 Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense. Part 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy. Five Essays by George Santiana. Essay No. 1. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense. Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of the Tercentenary of the Birth of John Locke with some supplementary notes. Part 1. A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not a figure to stand statuously in a void. A pose might not seem grand enough for bronze or marble. Rather, he should be painted in the manner of the Dutch masters in a sunny interior, scrupulously finished with all the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic inquiry. The Holy Bible opened majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation, the Terrestrial Globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for examining the internal constitution of a beetle. But for the moment his eye should be seen wandering through the open window to admire the blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in the marketplace, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily pass to the stout-carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting sail for the Indies or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were few ingenious authors that he had not pursued, or philosophical instruments he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested, and no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of the incomparable Mr. Newton. Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline continents, would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the philosophers' thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem, for there was also what he called the scene of ideas, immaterial and private, but often more crowded and pressing, than the public scene. Locke was the father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, his half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate. This airy monster, this half-natural changeling, monsters and changelings were pointed to by Locke with a certain controversial relish. They proved that nature was not compressed or compressible within Aristotelian genre and species, but was a free mechanism subject to indefinite change. Mechanism in physics is favorable to liberty in politics and morals. Each creature has a right to be what it spontaneously is, and not what some previous classification alleges that it ought to have been. The Protestant and revolutionary independence of Locke's mind here gives us a foretaste of Darwin, and even of Nietzsche. But Locke was moderate even in his radicalisms. A human nature totally fluid would of itself have proved anarchical, but in order to stem that natural anarchy it was fortunately possible to provoke the conditions of prosperity and happiness strictly laid down by the Creator. The improvidence and naughtiness of nature was called to book at every turn by the pleasures and pains divinely appendaged to things enjoined and to things forbidden and ultimately by hell and by heaven. Yet if rewards and punishments were attached to human actions and feelings in this perfectly external and arbitrary fashion, whilst the feelings and actions spontaneous in mankind counted for nothing in the rule of morals and of wisdom, we should be living under the most cruel and artificial of tyrannies. And it would not be long before the authority of such a code would be called in question and the reality of those arbitrary rewards and punishments would be denied, both for this world and for any other. In a truly rational morality, moral sanctions would have to vary with the variations of species. Each new race or individual or mode of feeling finding its natural joy in a new way of life. The monsters would not be monsters except to rustic prejudice and the changelings would be simply experiments in creation. The glee of Locke in seeing nature elude scholastic conventions would then lose its savor since those staid conventions themselves would have become obsolete. Nature would henceforth present nothing but pervasive metamorphosis, irresponsible, and endless, to correct the weariness of such pure flux. We might indeed invoke the idea of a progress or evolution towards something always higher and better. But this idea simply restates under a temporal form the dominance of a specific standard to which nature is asked to conform. Genre and species might shift and glide into one another at will, but always in the authorized direction. If, on the contrary, transformation had no predetermined direction, we should be driven back for a moral principle to each of the particular types of life generated on the way as in estimating the correctness or beauty of language we appeal to the speech and genius of each nation at each epic without imposing the grammar of one language or age upon another. It is only insofar as, in the midst of the flux, certain tropes become organized and recurrent that any interests or beauties can be transmitted from moment to moment or from generation to generation. Real integration is a prerequisite to moral integrity, and unless an individual or a species is sufficiently organized and determinant to aspire to a distinguishable form of life, eschewing all others, that individual or species can bear no significant name, can achieve no progress, and can approach no beauty or perfection. Thus, so long as, in a fluid world, there is some measure of life and organization, monsters and changelings will always remain possible physically and regrettably morally. Small deviations from the chosen type or the chosen direction of progress will continue to be called morbid and ugly, and great deviations or reversals will continue to be called monstrous. This is but the seamy side of that spontaneous predilection grounded in our deepest nature by which we recognize beauty and nobleness at first sight with immense refreshment and perfect certitude. I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions and their immense influence. Unfortunately I can consider him, what is hardly fair, only as a pure philosopher, for had Locke's mind been more profound, it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming age and was able to guide it, an age that confided in easy, eloquent reasoning, and proposed to be saved in this world and the next with as little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth. When quarreled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's mind, father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father of theoretical liberalism, godfather at least of the American political system, of Voltaire and the encyclopedia. At home he was the ancestor of that whole school of polite, moderate opinion which can unite