read at the present day (Herbert
Spencer), describes the mental process which we perform
upon perception as follows:
[4] "If, when walking through the fields some day in
September, you hear a rustle a few yards in advance,
and on observing the ditch-side where it occurs, see the
herbage agitated, you will probably turn towards the
spot to learn by what this sound and motion are
produced. As you approach there flutters into the ditch
a partridge; on seeing which your curiosity is satisfied
—you have what you call an explanation of the
appearances. The explanation, mark, amounts to this—
that whereas throughout life you have had countless
experiences of disturbance among small stationary
bodies, accompanying the movement of other bodies
among them, and have generalized the relation
between such disturbances and such movements, you
consider this particular disturbance explained on
finding it to present an instance of the like relation"
(First Principles, Part I, par. 23).
A closer analysis leads to a very different description from
that here given. When I hear a noise my first demand is for
the concept which fits this percept. Without this concept the
noise is to me a mere noise. Whoever does not reflect further,
hears just the noise and is satisfied with that. But my thought
makes it clear to me that the noise is to be regarded as an
effect. Thus it is only when I combine the concept of effect
with the percept of a noise that I am led to go beyond the
particular percept and seek for its cause. The concept of
"effect" calls up that of "cause," and my next step is to look for
the agent, which I find, say, in a partridge. But these concepts,
cause and effect, can never be gained through mere
perception, however many instances we bring under review.
Perception evokes thought, and it is this which shows me how
to link separate experiences together.
[5] If one demands of a "strictly objective science" that it
should take its data from perception alone, one must demand
also that it abandon all thought. For thought, by its very
nature, transcends the objects of perception.
[6] It is time now to pass from thought to the thinker. For it
is through the thinker that thought and perception are
combined. The human mind is the stage on which concept and
percept meet and are linked to one another. In saying this, we
already characterize this (human) consciousness. It mediates
between thought and perception. In perception the object
appears as given, in thought the mind seems to itself to be
active. It regards the thing as object and itself as the thinking
subject. When thought is directed upon the perceptual world
we have consciousness of objects; when it is directed upon
itself we have self-consciousness. Human consciousness must,
of necessity, be at the same time self-consciousness, because it
is a consciousness which thinks. For when thought
contemplates its own activity it makes an object for study of
its own essential nature, it makes an object of itself as subject.
[7] It is important to note here that it is only by means of
thought that I am able to determine myself as subject and
contrast myself with objects. Therefore thoughts must never
be regarded as a merely subjective activity. Thinking
transcends the distinction of subject and object. It produces
these two concepts just as it produces all others. When,
therefore, I, as thinking subject, refer a concept to an object,
we must not regard this reference as something purely
subjective. It is not the subject, but thought, which makes the
reference. The subject does not think because it is a subject,
rather it conceives itself to be a subject because it can think.
The activity of consciousness, in so far as it thinks, is thus not
merely subjective. Rather it is neither subjective nor objective;
it transcends both these concepts. I ought never to say that I,
as an individual subject, think, but rather that I, as subject,
exist myself by the grace of thought. Thought thus takes me
out of myself and relates me to objects. At the same time it
separates me from them, inasmuch as I, as subject, am set
over against the objects.
[8] It is just this which constitutes the double nature of man.
His thought embraces himself and the rest of the world. But
by this same act of thought he determines himself also as an
individual, in contrast with the objective world.
[9] We must next ask ourselves how the other element,
which we have so far simply called the perceptual object and
which comes, in consciousness, into contact with thought,
enters into thought at all?
[10] In order to answer this question we must eliminate
from the field of consciousness everything which has been
imported by thought. For, at any moment, the content of
consciousness is always shot through with concepts in the
most various ways.
[11] Let us assume that a being with fully developed human
intelligence originated out of nothing and confronted the
world. All that it there perceived before its thought began to
act would be the pure content of perception. The world so far
would appear to this being as a mere chaotic aggregate of
sense-data, colours, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth,
of taste, of smell, and, lastly, feelings of pleasure and pain.
This mass constitutes the world of pure unthinking perception.
Over against it stands thought, ready to begin its activity as
soon as it can find a point of attack. Experience shows that the
opportunity is not long in coming. Thought is able to draw
threads from one sense-datum to another. It brings definite
concepts to bear on these data and thus establishes a relation
between them. We have seen above how a noise which we
hear is connected with another content by our identifying the
first as the effect of the second.
[12] If now we recollect that the activity of thought is on no
account to be considered as merely subjective, then we shall
not be tempted to believe that the relations thus established
by thought have merely subjective validity.
[13] Our next task is to discover by means of thought what
relation the above-mentioned immediate sense-data have to
the conscious subject.
[14] The ambiguity of current speech makes it advisable for
me to come to an agreement with my readers concerning the
meaning of a word which I shall have to employ in what
follows. I shall apply the name "percepts" to the immediate
sense-data enumerated above, in so far as the subject
consciously apprehends them. It is, then, not the process of
perception, but the object of this process which I call the
"percept."
[15] I reject the term "sensation," because this has a definite
meaning in Physiology which is narrower than that of my
term "percept." I can speak of feeling as a percept, but not as a
sensation in the physiological sense of the term. Before I can
have cognisance of my feeling it must become a percept for
me. The manner in which, through observation, we gain
knowledge of our thought-processes is such that when we first
begin to notice thought, it too may be called a percept.
[16] The unreflective man regards his percepts, such as they
appear to his immediate apprehension, as things having a
wholly independent existence. When he sees a tree he believes
that it stands in the form which he sees, with the colours of all
its parts, etc., there on the spot towards which his gaze is
directed. When the same man sees the sun in the morning
appear as a disc on the horizon, and follows the course of this
disc, he believes that the phenomenon exists and occurs (by
itself) exactly as he perceives it. To this belief he clings until
he meets with further percepts which contradict his former
ones. The child who has as yet had no experience of distance
grasps at the moon, and does not correct its first impression as
to the real distance until a second percept contradicts the first.
Every extension of the circle of my percepts compels me to
correct my picture of the world. We see this in everyday life,
as well as in the mental development of mankind. The picture
which the ancients made for themselves of the relation of the
earth to the sun and other heavenly bodies, had to be replaced
by another when Copernicus found that it contradicted
percepts which in those early days were unknown. A man who
had been born blind said, when operated on by Dr. Franz, that
the idea of the size of objects which he had formed before his
operation by his sense of touch was a very different one. He
had to correct his tactual percepts by his visual percepts.
[17] How is it that we are compelled to make these
continual corrections in our observations?
[18] A single reflection supplies the answer to this question.
When I stand at one end of an avenue, the trees at the other
end, away from me, seem smaller and nearer together than
those where I stand. But the scene which I perceive changes
when I change the place from which I am looking. The exact
form in which it presents itself to me is, therefore, dependent
on a condition which inheres, not in the object, but in me, the
percipient. It is all the same to the avenue where I stand. But
the picture of it which I receive depends essentially on my
standpoint. In the same way it makes no difference to the sun
and the planetary system that human beings happen to
perceive them from the earth; but the picture of the heavens
which human beings have is determined by the fact that they
inhabit the earth. This dependence of our percepts on our
points of observation is the easiest kind of dependence to
understand. The matter becomes more difficult when we
realize further that our perceptual world is dependent on our
bodily and mental organization. The physicist teaches us that
within the space in which we hear a sound there are
vibrations of the air, and that there are vibrations also in the
particles of the body which we regard as the cause of the
sound. These vibrations are perceived as sounds only if we
have normally constructed ears. Without them the whole
world would be for us for ever silent. Again, the physiologist
teaches us that there are men who perceive nothing of the
wonderful display of colours which surrounds us. In their
world there are only degrees of light and dark. Others are
blind only to one colour, e.g., red. Their world lacks this
colour tone, and hence it is actually a different one from that
of the average man. I should like to call the dependence of my
perceptual world on my point of observation "mathematical,"
and its dependence on my organization "qualitative." The
former determines proportions of size and mutual distances of
my percepts, the latter their quality. The fact that I see a red
surface as red —this qualitative determination— depends on
the structure of my eye.
[19] My percepts, then, are in the first instance subjective.
The recognition of the subjective character of our percepts
may easily lead us to doubt whether there is any objective
basis for them at all. When we know that a percept, e.g., that
of a red colour or of a certain tone, is not possible without a
specific structure of our organism, we may easily be led to
believe that it has no being at all apart from our subjective
organization, that it has no kind of existence apart from the
act of perceiving of which it is the object. The classical
representative of this theory is George Berkeley, who held that
from the moment we realize the importance of a subject for
perception, we are no longer able to believe in the existence
of a world apart from a conscious mind.
"Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind
that man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I
take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of
heaven and the furniture of the earth —in a word, all
those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the
world— have not any subsistence without a mind; that
their being is to be perceived or known; that
consequently, so long as they are not actually perceived
by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other
created spirit, they must either have no existence at all
or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit"
(Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part
I, Section 6).
On this view, when we take away the act of perceiving,
nothing remains of the percept. There is no colour when none
is seen, no sound when none is heard. Extension, form, and
motion exist as little as colour and sound apart from the act of
perception. We never perceive bare extension or shape. These
are always joined with colour, or some other quality, which is
undoubtedly dependent on the subject. If these latter
disappear when we cease to perceive, the former, being
connected with them, must disappear likewise.
[20] If it is urged that, even though figure, colour, sound,
etc., have no existence except in the act of perception, yet
there must be things which exist apart from perception and
which are similar to the percepts in our minds, then the view
we have mentioned would answer, that a colour can be
similar only to a colour, a figure to a figure. Our percepts can
be similar only to our percepts and to nothing else. Even what
we call a thing is nothing but a collection of percepts which
are connected in a definite way. If I strip a table of its shape,
extension, colour, etc. —in short, of all that is merely my
percepts— then nothing remains over. If we follow this view
to its logical conclusion, we are led to the assertion that the
objects of my perceptions exist only through me, and that only
in as far as, and as long as, I perceive them. They disappear
with my perceiving and have no meaning apart from it. Apart
from my percepts I know of no objects and cannot know of
any.
[21] No objection can be made to this assertion as long as
we take into account merely the general fact that the percept
is determined in part by the organization of the subject. The
matter would be far otherwise if we were in a position to say
what part exactly is played by our perceiving in the
occurrence of a percept. We should know then what happens
to a percept whilst it is being perceived, and we should also
be able to determine what character it must possess before it
comes to be perceived.
[22] This leads us to turn our attention from the object of a
perception to the subject of it. I am aware not only of other
things but also of myself. The content of my perception of
myself consists, in the first instance, in that I am something
stable in contrast with the ever coming and going flux of
percepts. The awareness of myself accompanies in my
consciousness the awareness of all other percepts. When I am
absorbed in the perception of a given object I am, for the time
being, aware only of this object. Next I become aware also of
myself. I am then conscious, not only of the object, but also of
my Self as opposed to and observing the object. I do not
merely see a tree, I know also that it is I who see it. I know,
moreover, that some process takes place in me when I observe
a tree. When the tree disappears from my field of vision, an
after-effect of this process remains, viz., an image of the tree.
This image has become associated with my Self during my
perception. My Self has become enriched; to its content a new
element has been added. This element I call my idea of the
tree. I should never have occasion to talk of ideas, were I not
aware of my own Self. Percepts would come and go; I should
let them slip by. It is only because I am aware of my Self, and
observe that with each perception the content of the Self is
changed, that I am compelled to connect the perception of the
object with the changes in the content of my Self, and to
speak of having an idea.
[23] That I have ideas is in the same sense matter of
observation to me as that other objects have colour, sound,
etc. I am now also able to distinguish these other objects,
which stand over against me, by the name of the outer world,
whereas the contents of my perception of my Self form my
inner world. The failure to recognize the true relation between
idea and object has led to the greatest misunderstandings in
modern philosophy. The fact that I perceive a change in
myself, that my Self undergoes a modification, has been thrust
into the foreground, whilst the object which causes these
modifications is altogether ignored. In consequence it has
been said that we perceive not objects, but only our ideas. 1
know, so it is said, nothing of the table in itself, which is the
object of my perception, but only of the changes which occur
within me when I perceive a table. This theory should not be
confused with the Berkeleyan theory mentioned above.
Berkeley maintains the subjective nature of my perceptual
contents, but he does not say that I can know only my own
ideas. He limits my knowledge to my ideas because, on his
view, there are no objects other than ideas. What I perceive as
a table no longer exists, according to Berkeley, when I cease
to look at it. This is why Berkeley holds that our percepts are
created directly by the omnipotence of God. I see a table
because God causes this percept in me. For Berkeley,
therefore, nothing is real except God and human spirits. What
we call the "world" exists only in spirits. What the naive man
calls the outer world, or material nature, is for Berkeley non-
existent. This theory is confronted by the now predominant
Kantian view which limits our knowledge of the world to our
ideas, not because of any conviction that nothing beyond
these ideas exists, but because it holds that we are so
organized that we can have knowledge only of the changes
within our own selves, not of the things-in-themselves, which
are the causes of these changes. This view concludes from the
fact that I know only my own ideas, not that there is no
reality independent of them, but only that the subject cannot
have direct knowledge of such reality. The mind can merely
"through the medium of its subjective thoughts imagine it,
conceive it, know it, or perhaps also fail to know it" (O.
Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, p. 28). Kantians
believe that their principles are absolutely certain, indeed
immediately evident, without any proof.
"The most fundamental principle which the philosopher
must begin by grasping clearly, consists in the
recognition that our knowledge, in the first instance,
does not extend beyond our ideas. Our ideas are all that
we immediately have and experience, and just because
we have immediate experience of them the most
radical doubt cannot rob us of this knowledge. On the
other hand, the knowledge which transcends my ideas
—taking ideas here in the widest possible sense, so as
to include all psychical processes— is not proof against
doubt. Hence, at the very beginning of all philosophy
we must explicitly set down all knowledge which
transcends ideas as open to doubt."
These are the opening sentences of Volkelt's book on Kant's
Theory of Knowledge. What is here put forward as an
immediate and self-evident truth is, in reality, the conclusion
of a piece of argument which runs as follows. Naive common
sense believes that things, just as we perceive them, exist also
outside our minds. Physics, Physiology, and Psychology,
however, teach us that our percepts are dependent on our
organization, and that therefore we cannot know anything
about external objects except what our organization transmits
to us. The objects which we perceive are thus modifications of
our organization, not things-in-themselves. This line of
thought has, in fact, been characterized by Ed. von Hartmann
as the one which leads necessarily to the conviction that we
can have direct knowledge only of our own ideas (cp. his
Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, pp. I 6-40). Because
outside our organisms we find vibrations of particles and of
air, which are perceived by us as sounds, it is concluded that
what we call sound is nothing more than a subjective reaction
of our organisms to these motions in the external world.
Similarly, colour and heat are inferred to be merely
modifications of our organisms. And, further, these two kinds
of percepts are held to be the effects of motions in an
infinitely fine material, ether, which fills all interstellar space.
When the vibrations of this ether stimulate the nerves in the
skin of my body, I perceive heat; when they stimulate the
optical nerve I perceive light and colour. Light, colour, and
heat, then, are the reactions of my sensory nerves to external
stimuli. Similarly, the sense of touch reveals to me, not the
objects of the outer world, but only states of my own body.
The physicist holds that bodies are composed of infinitely
small particles called molecules, and that these molecules are
not in direct contact with one another, but have definite
intervals between them. Between them, therefore, is empty
space. Across this space they act on one another by attraction
and repulsion. If I put my hand on a body, the molecules of
my hand by no means touch those of the body directly, but
there remains a certain distance between body and hand, and
what I experience as the body's resistance is nothing but the
effect of the force of repulsion which its molecules exert on
my hand. I am absolutely external to the body and experience
only its effects on my organism.
[24] The theory of the so-called Specific Nervous Energy,
which has been advanced by J. Muller, supplements these
speculations. It asserts that each sense has the peculiarity that
it reacts to all external stimuli in only one definite way. If the
optic nerve is stimulated, light sensations result, irrespective
of whether the stimulation is due to what we call light, or to
mechanical pressure, or an electrical current. On the other
hand, the same external stimulus applied to different senses
gives rise to different sensations. The conclusion from these
facts seems to be, that our sense-organs can give us knowledge
only of what occurs in themselves, but not of the external
world. They determine our percepts, each according to its own
nature.
[25] Physiology shows, further, that there can be no direct
knowledge even of the effects which objects produce on our
sense-organs. Through his study of the processes which occur
in our own bodies, the physiologist finds that, even in the
sense-organs, the effects of the external process are modified
in the most diverse ways. We can see this most clearly in the
case of eye and ear. Both are very complicated organs which
modify the external stimulus considerably, before they
conduct it to the corresponding nerve. From the peripheral
end of the nerve the modified stimulus is then conducted to
the brain. Here the central organs must in turn be stimulated.
The conclusion is, therefore, drawn that the external process
undergoes a series of transformations before it reaches
consciousness. The brain processes are connected by so many
intermediate links with the external stimuli, that any
similarity between them is out of the question. What the brain
ultimately transmits to the soul is neither external processes,
nor processes in the sense-organs, but only such as occur in
the brain. But even these are not apprehended immediately by
the soul. What we finally have in consciousness are not brain
processes at all, but sensations. My sensation of red has
absolutely no similarity with the process which occurs in the
brain when I sense red. The sensation, again, occurs as an
effect in the mind, and the brain process is only its cause. This
is why Hartmann (Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, p.
37) says, "What the subject experiences is therefore only
modifications of his own psychical states and nothing else."
However, when I have sensations, they are very far as yet
from being grouped in those complexes which I perceive as
"things." Only single sensations can be transmitted to me by
the brain. The sensations of hardness and softness are
transmitted to me by the organ of touch, those of colour and
light by the organ of sight. Yet all these are found united in
one object. This unification must, therefore, be brought about
by the soul itself; that is, the soul constructs things out of the
separate sensations which the brain conveys to it. My brain
conveys to me singly, and by widely different paths, the
visual, tactual, and auditory sensations which the soul then
combines into the idea of a trumpet. Thus, what is really the
result of a process (i.e., the idea of a trumpet), is for my
consciousness the primary datum. In this result nothing can
any longer be found of what exists outside of me and
originally stimulated my sense-organs. The external object is
lost entirely on the way to the brain and through the brain to
the soul.
[26] It would be hard to find in the history of human
speculation another edifice of thought which has been built up
with greater ingenuity, and which yet, on closer analysis,
collapses into nothing. Let us look a little closer at the way it
has been constructed. The theory starts with what is given in
naive consciousness, i.e., with things as perceived. It proceeds
to show that none of the qualities which we find in these
things would exist for us, had we no sense-organs. No eye —
no colour. Therefore, the colour is not, as yet, present in the
stimulus which affects the eye. It arises first through the
interaction of the eye and the object. The latter is, therefore,
colourless. But neither is the colour in the eye, for in the eye
there is only a chemical, or physical, process which is first
conducted by the optic nerve to the brain, and there initiates
another process. Even this is not yet the colour. That is only
produced in the soul by means of the brain process. Even then
it does not yet appear in consciousness, but is first referred by
the soul to a body in the external world. There I finally
perceive it, as a quality of this body. We have travelled in a
complete circle. We are conscious of a coloured object. That is
the starting-point. Here thought begins its construction. If I
had no eye the object would be, for me, colourless. I cannot,
therefore, attribute the colour to the object. I must look for it
elsewhere. I look for it, first, in the eye —in vain; in the nerve
—in vain; in the brain —in vain once more; in the soul —here
I find it indeed, but not attached to the object. I recover the
coloured body only on returning to my starting-point. The
circle is completed. The theory leads me to identify what the
naive man regards as existing outside of him, as really a
product of my mind.
[27] As long as one stops here everything seems to fit
beautifully. But we must go over the argument once more
from the beginning. Hitherto I have used, as my starting-
point, the object, i.e., the external percept of which up to
now, from my naive standpoint, I had a totally wrong
conception. I thought that the percept, just as I perceive it,
had objective existence. But now I observe that it disappears
with my act of perception, that it is only a modification of my
mental state. Have I, then, any right at all to start from it in
my arguments? Can I say of it that it acts on my soul? I must
henceforth treat the table of which formerly I believed that it
acted on me, and produced an idea of itself in me, as itself an
idea. But from this it follows logically that my sense-organs,
and the processes in them are also merely subjective. I have
no right to talk of a real eye but only of my idea of an eye.
Exactly the same is true of the nerve paths, and the brain
processes, and even of the process in the soul itself, through
which things are supposed to be constructed out of the chaos
of diverse sensations. If assuming the truth of the first circle of
argumentation, I run through the steps of my cognitive
activity once more, the latter reveals itself as a tissue of ideas
which, as such, cannot act on one another. I cannot say my
idea of the object acts on my idea of the eye, and that from
this interaction results my idea of colour. But it is necessary
that I should say this. For as soon as I see clearly that my
sense-organs and their activity, my nerve- and soul-processes,
can also be known to me only through perception, the
argument which I have outlined reveals itself in its full
absurdity. It is quite true that I can have no percept without
the corresponding sense-organ. But just as little can I be aware
of a sense-organ without perception. From the percept of a
table I can pass to the eye which sees it, or the nerves in the
skin which touches it, but what takes place in these I can, in
turn, learn only from perception. And then I soon perceive
that there is no trace of similarity between the process which
takes place in the eye and the colour which I see. I cannot get
rid of colour sensations by pointing to the process which takes
place in the eye whilst I perceive a colour. No more can I re-
discover the colour in the nerve- or brain-processes. I only add
a new percept, localized within the organism, to the first
percept which the naive man localizes outside of his organism.