liberal Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalized Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law, above all he was deeply convinced, as he puts it, that the handsome conveniences of life are better than nasty penery. Locke still speaks or spoke until lately through many a modern mind, when his mind was most sincere and two hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence. A chief element of this modernness of Locke was something that hardly appeared before any pure philosophy. Although common in religion I mean the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions, not by accident or inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are imposed on all of us by life itself. For instance, the presupposition that life is to continue and that it is worth living. Belief is born on the wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards in reflection we may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands, and being ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will tempt us to condemn them and to take for granted that the analysis which undermines them is justified and will prove fruitful. But this critical assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically, providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable, whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible misunderstanding or the exaggeration of a half-truth, so that the critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting. End of note. In Locke, the central presupposition which he embraced heartily and without question were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a plain historical method, fit in his own words to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. Men barely by the use of their natural faculties might attain to all the knowledge possible or worth having. All children, he writes, that are born into this world, being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them, have a variety of ideas imprinted on their minds. External material things as objects of sensation and the operations of our own minds as objects of reflection are, to me, the only originals from which all our ideas take their beginnings. Every act of sensation, he writes elsewhere, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the corporal and the spiritual. For wilts I know by seeing or hearing, that there is some corporal being without me, the object of that sensation, I do more certainly know, that there is some spiritual being within me that sees and hears. Looking on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls into two parts, one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one, the theory of Democritus, that the material universe contains nothing but a multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space. But Locke added a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space in its subtlety must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few materialists would venture to assert that if we could thoroughly examine the cosmic mechanism, we should see that a monstrous necessity of every complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind, for it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than to endow it with the power of moving. In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe accurately or even exhaustively the intrinsic constitution of things or their primary qualities. Perhaps insofar as physical hypothesis must remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested by the wearing out and disillusion of all material objects, and by the specks of dust floating in a sunbeam, and it is confirmed on an enlarged scale by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we imagine them as atoms. But it is all a picture, prophesying what we might see through a sufficiently powerful microscope. The important philosophical question is the one raised by the other half of Locke's natural philosophy, by optics and the general criticism of perception. How far, if at all, may we trust the images in our minds to reveal the nature of external things? On this point of doctrine, Locke, through Descartes, was also derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things, except position, shape, solidity, number, and motion, were only ideas in us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things these imputed or secondary qualities were simply powers inherent in their atomic constitution and calculated to excite sensations of that character in our bodies. This doctrine is readily established by Locke's plain historical method, when applied to the study of rainbows, mirrors, effects of perspective, dreams, jaundice, madness, and the will to believe, all of which go to convince us that the ideas which we impulsively assume to be qualities of objects are always, in their seat and origin, evolved in our own heads. Begin note. Through Descartes Very characteristic was the tireless polemic which Locke carried on against Descartes. The outraged plain facts had to be defended against sweeping and arbitrary theories. There were no innate ideas or maxims. Children were not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing were equal to one another, and an urchin knew that pain was caused by the parental slipper before he reflected philosophically that everything must have a cause. Again extension was not the essence of matter which must be solid as well to be distinguishable from empty space. Finally, thinking was not the essence of the soul. A man without dying might lose consciousness. This often happened, or at least could not be prevented from happening by a definition framed by a French philosopher. These protests were evidently justified by common sense. Yet they missed the speculative radicalism and depth of the Cartesian doctrines which had struck the keynotes of all modern philosophy and science, for they assumed, for the first time in history, the transcendental point of view. No wonder that Locke could not do justice to this great novelty. Descartes himself did not do so, but ignored his subjective first principles in the development of his system, and it was not until adopted by Kant, or rather by Fitch, that the transcendental method showed its true colors. Even today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and physics with soliloquy. Moreover, Locke's misunderstandings of Descartes were partially justified by the latter's verbal concessions to tradition and authority. A man who has a clear head and like Descartes is rendered by his aristocratic pride, both courteous and disdainful, may readily conform to usage in his language, and even in his personal sentiments, without taking either too seriously. He is not struggling to free his own mind, which is free already, nor very hopeful of freeing that of most