I only pass from one percept to another.
[28] Moreover, there is a break in the whole argument. I can
follow the processes in my organism up to those in my brain,
even though my assumptions become more and more
hypothetical as I approach the central processes of the brain.
The method of external observation ceases with the process in
my brain, more particularly with the process which I should
observe, if I could treat the brain with the instruments and
methods of Physics and Chemistry. The method of internal
observation, or introspection, begins with the sensations, and
includes the construction of things out of the material of
sense-data. At the point of transition from brain process to
sensation, there is a break in the sequence of observation.
[29] The theory which I have here described, and which
calls itself Critical Idealism, in contrast to the standpoint of
naive common sense which it calls Naive Realism, makes the
mistake of characterizing one group of percepts as ideas,
whilst taking another group in the very same sense as the
Naive Realism which it apparently refutes. It establishes the
ideal character of percepts by accepting naively, as objectively
valid facts, the percepts connected with one's own body, and,
in addition, it fails to see that it confuses two spheres of
observation, between which it can find no connecting link.
[30] Critical Idealism can refute Naive Realism only by itself
assuming, in naive-realistic fashion, that one's own organism
has objective existence. As soon as the Idealist realizes that
the percepts connected with his own organism stand on
exactly the same footing as those which Naive Realism
assumes to have objective existence, he can no longer use the
former as a safe foundation for his theory. He would, to be
consistent, have to regard his own organism also as a mere
complex of ideas. But this removes the possibility of regarding
the content of the perceptual world as a product of the mind's
organization. One would have to assume that the idea "colour"
was only a modification of the idea "eye." So-called Critical
Idealism can be established only by borrowing the
assumptions of Naive Realism. The apparent refutation of the
latter is achieved only by uncritically accepting its own
assumptions as valid in another sphere.
[31] This much, then, is certain: Analyses within the world
of percepts cannot establish Critical Idealism, and,
consequently, cannot strip percepts of their objective
character.
[32] Still less is it legitimate to represent the principle that
"the perceptual world is my idea" as self-evident and needing
no proof. Schopenhauer begins his chief work, The World as
Will and Idea, with the words:
"The world is my idea —This is a truth which holds
good for everything that lives and knows, though man
alone can bring it into reflective and abstract
consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to
philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and
certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an
earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels
an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there
only in idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the
consciousness which is himself. If any truth can be
asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the
most general form of all possible and _ thinkable
experience, a form which is more general than time, or
space, or causality, for they all presuppose it. . ." (The
World as Will and Idea, Book I, par. I).
This whole theory is wrecked by the fact already mentioned
above, that the eyes and the hand are just as much percepts as
the sun and the earth. Using Schopenhauer's vocabulary in his
own sense, one might maintain against him that my eye which
sees the sun, and my hand which feels the earth, are my ideas
just like the sun and the earth themselves. That, put in this
way, the whole theory cancels itself, is clear without further
argument. For only my real eye and my real hand, but not my
ideas "eye" and "hand," could own the ideas "sun" and "earth"
as modifications.
[33] Critical Idealism is totally unable to gain an insight
unto the relation of percept to idea. It cannot make the
separation, mentioned on p. 76, between what happens to the
percept in the process of perception and what must be
inherent in it prior to perception. We must therefore attempt
this problem in another way.
VI
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD
[1] FROM the foregoing considerations it follows that it is
impossible to prove, by analysis of the content of our
perceptions, that our percepts are ideas. This is supposed to be
proved by showing that, if the process of perceiving takes
place, in the way in which we conceive it in accordance with
the naive-realistic assumptions concerning the psychological
and physiological constitution of human individuals, then we
have to do, not with things themselves, but merely with our
ideas of things. Now, if Naive Realism, when consistently
thought out, leads to results which directly contradict its
presuppositions, then these presuppositions must be discarded
as unsuitable for the foundation of a theory of the world. In
any case, it is inadmissible to reject the presuppositions and
yet accept the consequences, as the Critical Idealist does who
bases his assertion that the world is my idea on the line of
argument indicated above. (Eduard von Hartmann gives in his
work Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie a full account
of this line of argument.)
[2] The truth of Critical Idealism is one thing, the
persuasiveness of its proofs another. How it stands with the
former, will appear later in the course of our argument, but
the persuasiveness of its proofs is nil. If one builds a house,
and the ground floor collapses whilst the first floor is being
built, then the first floor collapses too. Naive Realism and
Critical Idealism are related to one another like the ground
floor to the first floor in this simile.
[3] For one who holds that the whole perceived world is
only an ideal world, and, moreover, the effect of things
unknown to him acting on his soul, the real problem of
knowledge is naturally concerned, not with the ideas present
only in the soul, but with the things which lie outside his
consciousness and which are independent of him. He asks:
How much can we learn about them indirectly, seeing that we
cannot observe them directly? From this point of view, he is
concerned, not with the connection of his conscious percepts
with one another, but with their causes which transcend his
consciousness and exist independently of him, whereas the
percepts, on his view, disappear as soon as he turns his sense-
organs away from the things themselves. Our consciousness,
on this view, works like a mirror from which the pictures of
definite things disappear the very moment its reflecting
surface is not turned towards them. If, now, we do not see the
things themselves, but only their reflections, we must obtain
knowledge of the nature of the former indirectly by drawing
conclusions from the character of the latter. The whole of
modern science adopts this point of view, when it uses
percepts only as a means of obtaining information about the
motions of matter which lie behind them, and which alone
really "are." If the philosopher, as Critical Idealist, admits real
existence at all, then his sole aim is to gain knowledge of this
real existence indirectly by means of his ideas. His interest
ignores the subjective world of ideas, and pursues instead the
causes of these ideas.
[4] The Critical Idealist can, however, go even further and
say, I am confined to the world of my own ideas and cannot
escape from it. If I conceive a thing beyond my ideas, this
concept, once more, is nothing but my idea. An Idealist of this
type will either deny the thing-in-itself entirely or, at any rate,
assert that it has no significance for human minds, i.e., that it
is as good as nonexistent since we can know nothing of it.
[5] To this kind of Critical Idealist the whole world seems a
chaotic dream, in the face of which all striving for knowledge
is simply meaningless. For him there can be only two sorts of
men: (1) victims of the illusion that the dreams they have
woven themselves are real things, and (2) wise men who see
through the nothingness of this dream world, and who
gradually lose all desire to trouble themselves further about it.
From this point of view, even one's own personality may
become a mere dream phantom. Just as during sleep there
appears among my dream-images an image of myself, so in
waking consciousness the idea of my own Self is added to the
idea of the outer world. I have then given to me in
consciousness, not my real Self, but only my idea of my Self.
Whoever denies that things exist or, at least, that we can
know anything of them, must also deny the existence,
respectively the knowledge, of one's own personality. This is
how the Critical Idealist comes to maintain that "All reality
transforms itself into a wonderful dream, without a life which
is the object of the dream, and without a mind which has the
dream; into a dream which is nothing but a dream of itself."
(Cp. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen.)
[6] Whether he who believes that he recognizes immediate
experience to be a dream, postulates nothing behind this
dream, or whether he relates his ideas to actual things, is
immaterial. In both cases life itself must lose all scientific
interest for him. However, whereas for those who believe that
the whole of accessible reality is exhausted in dreams, all
science is an absurdity, for those who feel compelled to argue
from ideas to things, science consists in studying these things-
in-themselves. The first of these theories of the world may be
called Absolute’ Illusionism, the second is_ called
Transcendental Realism[1] by its most rigorously logical
exponent, Eduard von Hartmann.
[7] These two points of view have this in common with
Naive Realism, that they seek to gain a footing in the world by
means of an analysis of percepts. Within this sphere, however,
they are unable to find any stable point.
[8] One of the most important questions for an adherent of
Transcendental Realism would have to be, how the Ego
constructs the world of ideas out of itself. A world of ideas
which was given to us, and which disappeared as soon as we
shut our senses to the external world, might provoke an
earnest desire for knowledge, in so far as it was a means for
investigating indirectly the world of the self-existing Self. If
the things of our experience were "ideas," then our everyday
life would be like a dream, and the discovery of the true facts
like waking. Even our dream-images interest us as long as we
dream, and consequently do not detect their dream character.
But as soon as we wake, we no longer look for the connections
of our dream-images among themselves, but rather for the
physical, physiological, and psychological processes which
underlie them. In the same way, a philosopher who holds the
world to be his idea, cannot be interested in the reciprocal
relations of the details within the world. If he admits the
existence of a real Ego at all, then his question will be, not
how one of his ideas is associated with another, but what
takes place in the Soul which is independent of these ideas,
while a certain train of ideas passes through his consciousness.
If I dream that I am drinking wine which makes my throat
burn, and then wake up with a fit of coughing (cp. Weygandt,
Entstehung den Traume, 1893) I cease, the moment I wake, to
be interested in the dream-experience for its own sake. My
attention is now concerned only with the physiological and
psychological processes by means of which the irritation
which causes me to cough, comes to be symbolically
expressed in the dream. Similarly, once the philosopher is
convinced that the given world consists of nothing but ideas,
his interest is bound to switch from them at once to the soul
which is the reality lying behind them. The matter is more
serious however for the Illusionist who denies the existence of
an Ego behind the "ideas," or at least holds this Ego to be
unknowable. We might very easily be led to such a view by
the reflection that, in contrast to dreaming, there is the
waking state in which we have the opportunity to detect our
dreams, and to realize the real relations of things, but that
there is no state of the self which is related similarly to our
waking conscious life. Every adherent of this view fails
entirely to see that there is, in fact, something which is to
mere perception what our waking experience is to our dreams.
This something is thought.
[9] The naive man cannot be charged with failure to
perceive this. He accepts life as it is, and regards things as real
just as they present themselves to him in experience. The first
step, however, which we take beyond this standpoint can be
only this, that we ask how thought is related to perception. It
makes no difference whether or no the percept, as given to
me, has a continuous existence before and after I perceive it.
If I want to assert anything whatever about it, I can do so only
with the help of thought. When I assert that the world is my
idea, I have enunciated the result of an act of thought, and if
my thought is not applicable to the world, then my result is
false. Between a percept and every kind of judgment about it
there intervenes thought.
[10] The reason why, in our discussion about things, we
generally overlook the part played by thought, has already
been given above (p. 46). It lies in the fact that our attention
is concentrated only on the object about which we think, but
not at the same time on the thinking itself. The naive mind,
therefore, treats thought as something which has nothing to
do with things, but stands altogether aloof from them and
makes its theories about them. The theory which the thinker
constructs concerning the phenomena of the world is
regarded, not as part of the real things, but as existing only in
men's heads. The world is complete in itself even without this
theory. It is all ready-made and finished with all its substances
and forces, and of this ready-made world man makes himself a
picture. Whoever thinks thus need only be asked one question.
What right have you to declare the world to be complete
without thought? Does not the world cause thoughts in the
minds of men with the same necessity as it causes the
blossoms on plants? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth
roots and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the
plant before yourselves. It connects itself, in your minds, with
a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to
the whole plant than leaf and blossom? You say the leaves and
blossoms exist quite apart from an experiencing subject. The
concept appears only when a human being makes an object of
the plant. Quite so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on
the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted,
and light and air in which the blossoms and leaves can unfold.
Just so the concept of a plant arises when a thinking being
comes into contact with the plant.
[11] It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we
experience of a thing through bare perception, as a totality, a
whole, while that which thought reveals in it is regarded as a
mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself.
If I am given a rosebud today, the percept that offers itself to
me is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into
water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my
object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see
today's state gradually change into tomorrow's through an
infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which
presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance
section out of the continuous process of growth in which the
object is engaged. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole
series of states, the possibility of which lay in the bud, will not
be realized. Similarly, I may be prevented tomorrow from
watching the blossom further, and thus carry away an
incomplete picture of it.
[12] It would be a quite unscientific and arbitrary judgment
which declared of any haphazard appearance of a thing, this
is the thing.
[13] To regard the sum of perceptual appearances as the
thing is no more legitimate. It might be quite possible for a
mind to receive the concept at the same time as, and together
with, the percept. To such a mind it would never occur that
the concept did not belong to the thing. It would have to
ascribe to the concept an existence indivisibly bound up with
the thing.
[14] Let me make myself clearer by another example. If I
throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in
different places at different times. I connect these places so as
to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to distinguish various
kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know a parabola
to be a line which is produced by a point moving according to
a certain well-defined law. If I analyze the conditions under
which the stone thrown by me moves, I find that the line of its
flight is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the
stone moves exactly in a parabola is a result of the given
conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the
parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any
other feature of it. The hypothetical mind described above
which has no need of the roundabout way of thought, would
find itself presented, not only with a sequence of visual
percepts at different points, but, as part and parcel of these
phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the line of flight,
which we can add to the phenomenon only by an act of
thought.
[15] It is not due to the real objects that they appear to us at
first without their conceptual sides, but to our mental
organization. Our whole organization functions in such a way
that in the apprehension of every real thing the relevant
elements come to us from two sources, viz., from perception
and from thought.
[16] The nature of things is indifferent to the way I am
organized for apprehending them. The breach between
perception and thought exists only from the moment that I
confront objects as spectator. But which elements do, and
which do not, belong to the objects, cannot depend on the
manner in which I obtain my knowledge of them.
[17] Man is a being with many limitations. First of all, he is
a thing among other things. His existence is in space and time.
Hence but a limited portion of the total universe can ever be
given to him. This limited portion, however, is linked up with
other parts on every side both in time and in space. If our
existence were so linked with things that every process in the
object world were also a process in us, there would be no
difference between us and things. Neither would there be any
individual objects for us. All processes and events would then
pass continuously one into the other. The cosmos would be a
unity and a whole complete in itself. The stream of events
would nowhere be interrupted. But owing to our limitations
we perceive as an individual object what, in truth, is not an
individual object at all. Nowhere, e.g., is the particular quality
"red" to be found by itself in abstraction. It is surrounded on
all sides by other qualities to which it belongs, and without
which it could not subsist. For us, however, it is necessary to
isolate certain sections of the world and to consider them by
themselves. Our eye can seize only single colours one after
another out of a manifold colour-complex, our understanding
only single concepts out of a connected conceptual system.
This isolation is a subjective act, which is due to the fact that
we are not identical with the world-process, but are only
things among other things.
[18] It is of the greatest importance for us to determine the
relation of ourselves, as things, to all other things. The
determining of this relation must be distinguished from
merely becoming conscious of ourselves. For this self-
awareness we depend on perception just as we do for our
awareness of any other thing. The perception of myself reveals
to me a number of qualities which I combine into an
apprehension of my personality as a whole, just as I combine
the qualities, yellow, metallic, hard, etc., in the unity "gold."
This kind of self-consciousness does not take me beyond the
sphere of what belongs to me. Hence it must be distinguished
from the determination of myself by thought. Just as I
determine by thought the place of any single percept of the
external world in the whole cosmic system, so I fit by an act of
thought what I perceive in myself into the order of the world-
process. My self-observation restricts me within definite
limits, but my thought has nothing to do with these limits. In
this sense I am a two-sided being. I am contained within the
sphere which I apprehend as that of my personality, but I am
also the possessor of an activity which, from a higher
standpoint, determines my finite existence. Thought is not
individual like sensation and feeling; it is universal. It receives
an individual stamp in each separate human being only
because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and
sensations. By means of these particular colourings of the
universal thought, individual men are distinguished from one
another. There is only one single concept of "triangle." It is
quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is
in A's consciousness or in B's. It will however be grasped by
each of the two minds in its own individual way.
[19] This thought conflicts with a common prejudice which
is very hard to overcome. The victims of this prejudice are
unable to see that the concept of a triangle which my mind
grasps is the same as the concept which my neighbour's mind
grasps. The naive man believes himself to be the creator of his
concepts. Hence he believes that each person has his private
concepts. One of the first things which philosophic thought
requires of us is to overcome this prejudice. The one single
concept of "triangle" does not split up into many concepts
because it is thought by many minds. For the thought of the
many is itself a unity.
[20] In thought we have the element which welds each
man's special individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In
so far as we sense and feel (perceive), we are isolated
individuals; in so far as we think, we are the All-One Being
which pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our
two-sided nature. We are conscious of an absolute principle
revealing itself in us, a principle which is universal. But we
experience it, not as it issues from the centre of the world, but
rather at a point on the periphery. Were the former the case,
we should know, as soon as ever we became conscious, the
solution of the whole world problem. But since we stand at a
point on the periphery, and find that our own being is
confined within definite limits, we must explore the region
which lies beyond our own being with the help of thought,
which is the universal cosmic principle manifesting itself in
our minds.
[21] The fact that thought, in us, reaches out beyond our
separate existence and relates itself to the universal world-
order, gives rise to the desire for knowledge in us. Beings
without thought do not experience this desire. When they
come in contact with other things no questions arise for them.
These other things remain external to such beings. But in
thinking beings the concept confronts the external thing. It is
that part of the thing which we receive not from without, but
from within. To assimilate, to unite, the two elements, the
inner and the outer, that is the function of knowledge.
[22] The percept, thus, is not something finished and self-
contained, but one side only of the total reality. The other side
is the concept. The act of cognition is the synthesis of percept
and concept. And it is only the union of percept and concept
which constitutes the whole thing.
[23] The preceding discussion shows clearly that it is futile
to seek for any other common element in the separate things
of the world, than the ideal content which thinking supplies.
All attempts to discover any other principle of unity in the
world than this internally coherent ideal content, which we
gain for ourselves by the conceptual analysis of our percepts,
are bound to fail. Neither a personal God, nor force, nor
matter, nor the blind will (of Schopenhauer and Hartmann),
can be accepted by us as the universal principle of unity in the
world. These principles all belong only to a limited sphere of
our experience. Personality we experience only in ourselves,
force and matter only in external things. The will, again, can
be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite
personalities. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making "abstract"
thought the principle of unity in the world, and seeks instead
something which presents itself to him immediately as real.
This philosopher holds that we can never solve the riddle of
the world so long as we regard it as an "external" world.
"In fact, the meaning for which we seek of that world
which is present to us only as our idea, or the transition
from the world as mere idea of the knowing subject to
whatever it may be besides this, would never be found
if the investigator himself were nothing more than the
pure knowing subject (a winged cherub without a
body). But he himself is rooted in that world; he finds
himself in it as an individual, that is to say, his
knowledge, which is the necessary supporter of the
whole world as idea, is yet always given through the
medium of a body, whose affections are, as we have
shown, the starting-point for the understanding in the
perception of that world. His body is, for the pure
knowing subject, an idea like every other idea, an
object among objects. Its movements and actions are so
far known to him in precisely the same way as the
changes of all other perceived objects, and would be
just as strange and incomprehensible to him if their
meaning were not explained for him in an entirely
different way.... The body is given in two entirely
different ways to the subject of knowledge, who
becomes an individual only through his identity with it.
It is given as an idea in intelligent perception, as an
object among objects and subject to the laws of objects.
And it is also given in quite a different way as that
which is immediately known to every one, and is
signified by the word will. Every true act of his will is
also at once and without exception a movement of his
body. The act of will and the movement of the body are
not two different things objectively known, which the
bond of causality unites; they do not stand in the
relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same,
but they are given in entirely different ways
—immediately, and again in perception for the
understanding." (The World as Will and Idea, Book 2, &
18.)
Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments
to hold that the will becomes objectified in the human body.
He believes that in the activities of the body he has an
immediate experience of reality, of the thing-in-itself in the
concrete. Against these arguments we must urge that the
activities of our body become known to us only through self-
observation, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to
other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can
do so only by means of thought, i.e., by fitting them into the
ideal system of our concepts and ideas.
[24] One of the most deeply rooted prejudices of the naive
mind is the opinion that thinking is abstract and empty of any
concrete content. At best, we are told it supplies but an "ideal"
counterpart of the unity of the world, but never that unity
itself. Whoever holds this view has never made clear to
himself what a percept apart from concepts really is. Let us
see what this world of bare percepts is. A mere juxtaposition
in space, a mere succession in time, a chaos of disconnected
particulars —that is what it is. None of these things which
come and go on the stage of perception has any connection
with any other. The world is a multiplicity of objects without
distinctions of value. None plays any greater part in the nexus
of the world than any other. In order to realize that this or
that fact has a greater importance than another we must go to
thought. As long as we do not think, the rudimentary organ of
an animal which has no significance in its life, appears equal
in value to its more important limbs. The particular facts
reveal their meaning, in themselves and in their relations with
other parts of the world, only when thought spins its threads
from thing to thing. This activity of thinking has always a
content. For it is only through a perfectly definite concrete
content that I can know why the snail belongs to a lower type
of organization than the lion. The mere appearance, the
percept, gives me no content which could inform me as to the
degree of perfection of the organization.
[25] Thought contributes this content to the percept from
the world of concepts and ideas. In contrast with the content
of perception which is given to us from without, the content
of thought appears within our minds. The form in which
thought first appears in consciousness we will call "Intuition."
Intuition is to thoughts what observation is to percepts.
Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.
An external object which we observe remains unintelligible to
us, until the corresponding intuition arises within us which
adds to the reality those sides of it which are lacking in the
percept. To anyone who is incapable of supplying the relevant
intuitions, the full nature of the real remains a sealed book.