people. The innate ideas were not explicit thoughts, but categories employed unwittingly as people in speaking conformed to the grammar of the vernacular without being aware that they do so. As an extension being the essence of matter, since matter existed and was a substance, it would always have been more than its essence, a sort of ether, the parts of which might move and might have different and calculable dynamic values. The gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific calculation by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses and feelings to appreciate the crosslights that might be generated in the process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, the physics of our own day realizes this ideal and traces in nature a mathematical dynamism perfectly sufficient for exact provision and mechanical art. End of note. Similarly in saying that the essence of the soul was to think Descartes detached consciousness or actual spirit from the meshes of all unknown organic or invented mental mechanisms. It was an immense clarification and liberation in its proper dimension, but this pure consciousness was not a soul. It was not the animal psyche or principle of organization, life, and passion, a principle which, according to Descartes, was material. To have called such a material principle the soul would have shocked all Christian conceptions. But if Descartes had abstained from giving that consecrated name to mere consciousness, he need not have been wary of making the latter intermittent and effervescent as it naturally is. He was driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking by the desire to placate orthodox opinion and his own Christian sentiments at the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with it, a force and independence perfectly congruous with the platonic soul which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or demon or incubus incarnate in the natural world and partly dominating it. The relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts then became questions for theology or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind. Yet it was not possible either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions altogether from those ancient dreams. What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of Descartes in respect to the nature of matter I have indicated above the position of Locke? Pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism scientifically the physics of Newton. On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than speculative. He resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our natural facilities were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came from experience, and no man could know the savor of a pineapple without having tasted it. Yet this savor, according to Locke, did not reside at first in the pineapple to be conveyed on contact to the pallet and to the mind, but it was generated in the process of gestation, or perhaps we should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that process. At least then in respect to secondary qualities and to all moral values the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the human body or mind. Experience, if this word meant the lifelong train of ideas which made a man's moral being, was not a source of knowledge, but was knowledge or illusion itself, produced by organs endowed with a special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed the doctrine of innate categories. As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it an immaterial substance. Not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although like Hobbes, Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human intellect. He here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddled Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body, immaterial meant bodyless. Therefore immaterial substance meant bodyless body. True substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the schoolman, but who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them. Locke scornfully refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified, and in still maintaining that he had a soul and calling it a spiritual substance he was probably simply protesting that there was something living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all his thoughts and actions. It was he that had them and did them, and this self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical, impersonal subject, and I think, supposed in all thought, for what would this I think have become when it was not thinking. On the other hand it mattered very little what the substance of a thinking being might be. God might even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking and of generating ideas on occasion of certain impacts, yet a man was a man for all that, and Locke was satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be, and this inner man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart. It was all his moral past, all that he remembered it to have been. If from moment to moment the self was a spiritual energy, a stir within, in retrospect the living present seemed as it were to extend its tentacles and to communicate its subjectivity in his whole personal past. The limits of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included everything that his living mind could appropriate and relive. In a word he was his idea of himself, and this insight opens a new chapter not only in his philosophy, but in the history of human self-estimation. Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of natural beings, nor of souls with a specific nature and fixed possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character. He was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he could will to become. The way was open for Napoleon on one hand, and for Fitch on the other. These two parts of Locke's natural philosophy, however, are not in perfect equilibrium. All the feelings and ideas of an animal must be equally conditioned by his organs and passions, and he cannot be aware of what goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life. How, then, could Locke or could Democritus suppose that his ideas of space and atoms were less human, less graphic, summary, and symbolic, than his sensations of sound or color? The language of science, no less than that of sense, should have been recognized to be a human language, and the nature of anything exists collateral with ourselves, be that collateral existence material or mental. Should have been confessed to be a subject for faith and for hypothesis, never by any possibility for absolute or direct intuition. Begin note, all ideas must be equally conditioned. Even the mathematical