Just as the colour-blind person sees only differences of
brightness without any colour qualities, so the mind which
lacks intuition sees only disconnected fragments of percepts.
[26] To explain a thing, to make it intelligible means
nothing else than to place it in the context from which it has
been torn by the peculiar organisation of our minds, described
above. Nothing can possibly exist cut off from the universe.
Hence all isolation of objects has only subjective validity for
minds organized like ours. For us the universe is split up into
above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object
and idea, matter and force, object and subject, etc. The objects
which, in observation, appear to us as separate, become
combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified system of
our intuitions. By thought we fuse again into one whole all
that perception has separated.
[27] An object presents riddles to our understanding so long
as it exists in isolation. But this is an abstraction of our own
making and can be unmade again in the world of concepts.
[28] Except through thought and perception nothing is given
to us directly. The question now arises as to the interpretation
of percepts on our theory. We have learnt that the proof
which Critical Idealism offers for the subjective nature of
percepts collapses. But the exhibition of the falsity of the
proof is not, by itself, sufficient to show that the doctrine itself
is an error. Critical Idealism does not base its proof on the
absolute nature of thought, but relies on the argument that
Naive Realism, when followed to its logical conclusion,
contradicts itself. How does the matter appear when we
recognize the absoluteness of thought?
[29] Let us assume that a certain percept, e.g., red, appears
in consciousness. To continued observation, the percept shows
itself to be connected with other percepts, e.g., a certain
figure, temperature, and touch-qualities. This complex of
percepts I call an object in the world of sense. I can now ask
myself: Over and above the percepts just mentioned, what else
is there in the section of space in which they are? I shall then
find mechanical, chemical, and other processes in that section
of space. I next go further and study the processes which take
place between the object and my sense-organs. I shall find
oscillations in an elastic medium, the character of which has
not the least in common with the percepts from which I
started. I get the same result if I trace further the connection
between sense organs and brain. In each of these inquiries I
gather new percepts, but the connecting thread which binds
all these spatially and temporally separated percepts into one
whole, is thought. The air vibrations which carry sound are
given to me as percepts just like the sound. Thought alone
links all these percepts one to the other and exhibits them in
their reciprocal relations. We have no right to say that over
and above our immediate percepts there is anything except
the ideal nexus of percepts (which thought has to reveal). The
relation of the object perceived to the perceiving subject,
which relation transcends the bare percept, is therefore
merely ideal, i.e., capable of being expressed only through
concepts. Only if it were possible to perceive how the object
of perception affects the perceiving subject, or alternatively,
only if I could watch the construction of the perceptual
complex through the subject, could we speak as modern
Physiology, and the Critical Idealism which is based on it,
speak. Their theory confuses an ideal relation (that of the
object to the subject) with a process of which we could speak
only if it were possible to perceive it. The proposition, "No
colour without a colour-sensing eye" cannot be taken to mean
that the eye produces the colour, but only that an ideal
relation, recognizable by thought, subsists between the
percept "colour" and the percept "eye."
To empirical science belongs the task of ascertaining how
the properties of the eye and those of the colours are related
to one another; by means of what structures the organ of sight
makes possible the perception of colours, etc. I can trace how
one percept succeeds another and how one is related to others
in space, and I can formulate these relations in conceptual
terms, but I can never perceive how a percept originates out
of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations
between percepts other than conceptual relations must of
necessity fail.
[30] What then is a percept? This question, asked in this
general way, is absurd. A percept appears always as a
perfectly determinate, concrete content. This content is
immediately given and is completely contained in the given.
The only question one can ask concerning the given content
is, what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for
thought. The question concerning the "what" of a percept can,
therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition which
corresponds to the percept. From this point of view, the
problem of the subjectivity of percepts, in the sense in which
the Critical Idealists debate it, cannot be raised at all. Only
that which is experienced as belonging to the subject can be
termed "subjective." To form a link between subject and object
is impossible for any real process, in the naive sense of the
word "real," in which it means a process which can be
perceived. That is possible only for thought. For us, then,
"objective" means that which, for perception, presents itself as
external to the perceiving subject. As subject of perception I
remain perceptible to myself after the table which now stands
before me has disappeared from my field of observation. The
perception of the table has produced a modification in me
which persists like myself. I preserve an image of the table
which now forms part of my Self. Modern Psychology terms
this image a "memory-idea." Now this is the only thing which
has any right to be called the idea of the table. For it is the
perceptible modification of my own mental state through the
presence of the table in my visual field. Moreover, it does not
mean a modification in some "Ego-in-itself' behind the
perceiving subject, but the modification of the perceiving
subject itself. The idea is, therefore, a subjective percept, in
contrast with the objective percept which occurs when the
object is present in the perceptual field. The false
identification of the subjective with this objective percept
leads to the misunderstanding of Idealism: The world is my
idea.
[31] Our next task must be to define the concept of "idea"
more nearly. What we have said about it so far does not give
us the concept, but only shows us where in the perceptual
field ideas are to be found. The exact concept of "idea" will
also make it possible for us to obtain a_ satisfactory
understanding of the relation of idea and object. This will
then lead us over the border-line, where the relation of subject
to object is brought down from the purely conceptual field of
knowledge into concrete individual life. Once we know how
we are to conceive the world, it will be an easy task to adapt
ourselves to it. Only when we know to what object we are to
devote our activity can we put our whole energy into our
actions.
[1] Knowledge is transcendental, when it is aware that nothing can be
asserted directly about the thing-in-itself, but makes indirect inferences
from the subjective which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond
the subjective Transcendental. The thing-in-itself is, according to this view,
beyond the sphere of the world of immediate experience; in other words, it
is transcendent. Our world can however he transcendentally related to the
transcendent. Hartmann's theory is called Realism because it proceeds
from the subjective, the mental, to the transcendent, the real.
vil
HUMAN INDIVIDUALITY
[1] PHILOSOPHERS have found the chief difficulty in the
explanation of ideas in the fact that we are not identical with
the external objects, and yet our ideas must have a form
corresponding to their objects. But on closer inspection it
turns out that this difficulty does not really exist. We certainly
are not identical with the external things, but we belong
together with them to one and the same world. The stream of
the universal cosmic process passes through that segment of
the world which, to my perception, is myself as subject. So far
as my perception goes, I am, in the first instance, confined
within the limits bounded by my skin. But all that is contained
within the skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Hence, for a
relation to subsist between my organism and an _ object
external to me, it is by no means necessary that something of
the object should slip into me, or make an impression on my
mind, like a signet ring on wax. The question, How do I gain
knowledge of that tree ten feet away from me, is utterly
misleading. It springs from the view that the boundaries of my
body are absolute barriers, through which information about
external things filters into me. The forces which are active
within my body are the same as those which exist outside. I
am, therefore, really identical with the objects; not, however, I
in so far as I am subject of perception, but I in so far as |am a
part within the universal cosmic process. The percept of the
tree belongs to the same whole as my Self. The universal
cosmic process produces alike, here the percept of the tree,
and there the percept of my Self. Were I a world-creator
instead of a world-knower, subject and object (percept and
self) would originate in one act. For they condition one
another reciprocally. As world-knower I can discover the
common element in both, so far as they are complementary
aspects of the world, only through thought which by means of
concepts relates the one to the other.
[2] The most difficult to drive from the field are the so-
called physiological proofs of the subjectivity of our percepts.
When I exert pressure on the skin of my body, I experience it
as a pressure sensation. This same pressure can be sensed as
light by the eye, as sound by the ear. I experience an electrical
shock by the eye as light, by the ear as sound, by the nerves of
the skin as touch, and by the nose as a smell of phosphorus.
What follows from these facts? Only this: I experience an
electrical shock, or, as the case may be, a pressure followed by
a light, or a sound, or, it may be, a certain smell, etc. If there
were no eye present, then no light quality would accompany
the perception of the mechanical vibrations in my
environment; without the presence of the ear, no sound, etc.
But what right have we to say that in the absence of sense-
organs the whole process would not exist at all? All those
who, from the fact that an electrical process causes a sensation
of light in the eye, conclude that what we sense as light is
only a mechanical process of motion, forget that they are only
arguing from one percept to another, and not at all to
something altogether transcending percepts. Just as we can
say that the eye perceives a mechanical process of motion in
its surroundings as light, so we can affirm that every change
in an object, determined by natural law, is perceived by us as
a process of motion. If I draw twelve pictures of a horse on the
circumference of a rotating disc, reproducing exactly the
positions which the horse's body successively assumes in
movement, I can, by rotating the disc, produce the illusion of
movement. I need only look through an opening in such a way
that, at regular intervals I perceive the successive positions of
the horse. I perceive, not separate pictures of twelve horses,
but one picture of a single galloping horse.
[3] The above-mentioned physiological facts cannot,
therefore, throw any light on the relation of percept to idea.
Hence, we must seek a relation some other way.
[4] The moment a percept appears in my field of
consciousness, thought, too, becomes active in me. A member
of my thought-system, a definite intuition, a concept, connects
itself with the percept. When, next, the percept disappears
from my field of vision, what remains? The intuition with the
reference to the particular percept which it acquired in the
moment of perception. The degree of vividness with which I
can subsequently recall this reference depends on the manner
in which my mental and bodily organism is working. An idea
is nothing but an intuition related to a particular percept; it is
a concept which was once connected with a certain percept,
and which retains this reference to the percept. My concept of
a lion is not constructed out of my percepts of a lion; but my
idea of a lion is formed under the guidance of the percept. I
can teach some one to form the concept of a lion without his
ever having seen a lion, but I can never give him a living idea
of it without the help of his own perception.
[5] An idea is therefore nothing but an individualized
concept. And now we can see how real objects can be
represented to us by ideas. The full reality of a thing is present
to us in the moment of observation through the combination
of concept and percept. The concept acquires by means of the
percept an individualized form, a relation to this particular
percept. In this individualized form which carries with it, as
an essential feature, the reference to the percept, it continues
to exist in us and constitutes the idea of the thing in question.
If we come across a second thing with which the same concept
connects itself, we recognize the second as being of the same
kind as the first; if we come across the same thing twice we
find in our conceptual system, not merely a corresponding
concept, but the individualized concept with its characteristic
relation to this same object, and thus we recognize the object
again.
[6] The idea, then, stands between the percept and the
concept. It is the determinate concept which points to the
percept.
[7] The sum of my ideas may be called my experience. The
man who has the greater number of individualized concepts
will be the man of richer experience. A man who lacks all
power of intuition is not capable of acquiring experience. The
objects simply disappear again from the field of his
consciousness, because he lacks the concepts which he ought
to bring into relation with them. On the other hand, a man
whose faculty of thought is well developed, but whose
perception functions badly owing to his clumsy sense-organs,
will be no better able to gain experience. He can, it is true, by
one means and another acquire concepts; but the living
reference to particular objects is lacking to his intuitions. The
unthinking traveler and the student absorbed in abstract
conceptual systems are alike incapable of acquiring a rich
experience.
[8] Reality presents itself to us as the union of percept and
concept; and the subjective representation of this reality
presents itself to us as idea.
[9] If our personality expressed itself only in cognition, the
totality of all that is objective would be contained in percept,
concept, and idea.
[10] However, we are not satisfied merely to refer percepts,
by means of thinking, to concepts, but we relate them also to
our private subjectivity, our individual Ego. The expression of
this relation to us as individuals is feeling, which manifests
itself as pleasure and pain.
[11] Thinking and feeling correspond to the twofold nature
of our being to which reference has already been made. By
means of thought we take an active part in the universal
cosmic process. By means of feeling we withdraw ourselves
into the narrow precincts of our own being.
[12] Thought links us to the world; feeling leads us back into
ourselves and thus makes us individuals. Were we merely
thinking and perceiving beings our whole life would flow
along in monotonous indifference. Could we only know
ourselves as Selves, we should be totally indifferent to
ourselves. It is only because with self-knowledge we
experience self-feeling, and with the perception of objects
pleasure and pain, that we live as individuals whose existence
is not exhausted by the conceptual relations in which they
stand to the rest of the world, but who have a special value in
themselves.
[13] One might be tempted to regard the life of feeling as
something more richly saturated with reality than the
apprehension of the world by thought. But the reply to this is
that the life of feeling, after all, has this richer meaning only
for my individual self. For the universe as a whole my feelings
can be of value only if, as percepts of myself, they enter into
connection with a concept, and in this roundabout way
become links in the cosmos.
[14] Our life is a continual oscillation between our share in
the universal world-process and our own individual existence.
The farther we ascend into the universal nature of thought
where the individual, at last, interests us only as an example,
an instance, of the concept, the more the character of
something individual, of the quite determinate, unique
personality, becomes lost in us. The farther we descend into
the depths of our own private life and allow the vibrations of
our feelings to accompany all our experiences of the outer
world, the more we cut ourselves off from the universal life.
True individuality belongs to him whose feelings reach up to
the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal. There
are men in whom even the most general ideas still bear that
peculiar personal tinge which shows unmistakably their
connection with their author. There are others whose concepts
come before us as devoid of any trace of individual colouring
as if they had not been produced by a being of flesh and blood
at all.
[15] Even ideas give to our conceptual life an individual
stamp. Each one of us has his special standpoint from which
he looks out on the world. His concepts link themselves to his
percepts. He has his own special way of forming general
concepts. This special character results for each of us from his
special standpoint in the world, from the way in which the
range of his percepts is dependent on the place in the whole
where he exists. The conditions of individuality, here
indicated, we call the milieu.
[16] This special character of our experience must be
distinguished from another which depends on our peculiar
organization. Each of us, as we know, is organized as a
unique, fully determined individual. Each of us combines
special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of
intensity, with his percepts. This is just the individual element
in the personality of each of us. It is what remains over when
we have allowed fully for all the determining factors in our
milieu.
[17] A life of feeling, wholly devoid of thought, would
gradually lose all connection with the world. But man is
meant to be a whole, and knowledge of objects will go hand-
in-hand for him with the development and education of the
feeling-side of his nature.
[18] Feeling is the means whereby, in the first instance,
concepts gain concrete life.
Vill
ARE THERE ANY LIMITS
TO KNOWLEDGE?
[1] WE have established that the elements for the
explanation of reality are to be taken from the two spheres of
perception and thought. It is due, as we have seen, to our
organization that the full totality of reality, including our own
selves as subjects, appears at first as a duality. Knowledge
transcends this duality by fusing the two elements of reality,
the percept and the concept, into the complete thing. Let us
call the manner in which the world presents itself to us, before
by means of knowledge it has taken on its true nature, "the
world of appearance," in distinction from the unified whole
composed of percept and concept. We can then say, the world
is given to us as a duality (Dualism), and knowledge
transforms it into a unity (Monism). A philosophy which starts
from this basal principle may be called a Monistic philosophy,
or Monism. Opposed to this is the theory of two worlds, or
Dualism. The latter does not, by any means, assume merely
that there are two sides of a single reality, which are kept
apart by our organization, but that there are two worlds
totally distinct from one another. It then tries to find in one of
these two worlds the principle of explanation for the other.
[2] Dualism rests on a false conception of what we call
knowledge. It divides the whole of reality into two spheres,
each of which has its own laws, and it leaves these two worlds
standing outside one another.
[3] It is from a Dualism such as this that there arises the
distinction between the object of perception and the thing-in-
itself, which Kant introduced into philosophy, and which, to
the present day, we have not succeeded in expelling.
According to our interpretation, it is due to the nature of our
organization that a particular object can be given to us only as
a percept. Thought transcends this particularity by assigning
to each percept its proper place in the world as a whole. As
long as we determine the separate parts of the cosmos as
percepts, we are simply following, in this sorting out, a law of
our subjective constitution. If, however, we regard all
percepts, taken together, merely as one part, and contrast with
this a second part, viz., the things-in-themselves, then our
philosophy is building castles-in-the-air. We are then engaged
in mere playing with concepts. We construct an artificial
opposition, but we can find no content for the second of these
opposites, seeing that no content for a particular thing can be
found except in perception.
[4] Every kind of reality which is assumed to exist outside
the sphere of perception and conception must be relegated to
the limbo of unverified hypotheses. To this category belongs
the "thing-in-itself." It is, of course, quite natural that a
Dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection
between the world-principle which he hypothetically assumes
and the facts that are given in experience. For the
hypothetical world-principle itself a content can be found only
by borrowing it from experience and shutting one's eyes to the
fact of the borrowing. Otherwise it remains an empty and
meaningless concept, a mere form without content. In this
case the Dualistic thinker generally asserts that the content of
this concept is inaccessible to our knowledge. We can know
only that such a content exists, but not what it is. In either
case it is impossible to transcend Dualism. Even though one
were to import a few abstract elements from the world of
experience into the content of the thing-in-itself, it would still
remain impossible to reduce the rich concrete life of
experience to these few elements, which are, after all,
themselves taken from experience. Du Bois-Reymond lays it
down that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce
sensation and feeling by means of their position and motion,
and then infers from this premise that we can never find a
satisfactory explanation of how matter and motion produce
sensation and feeling, for
"it is absolutely and for ever unintelligible that it
should be other than indifferent to a number of atoms
of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, etc., how they lie
and move, how they lay or moved, or how they will lie
and will move. It is in no way intelligible how
consciousness might come into existence through their
interaction."
This conclusion is characteristic of the whole tendency of this
school of thought. Position and motion are abstracted from
the rich world of percepts. They are then transferred to the
fictitious world of atoms. And then we are astonished that we
fail to evolve concrete life out of this principle of our own
making, which we have borrowed from the world of percepts.
[5] That the Dualist, working as he does with a completely
empty concept of the thing-in-itself, can reach no explanation
of the world, follows even from the definition of his principle
which has been given above.
[6] In any case, the Dualist finds it necessary to set
impassable barriers to our faculty of knowledge. A follower of
the Monistic theory of the world knows that all he needs to
explain any given phenomenon in the world is to be found
within this world itself. What prevents him from finding it can
be only chance limitations in space and time, or defects of his
organization, i.e., not of human organization in general, but
only of his own.
[7] It follows from the concept of knowledge, as defined by
us, that there can be no talk of any limits of knowledge.
Knowledge is not a concern of the universe in general, but one
which men must settle for themselves. External things demand
no explanation. They exist and act on one another according
to laws which thought can discover. They exist in indivisible
unity with these laws. But we, in our self-hood, confront them,
grasping at first only what we have called percepts. However,
within ourselves we find the power to discover also the other
part of reality. Only when the Self has combined for itself the
two elements of reality which are indivisibly bound up with
one another in the world, is our thirst for knowledge stilled.
The Self is then again in contact with reality.
[8] The presuppositions for the development of knowledge
thus exist through and for the Self. It is the Self which sets
itself the problems of knowledge. It takes them from thought,
an element which in itself is absolutely clear and transparent.
If we set ourselves questions which we cannot answer, it must
be because the content of the questions is not in all respects
clear and distinct. It is not the world which sets questions to
us, but we who set them to ourselves.
[9] I can imagine that it would be quite impossible for me to
answer a question which I happened to find written down
somewhere, without knowing the universe of discourse from
which the content of the question is taken.
[10] In knowledge we are concerned with questions which
arise for us through the fact that a world of percepts,
conditioned by time, space, and our subjective organization,
stands over against a world of concepts expressing the totality
of the universe. Our task consists in the assimilation to one
another of these two spheres, with both of which we are
familiar. There is no room here for talking about limits of
knowledge. It may be that, at a particular moment, this or
that remains unexplained because, through chance obstacles,
we are prevented from perceiving the things involved. What is
not found today, however, may easily be found tomorrow.
The limits due to these causes are only contingent, and must
be overcome by the progress of perception and thought.
[11] Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the
opposition of subject and object, which has meaning only
within the perceptual world, to pure conceptual entities
outside this world. Now the distinct and separate things in the
perceptual world remain separated only so long as the
perceiver refrains from thinking. For thought cancels all
separation and reveals it as due to purely subjective
conditions. The Dualist, therefore, transfers to entities
transcending the perceptual world abstract determinations
which, even in the perceptual world, have no absolute, but
only relative, validity. He thus divides the two factors
concerned in the process of knowledge, viz., percept and
concept, into four: (1) the object in itself; (2) the percept
which the subject has of the object; (3) the subject; (4) the
concept which relates the percept to the object in itself. The
relation between subject and object is "real"; the subject is
really (dynamically) influenced by the object. This real
process does not appear in consciousness. But it evokes in the
subject a response to the stimulation from the object. The
result of this response is the percept. This, at length, appears
in consciousness. The object has an objective (independent of
the subject) reality, the percept a subjective reality. This
subjective reality is referred by the subject to the object. This
reference is an ideal one. Dualism thus divides the process of
knowledge into two parts. The one part, viz., the production
of the perceptual object by the thing-in-itself, he conceives of
as taking place outside consciousness, whereas the other, the
combination of percept with concept and the latter's reference
to the thing-in-itself, takes place, according to him, in
consciousness.
With such presuppositions, it is clear why the Dualist regards
his concepts merely as subjective representations of what is
really external to his consciousness. The objectively real
process in the subject by means of which the percept is
produced, and still more the objective relations between
things-in-themselves, remain for the Dualist inaccessible to
direct knowledge. According to him, man can get only
conceptual representations of the objectively real. The bond of
unity which connects things-in-themselves with one another,
and also objectively with the individual minds (as things-in-
themselves) of each of us, exists beyond our consciousness in
a Divine Being of whom, once more, we have merely a
conceptual representation.