ideas, which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic order of nature, are not repetitious of their natural counterpart, for mathematical form in nature is a web of diffused relations enacted in the mind. It is a thought processed, the logical synthesis of those deployed relations. To run in a circle is one thing. To conceive a circle is another. Our mind, by its animal roots, which render it relevant to the realm of matter and cognitive, and by its spiritual actuality, which renders it original, synthetic, and emotional, is a language from its beginnings, almost, we might say, a biological poetry, and the greater the intellectuality and poetic abstraction, the greater the possible range. Yet we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or exhaustiveness. On the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way, so sure, leave most of the truth out. End note. There is no occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us to solitary confinement and to ignorance of the world in which we live. We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence in visual and intellectual terms. How else could a world be seen or known, which is not figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing an alien, in that cognizance which an animal may take of his surroundings, and surely all animals take such cognizance, the subjective and moral character of his feelings, or fighting himself so surrounded it does not destroy their cognitive value? These feelings, as Locke says, are signs to take them for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle sensations satisfied with their own presence. They violently summon attention to the objects that are their source, can love or hate be felt without being felt towards something, something near and potent, yet external, uncontrolled, and mysterious. When I dodge a missile or pick a berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure sensations or ideas without recognizing or pursuing something material? Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help uniting internal moral intensity with the external physical reference, and the natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias, and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects which entice the organism or threaten it. All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The ambition to know is not an exception, and certainly our perceptions cannot tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said, are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their sensuous and grammatical quality by their distribution and method of variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism of nature. We see the science of today how completely the most accurate knowledge, proven to be accurate by its application in the arts, may shed every pictorial element and the whole language of experience to become a pure method of calculation and control, and by a pleasant compensation or aesthetic life may become free, more self-sufficing, more humbly happy to itself, and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human note, since the life of reason in us may well become science in its validity, wilts remaining poetry in its texture. I think that by a slight rearrangement of Locke's pronouncements in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent and still faithful to the first presupposition of common sense, although certainly far more chastened and skeptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be in the first instance. There are other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke. Beside his fundamental naturalism and in his private mind, probably the most important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example of scientific rigor, capped with mystical insight. Yet if we consider Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost disappears. From his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic. Yet one who was a deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it were simple and short and left the broad field of truth open in almost every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary to his private reason or political interests, and the moral precepts actually vouch safe to us in the Gospels were most acceptable seeing that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would have arrived at in any case. Evidently, common sense had nothing to fear from the religious faith of this character. But the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil, advantage and disaster, and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for the common sense, even thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Molière making his chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it has a dormative virtue. The virtues of moral uses of things, according to Socrates, were the reasons why the things had been created and were what they were. The admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature. Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone and it had been a capital error in Socrates to make the interpretations exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew being an enthusiast for experimental science, and in order to control the movement of matter, which is to release those virtues and perfections, it is better to trace the movement of matter materialistically, for it is in the act of manifesting its own powers and not as Socrates and the scholastics fancied by obeying a foreign magic that matter sometimes assumes or restores the forms so precious to the healers or the moralists' eyes. At the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural, though divined, perhaps by a few philosophers, has not been generally understood. And Locke, whose broad humanity would not exclude the moral interpretations of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates. He seriously invoked a Socratic maxim that nothing can produce that which it does not contain. For this reason, the unconscious, after all, could never have given rise to consciousness. Observation and experiment could not be allowed to decide this point. The moral interpretations of things, because more deeply rooted in human experience, must envelop the physical interpretations and must have the last word. Modern Philosophy. Five Essays by George Santiana. Essay No. 1. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense. Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of the Tersentenary of the Birth of John Locke, with some supplementary notes. Part 2. It was characteristic of Locke's simplicity and intensity that he retained these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations, appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist at all. Yet in suffering and illusion we must entertain an idea, and the manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone Locke thinks. We can have certain knowledge. These, he writes, are two very different things and carefully to be distinguished. It is being one thing to perceive and know the idea of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of particles they may be, and how arranged, to make any object appear white or black. A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he has them in his mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he calls red or square. Thus the mind always perceives at first sight, and ever there happens any doubt about it, it will always be found to be about the names, and not about the ideas themselves. This sounds like high platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the left, but Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject. Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true, and he demanded this truth which he called reality of all ideas worthy of consideration. Mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot in his philosophic Puritanism that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where the frontiers of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly indicated in Locke's day by Spinoza, who says, if in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination the mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist, surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its own constitution, not as a vice, especially if such an imaginative faculty depended on nothing except the mind's own nature. That is to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free. But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play with fancy, and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction, rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally true. So in the realm of imagination he retrenched somewhat illiberally our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses for truth and being half aware of this imposition he is more troubled at the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanized or being bored, and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will. Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident. You had only to notice the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, being thus known to exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of reality. It was a fact on its own accord. Common sense seemed to testify to this. Not only when confronted with the, I think therefore I am, of Descartes, but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind and body interacted, each must be as real as the other, and as it were, on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right of the conscious inner man to assert himself, and when he looked into his own mind he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which occupied it. The existence which he was so sure of in himself was therefore the existence of his ideas. Begin note. Conscious mind was a fact on its own accord. The conscious mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some comic applications. Bishop of Worcester was alarmed if actions which a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would be a great blessing in the day of judgment. On the other hand, a theology more plastic than still fleets would one day find in this same doctrine a new means of edification. For if I may disown all actions I have forgotten, may not things not done or witnessed by me in the body be now appropriated and incorporated into my consciousness, if only I conceive them vividly. The door is then open to all the noble ambiguities of idealism, as my consciousness expands or thinks it expands into dramatic sympathy with universal experience. That experience becomes my own. I may say that I have been the agent in all past achievements. Emerson could know that he was Shakespeare and Caesar and Christ. Futurity is mine also in every possible direction at once. And I am one with the spirit of the universe and with God. Locke reassured the bishop of Worcester, and was humbly confident that divine justice would find a way of vindicating itself in spite of human wit. He might have added that if the sin of Adam could not only be imputed to us jurisdictionally, but could actually taint our consciousness, as it certainly does if by Adam we understand our whole material heritage, so surely the sins done or the habits acquired by the body beyond the scope of consciousness may taint or clarify this consciousness now. Indeed, the idea we form of ourselves and of our respective experiences is a figment of vanity, a product of dramatic imagination, without cognitive import, save as a reading of the hidden forces physical or divine which have formed us and actually govern us. End note. Begin note. Mind and body interacted. The self which acts in a man is itself moved by forces which have long been familiar to common sense, without being understood except dramatically. These forces are called the passions, or when the dramatic units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes they are called temperament, character, or will, or perhaps weaving all these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside, and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the conscious sphere or in the superficial miscellany of experience. Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to rationalize. Is human nature then resident in each individual soul? Certainly. But the soul is merely another name for that active principle which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source of our actions. Is this psychic power then resident in the body? Undoubtedly, since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed and continually aroused and modified by material agencies. End of note. Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great to dramatize its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the normal means of describing those forces of nature, which we cannot measure or understand. If we could understand or measure them, we should describe them prosaically and analytically in what is called science. But nothing is less measurable or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near to us and familiar as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with registering the routine of consciousness, but endeavors to trace its hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical cause, is driven to use the most frankly mythological language. The psychological processes concerned, though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not traceable in detail, and the moral action, though familiar in snatches, has to be patched by invented episodes and largely attributed to demonic personages that never come on the stage. Locke in his Psychology of Morals had at first followed the verbal rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one another. Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the greater prospective pleasure and avoidance of the greater prospective pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no power. They cannot even be discerned prophetically, saved by the vaguest fancy, entirely based on the present impulse and obsessions of the soul. No future good, no future evil, awaits to move us, except, as Locke said after examining the facts more closely, when a certain uneasiness in the soul, or in the body, causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream pictures which it evokes, is a mere symptom of the direction in which human nature in us is already moving, or already disposed to move. Without this prior physical impulse, heaven may beckon and hell may yawn without causing the least variation in conduct, as in religious conversion all is due to the call of grace. So in ordinary action all is due to the ripening of natural impulses and powers within the psyche. The uneasiness observed by Locke is merely the consciousness of ripening before the field of revelant action has been clearly discerned. When all this is considered, the ostensible interaction between mind and body puts on a new aspect. There are no purely mental ideas or intentions followed by material effects. There are no material events followed by a purely mental sensation or idea. Mental events are always elements in total natural events containing material elements also. Material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the object for those mental sensations or ideas. Moreover the physical strand alone is found to be continuous and traceable. The conscious strand, the sequence of mental events, flares up and dies down daily, if not hourly, and the medley of its immediate features, images, words, moods, juxtaposes China and Peru, past and future, in the most irresponsible confusion. On the other hand, a human life is a part of the conscious element, intentions, affectations, plans, and reasonings that explains the course of action dispersed temporarily, or dominant thoughts contain the reason for our continuous behavior and seem to guide us. They are not so much links in a chain of minute constructive causes. An idea or an act of will often takes time to work, and works, as it were, only posthumously, as they are general overarching moral inspirations and resolves which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often rendering our thoughts more precious in the process or totally transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents. The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate and our actions in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition, betrays it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares and now sadly disappointing it. I leave it for the reader's reflection to decide whether we should call such cohabitation of the mind with body interactions or rather sympathetic concomitance, self-annotation, and a partial prophetic awakening to a life which we are leading automatically. And note hereby an insensible shift in the meaning of the word idea, a momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally meant objective terms distinguished in thought images, qualities, concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts, moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind, constituents of experience, very much as material atoms were conceived to be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of sensation and the ideas, the only objects of ideas, so that the material world was rendered superfluorious, and the only scientific problem was now to construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Rock himself did not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical objects to some at least of his mental units. And indeed sensations and ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence of which his new psychology was soon to deny, so that about the origin of its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discrete silence. But as to the combinations and reappearances it was able to invoke the principle of association, a thread on which many shrewd observations may be strong, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a verbal mask for organic habits in matter. The fact is that there are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology, neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such as the followers of Locke developed into modern idealism, to the confusion of common sense. One unobjectionable sort of psychology is biological and studies life from the outside. The other sort relying on memory and dramatic imagination reproduces life from the inside, and is literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has been or might be unrolled in a human being. The ideas with which Locke operates are simply highlights picked out by attention in this nebulous continuum and identified by names. Ideas in the original ideal sense of the word are indeed the only definite terms which attention can be discriminant and rest upon, but the unity of these units is specious, not existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but self-sustaining feelings, each knowing itself they would be insulated forever. No spirit could ever survey, recognize, or compare them, and mind would have disappeared in the analysis of mind. Begin note to the confusion of common sense. Berkeley and his followers sometimes maintain that common sense is on their side, that they have simply analysed the fact of our experience of the material world, and if there is any paradox in their idealism it is merely verbal and disappears with familiarity. All the reality, they say, all the force, obscurity, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished after we discover that this reality resides and can only reside in the fixed order of our experience. But no analysis of immediate experience will ever disclose any fixed order in it. The surface of experience, when not interpreted materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers, when they look in this direction towards nature and the rationale of experience and science, are looking away from their own system and relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our actions, not our experience, and even anticipate their occasions, a propensity further biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future not so much similar to the past as better. When developed this propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws, but it is contrary to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from