[12] The Dualist believes that the whole world would be
dissolved into a mere abstract scheme of concepts, did he not
posit the existence of real connections beside the conceptual
ones. In other words, the ideal principles which thinking
discovers are too airy for the Dualist, and he seeks, in
addition, real principles with which to support them.
[13] Let us examine these real principles a little more
closely. The naive man (Naive Realist) regards the objects of
sense-experience as realities. The fact that his hands can
grasp, and his eyes see, these objects is for him sufficient
guarantee of their reality. "Nothing exists that cannot be
perceived" is, in fact, the first axiom of the naive man; and it
is held to be equally valid in its converse: "Everything which is
perceived exists." The best proof for this assertion is the naive
man's belief in immortality and in ghosts. He thinks of the
soul as a fine kind of matter perceptible by the senses which,
in special circumstances, may actually become visible to the
ordinary man (belief in ghosts).
[14] In contrast with this, his real, world, the Naive Realist
regards everything else, especially the world of ideas, as
unreal, or "merely ideal." What we add to objects by thinking
is merely thoughts about the objects. Thought adds nothing
real to the percept.
[15] But it is not only with reference to the existence of
things that the naive man regards perception as the sole
guarantee of reality, but also with reference to the existence of
processes. A thing, according to him, can act on another only
when a force actually present to perception issues from the
one and acts upon the other. The ancient Greek philosophers,
who were Naive Realists in the best sense of the word, held a
theory of vision according to which the eye sends out feelers
which touch the objects. The older physicists thought that
very fine kinds of substances emanate from the objects and
penetrate through the sense-organs into the soul. The actual
perception of these substances is impossible only because of
the coarseness of our sense-organs relatively to the fineness of
these substances. In principle the reason for attributing reality
to these substances was the same as that for attributing it to
the objects of the sensible world, viz., their kind of existence,
which was conceived to be analogous to that of perceptual
reality.
[16] The self-contained being of ideas is not thought of by
the naive mind as real in the same sense. An object conceived
"merely in idea" is regarded as a chimera until sense-
perception can furnish proof of its reality. In short, the naive
man demands, in addition to the ideal evidence of his
thinking, the real evidence of his senses. In this need of the
naive man lies the ground for the origin of the belief in
revelation. The God whom we apprehend by thought remains
always merely our idea of God. The naive consciousness
demands that God should manifest Himself in ways accessible
to the senses. God must appear in the flesh, and must attest
his Godhead to our senses by the changing of water into wine.
[17] Even knowledge itself is conceived by the naive mind
as a process analogous to sense-perception. Things, it is
thought, make an impression on the mind, or send out copies
of themselves which enter through our senses, etc.
[18] What the naive man can perceive with his senses he
regards as real, and what he cannot perceive (God, soul,
knowledge, etc.) he regards as analogous to what he can
perceive.
[19] On the basis of Naive Realism, science can consist only
in an exact description of the content of perception. Concepts
are only means to this end. They exist to provide ideal
counterparts of percepts. With the things themselves they
have nothing to do. For the Naive Realist only the individual
tulips, which we can see, are real. The universal idea of tulip
is to him an abstraction, the unreal thought-picture which the
mind constructs for itself out of the characteristics common to
all tulips.
[20] Naive Realism, with its fundamental principle of the
reality of all percepts, contradicts experience, which teaches
us that the content of percepts is of a transitory nature. The
tulip I see is real today; in a year it will have vanished into
nothingness. What persists is the species "tulip." This species
is, however, for the Naive Realist merely an idea, not a
reality. Thus this theory of the world finds itself in the
paradoxical position of seeing its realities arise and perish,
while that which, by contrast with its realities, it regards as
unreal endures. Hence Naive Realism is compelled to
acknowledge the existence of something ideal by the side of
percepts. It must include within itself entities which cannot be
perceived by the senses. In admitting them it escapes
contradicting itself by conceiving their existence as analogous
to that of objects of sense. Such hypothetical realities are the
invisible forces by means of which the objects of sense-
perception act on one another. Another such reality is
heredity, the effects of which survive the individual, and
which is the reason why from the individual a new being
develops which is similar to it, and by means of which the
species is maintained. The soul, the life-principle permeating
the organic body, is another such reality which the naive
mind is always found conceiving in analogy to realities of
sense-perception. And, lastly, the Divine Being, as conceived
by the naive mind, is such a hypothetical entity. The Deity is
thought of as acting in a manner exactly corresponding to that
which we can perceive in man himself, i.e., the Deity is
conceived anthropomorphically.
[21] Modern Physics traces sensations back to the
movements of the smallest particles of bodies and of an
infinitely fine substance called ether. What we experience,
e.g., as warmth is a movement of the parts of a body which
causes the warmth in the space occupied by that body. Here
again something imperceptible is conceived on the analogy of
what is perceptible. Thus, in terms of perception, the analogon
to the concept "body " is, say, the interior of a room, shut in
on all sides, in which elastic balls are moving in all directions,
impinging one on another, bouncing on and off the walls, etc.
[22] Without such assumptions the world of the Naive
Realist would collapse into a disconnected chaos of percepts,
without mutual relations, and having no unity within itself. It
is clear, however, that Naive Realism can make these
assumptions only by contradicting itself. If it would remain
true to its fundamental principle, that only what is perceived
is real, then it ought not to assume a reality where it perceives
nothing. The imperceptible forces of which perceptible things
are the bearers are, in fact, illegitimate hypotheses from the
standpoint of Naive Realism. But because Naive Realism
knows no other realities, it invests its hypothetical forces with
perceptual content. It thus transfers a form of existence (the
existence of percepts) to a sphere where the only means of
making any assertion concerning such existence, viz., sense-
perception, is lacking.
[23] This self-contradictory theory leads to Metaphysical
Realism. The latter constructs, beside the perceptible reality,
an imperceptible one which it conceives on the analogy of the
former. Metaphysical Realism is, therefore, of necessity
Dualistic.
[24] Wherever the Metaphysical Realist observes a relation
between perceptible things (mutual approach through
movement, the entrance of an object into consciousness, etc.),
there he posits a reality. However, the relation of which he
becomes aware cannot be perceived but only expressed by
means of thought. The ideal relation is thereupon arbitrarily
assimilated to something perceptible. Thus, according to this
theory the world is composed of the objects of perception
which are in ceaseless flux, arising and disappearing, and of
imperceptible forces by which the perceptible objects are
produced, and which are permanent.
[25] Metaphysical Realism is a self-contradictory mixture of
Naive Realism and Idealism. Its forces are imperceptible
entities endowed with the qualities proper to percepts. The
Metaphysical Realist has made up his mind to acknowledge,
in addition to the sphere for the existence of which he has an
instrument of knowledge in sense-perception, the existence of
another sphere for which this instrument fails, and which can
be known only by means of thought. But he cannot make up
his mind at the same time to acknowledge that the mode of
existence which thought reveals, viz., the concept (or idea),
has equal rights with percepts. If we are to avoid the
contradiction of imperceptible percepts, we must admit that,
for us, the relations which thought traces between percepts
can have no other mode of existence than that of concepts. If
one rejects the untenable part of Metaphysical Realism, there
remains the concept of the world as the aggregate of percepts
and their conceptual (ideal) relations. Metaphysical Realism,
then, merges itself in a view of the world according to which
the principle of perceptibility holds for percepts, and that of
conceivability for the relations between the percepts. This
view of the world has no room, in addition to the perceptual
and conceptual worlds, for a third sphere in which both
principles, the so-called "real" principle and the "ideal"
principle, are simultaneously valid.
[26] When the Metaphysical Realist asserts that, besides the
ideal relation between the perceived object and the perceiving
subject, there must be a real relation between the percept as
"thing-in-itself' and the subject as "thing-in-itself" (the so-
called individual mind), he is basing his assertion on the false
assumption of a real process, imperceptible but analogous to
to processes in the world of percepts. Further, when the
Metaphysical Realist asserts that we stand in a conscious ideal
relation to our world of percepts, but that to the real world we
can have only a dynamic (force) relation, he repeats the
mistake we have already criticized. We can talk of a dynamic
relation only within the world of percepts (in the sphere of the
sense of touch), but not outside that world.
[27] Let us call the view which we have just characterized,
and into which Metaphysical Realism merges when it discards
its contradictory elements, Monism, because it combines one-
sided Realism and Idealism into a higher unity.
[28] For Naive Realism the real world is an aggregate of
percepts; for Metaphysical Realism, reality belongs not only to
percepts but also to imperceptible forces; Monism replaces
forces by ideal relations which are supplied by thought. These
relations are the laws of nature. A law of nature is nothing but
the conceptual expression for the connection of certain
percepts.
[29] Monism is never called upon to ask whether there are
any principles of explanation for reality other than percepts
and concepts. The Monist knows that in the whole realm of
the real there is no occasion for this question. In the
perceptual world, as immediately apprehended, he sees one-
half of reality; in the union of this world with the world of
concepts he finds full reality. The Metaphysical Realist might
object that, relatively to our organization, our knowledge may
be complete in itself, that no part may be lacking, but that we
do not know how the world appears to a mind organized
differently from our own. To this the Monist will reply: Maybe
there are intelligences other than human; and maybe also that
their percepts are different from ours, if they have perception
at all. But this is irrelevant to me for the following reasons.
Through my perceptions, i.e., through this specifically human
mode of perception, I, as subject, am confronted with the
object. The nexus of things is thereby broken. The subject
reconstructs the nexus by means of thought. In doing so it re-
inserts itself into the context of the world as a whole. As it is
only through the Self, as subject, that the whole appears rent
in two between percept and concept, the reunion of those two
factors will give us complete knowledge. For beings with a
different perceptual world (e.g., if they had twice our number
of sense-organs) the nexus would appear broken in another
place, and the reconstruction would accordingly have to take
a form specifically adapted to such beings. The question
concerning the limits of knowledge troubles only Naive and
Metaphysical Realism, both of which see in the contents of
mind only ideal representations of the real world. For to these
theories whatever falls outside the subject is something
absolute, a self-contained whole, and the subject's mental
content is a copy which is wholly external to this absolute.
The completeness of knowledge depends on the greater or
lesser degree of resemblance between the representation and
the absolute object. A being with fewer senses than man will
perceive less of the world, one with more senses will perceive
more. The former's knowledge will, therefore, be less
complete than the latter's.
[30] For Monism the matter is different. The point where the
unity of the world appears to be rent asunder into subject and
object depends on the organization of the percipient. The
object is not absolute but merely relative to the nature of the
subject. The bridging of the gap, therefore, can take place only
in the quite specific way which is characteristic of the human
subject. As soon as the Self, which in perception is set over
against the world, is again re-inserted into the world-nexus by
constructive thought all further questioning ceases, having
been but a result of the separation.
[31] A differently constituted being would have a differently
constituted knowledge. Our own knowledge suffices to answer
the questions which result from our own mental constitution.
[32] Metaphysical Realism must ask, What is it that gives us
our percepts? What is it that stimulates the subject?
[33] Monism holds that percepts are determined by the
subject. But in thought the subject has, at the same time, the
instrument for transcending this determination of which it is
itself the author.
[34] The Metaphysical Realist is faced by a further difficulty
when he seeks to explain the similarity of the world-views of
different human individuals. He has to ask himself, How is it
that my theory of the world, built up out of subjectively
determined percepts and out of concepts, turns out to be the
same as that which another individual is also building up out
of these same two subjective factors? How, in any case, is it
possible for me to argue from my own subjective view of the
world to that of another human being? The Metaphysical
Realist thinks he can infer the similarity of the subjective
world-views of different human beings from their ability to
get on with one another in practical life. From this similarity
of world-views he infers further the likeness to one another of
individual minds, meaning by "individual mind" the "I-in-
itself" underlying each subject.
[35] We have here an inference from a number of effects to
the character of the underlying causes. We believe that after
we have observed a sufficiently large number of instances, we
know the connection sufficiently to know how the inferred
causes will act in other instances. Such an inference is called
an inductive inference. We shall be obliged to modify its
results, if further observation yields some unexpected fact,
because the character of our conclusion is, after ll,
determined only by the particular details of our actual
observations. The Metaphysical Realist asserts that this
knowledge of causes, though restricted by these conditions, is
quite sufficient for practical life.
[36] Inductive inference is the fundamental method of
modern Metaphysical Realism. At one time it was thought that
out of concepts we could evolve something that would no
longer be a concept. It was thought that the metaphysical
reals, which Metaphysical Realism after all requires, could be
known by means of concepts. This method of philosophizing is
now out of date. Instead it is thought that from a sufficiently
large number of perceptual facts we can infer the character of
the thing-in-itself which lies behind these facts. Formerly it
was from concepts, now it is from percepts that the Realist
seeks to evolve the metaphysically real. Because concepts are
before the mind in transparent clearness, it was thought that
we might deduce from them the metaphysically real with
absolute certainty. Percepts are not given with the same
transparent clearness. Each fresh one is a little different from
others of the same kind which preceded it. In principle,
therefore, anything inferred from past experience is somewhat
modified by each subsequent experience. The character of the
metaphysically real thus obtained can therefore be only
relatively true, for it is open to correction by further instances.
The character of Von Hartmann's Metaphysics depends on this
methodological principle. The motto on the title-page of his
first important book is, "Speculative results gained by the
inductive method of Science."
[37] The form which the Metaphysical Realist at the present
day gives to his things-in-themselves is obtained by inductive
inferences. Consideration of the process of knowledge has
convinced him of the existence of an objectively-real world-
nexus, over and above the subjective world which we know
by means of percepts and concepts. The nature of this reality
he thinks he can determine by inductive inferences from his
percepts.
THE REALITY OF FREEDOM
IX
THE FACTORS OF LIFE
[1] LET us recapitulate the results gained in the previous
chapters. The world appears to man as a multiplicity, as an
aggregate of separate entities. He himself is one of these
entities, a thing among things. Of this structure of the world
we say simply that it is given, and inasmuch as we do not
construct it by conscious activity, but simply find it, we say
that it consists of percepts. Within this world of percepts we
perceive ourselves. This percept of Self would remain merely
one among many other percepts, did it not give rise to
something which proves capable of connecting all percepts
one with another and, therefore, the aggregate of all other
percepts with the percept of Self. This something which
emerges is no longer a mere percept; neither is it, like
percepts, simply given. It is produced by our activity. It
appears, in the first instance, bound up with what each of us
perceives as his Self. In its inner significance, however, it
transcends the Self. It adds to the separate percepts ideal
determinations, which, however, are related to one another,
and which are grounded in a whole. What self-perception
yields is ideally determined by this something in the same
way as all other percepts, and placed as subject, or " I," over
against the objects. This something is thought, and the ideal
determinations are the concepts and ideas. Thought, therefore,
first manifests itself in connection with the percept of self. But
it is not merely subjective, for the Self characterizes itself as
subject only with the help of thought. This relation of the Self
to itself by means of thought is one of the fundamental
determinations of our personal lives. Through it we lead a
purely ideal existence. By means of it we are aware of
ourselves as thinking beings. This determination of our lives
would remain a purely conceptual (logical) one, if it were not
supplemented by other determinations of our Selves. Our lives
would then exhaust themselves in _ establishing ideal
connections between percepts themselves, and between them
and ourselves. If we call this establishment of an ideal relation
an "act of cognition," and the resulting condition of ourselves
"knowledge," then, assuming the above supposition to be true,
we should have to consider ourselves as beings who merely
apprehend or know.
[2] The supposition is, however, untrue. We relate percepts
to ourselves not merely ideally, through concepts, but also, as
we have already seen, through feeling. In short, the content of
our lives is not merely conceptual. The Naive Realist holds
that the personality actually lives more genuinely in the life of
feeling than in the purely ideal activity of knowledge. From
his point of view he is quite right in interpreting the matter in
this way. Feeling plays on the subjective side exactly the part
which percepts play on the objective side. From the principle
of Naive Realism, that everything is real which can be
perceived, it follows that feeling is the guarantee of the reality
of one's own personality. Monism, however, must bestow on
feeling the same supplementation which it considers necessary
for percepts, if these are to stand to us for reality in its full
nature. For Monism, feeling is an incomplete reality which, in
the form in which it first appears to us, lacks as yet its second
factor, the concept or idea. This is why, in actual life, feelings,
like percepts, appear prior to knowledge. At first, we have
merely a feeling of existence; and it is only in the course of
our gradual development, that we attain to the point at which
the concept of Self emerges from within the blind mass of
feelings which fills our existence. However, what for us does
not appear until later, is from the first indissolubly bound up
with our feelings. This is how the naive man comes to believe
that in feeling he grasps existence immediately, in knowledge
only mediately. The development of the affective life,
therefore, appears to him more important than anything else.
Not until he has grasped the unity of the world through
feeling will he believe that he has comprehended it. He
attempts to make feeling rather than thought the instrument
of knowledge. Now a feeling is entirely individual, something
equivalent to a percept. Hence a philosophy of feeling makes a
cosmic principle out of something which has significance only
within my own personality. Anyone who holds this view
attempts to infuse his own self into the whole world. What the
Monist strives to grasp by means of concepts, the philosopher
of feeling tries to attain through feeling, and he looks on his
own felt union with objects as more immediate than
knowledge.
[3] The tendency just described, the philosophy of feeling, is
Mysticism. The error in this view is that it seeks to possess by
immediate experience what must be known, that it seeks to
develop feeling, which is individual, into a universal principle.
[4] A feeling is a purely individual activity. It is the relation
of the external world to the subject, in so far as this relation
finds expression in a purely subjective experience.
[5] There is yet another expression of human personality.
The Self, through thought, takes part in the universal world-
life. Through thought it establishes purely ideal (conceptual)
relations between percepts and itself, and between itself and
percepts. In feeling it has immediate experience of the relation
of objects to itself as subject. In will the opposite is the case.
In volition, we are concerned once more with a percept, viz.,
that of the individual relation of the self to what is objective.
Whatever in the act of will is not an ideal factor, is just as
much mere object of perception as is any object in the
external world.
[6] Nevertheless, the Naive Realist believes here again that
he has before him something far more real than can ever be
attained by thought. He sees in the will an element in which
he is immediately aware of an activity, a causation, in
contrast with thought which afterwards grasps this activity in
conceptual form. On this view, the realization by the Self of
its will is a process which is experienced immediately. The
adherent of this philosophy believes that in the will he has
really got hold of one end of reality. Whereas he can follow
other occurrences only from the outside by means of
perception, he is confident that in his will he experiences a
real process quite immediately. The mode of existence
presented to him by the will within himself becomes for him
the fundamental reality of the universe. His own will appears
to him as a special case of the general world-process; hence
the latter is conceived as a universal will. The will becomes
the principle of reality just as, in Mysticism, feeling becomes
the principle of knowledge. This kind of theory is called
Voluntarism (Thelism). It makes something which can be
experienced only individually the dominant factor of the
world.
[7] Voluntarism can as little be called scientific as can
Mysticism. For both assert that the conceptual interpretation
of the world is inadequate. Both demand, in addition to a
principle of being which is ideal, also a principle which is
real. But as perception is our only means of apprehending
these so-called real principles, the assertion of Mysticism and
Voluntarism coincides with the view that we have two sources
of knowledge, viz., thought and perception, the latter finding
individual expression as will and feeling. Since the immediate
experiences which flow from the one source cannot be directly
absorbed into the thoughts which flow from the other,
perception (immediate experience) and thought remain side
by side, without any higher form of experience to mediate
between them. Beside the conceptual principle to which we
attain by means of knowledge, there is also a real principle
which must be immediately experienced. In other words,
Mysticism and Voluntarism are both forms of Naive Realism
because they subscribe to the doctrine that the immediately
perceived (experienced) is real. Compared with Naive Realism
in its primitive form, they are guilty of the yet further
inconsistency of accepting one definite form of perception
(feeling, respectively will) as the exclusive means of knowing
reality. Yet they can do this only so long as they cling to the
general principle that everything that is perceived is real.
They ought, therefore, to attach an equal value to external
perception for purposes of knowledge.
[8] Voluntarism turns into Metaphysical Realism, when it
asserts the existence of will also in those spheres of reality in
which will can no longer, as in the individual subject, be
immediately experienced. It assumes hypothetically that a
principle holds outside subjective experience, for the existence
of which, nevertheless, subjective experience is the sole
criterion. As a form of Metaphysical Realism, Voluntarism is
open to the criticism developed in the preceding chapter, a
criticism which makes it mecessary to overcome the
contradictory element in every form of Metaphysical Realism,
and to recognize that the will is a universal world-process
only in so far as it is ideally related to the rest of the world.
X
THE IDEA OF FREEDOM
[1] THE concept "tree" is conditioned for our knowledge by
the percept "tree." There is only one determinate concept
which I can select from the general system of concepts and
apply to a given percept. The connection of concept and
percept is mediately and objectively determined by thought in
conformity with the percept. The connection between a
percept and its concept is recognized after the act of
perception, but the relevance of the one to the other is
determined by the character of each.
[2] In willing the situation is different. The percept is here
the content of my existence as an individual, whereas the
concept is the universal element in me. What is brought into
ideal relation to the external world by means of the concept,
is an immediate experience of my own, a percept of my Self.
More precisely, it is a percept of my Self as active, as
producing effects on the external world. In apprehending my
own acts of will, I connect a concept with a corresponding
percept, viz., with the particular volition. In other words, by
an act of thought I link up my individual faculty (my will)
with the universal world-proces
…[truncated]