the matter and from the material continuity of external occasions. This appears clearly in our trust in persons, a radical animal propensity which is consistent with common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes superstitious or at least highly speculative when these persons are disembodied spirits. It is a pity that the beautiful systems of Berkeley should have appeared in an unspiritual age when religion was mundane and perfunctory and the free spirit where it stirred was romantic and willful, for that system was essentially religious. It put the spirit face to face with God, everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine language for the munition and expression of the inner man. Such an instrument in spiritual hand might have served to dispel all natural illusions and affections and to disinfect the spirit of worldiness and egotism, but Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they wished was to substitute a social for a material world precisely because a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might induce mankind against the evidence of their senses and the still small voice in their heart to live as if their worldly interests were absolute and must needs dominate the spirit. Morally this system thus became to sanction a human servitude to material things such as ancient materialists would have scorned, and theoretically the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the private spirit it professed to describe universal experience and the evolution of all human ideas. The notion of experience originally presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure the experience and to profit by it by learning to live in better harmony with external circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might at other times become an object of experience also, for they all formed part of a material world which they might envisage in common with their perceptions. Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial. It continues to operate with all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expertly criticizing. So in repudiating the material world this philosophy retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience and we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of experience without a world as there were people in the world when the world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now become undiscoverable. The material persons having been removed who formerly were so placid as to gather easily imagined experiences and to be able to communicate them. And the very notion of experience has been emptied of its meaning when no external common world subsists to impose that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing experience in Vakko that led common sense to assume a material world, but knowledge of an existing world led it to assume existing and regularly reproducible experiences. Thus the whole social convention posted by empirical idealism is borrowed without leave and rests on the belief in nature for which it is substituted. End note. Begin note. The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of experience. Experience cannot be in itself an object of science because it is essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private. And although it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited instinctively in view of the known circumstances in which the absent experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination. And such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language of other people, for action and language being contagious and being the material counterpart of experience in each of us may voluntarily or involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another by causing each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us in common not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to speak, as the square of the distance and even the record of experience in people's own words when these are not names for recognizable external things, awakens in the reader in another age or country quite incommensurable ideas. Yet under favorable circumstances such suggestions or revelation of experience without ever becoming science may become public unanimity in sentiment and may produce a truthful and lively dramatic literature. All modern philosophy in so far as it is a description of experience and not of nature therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature and to be without scientific value. These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the lines of physical science, and offers no difficulty in principle, nor need literally psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition of a material world since beyond his personal memory and even within it he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live and of the material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings. His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences of nature spread out before him. They tell him what has happened and his heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical not because it is not attentive to material facts and practical extinguishes but because being intensively attentive to them it turns them into pleasures and pains and into many colored ideas. Yet at every turn there is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science because ideas and emotions being caused by material events refer to these events and record their order. All philosophies are frail in that they are products of the human mind in which everything is essentially reactive spontaneous and volatile but as in passion and language so philosophy there are certain comparatively steady and hereditary principles forming a sort of orthodox reason which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of philosophers who are orthodox in this sense only the earliest or the most powerful an Aristotle or a Spinoza need to be remembered in that they stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting it makes up the chronique scabulous of the mind or the history of philosophy. Locke belongs to both camps. He is restive in his orthodoxy and timid in his heresies and like so many other initiators of revolution he would be dismayed at the results of his work. In intention Locke occupied an almost normal philosophic position rendered precarious not by what was traditional in it like the categories of subsistence and power but rather by certain incidental errors notably by admitting an experience independent of bodily life yet compounded and evolving in a mechanical fashion but I do not find in him a prickly nest of obsolete notions and contradictions from which fledged at last we have flown to our present enlightenment. In his person, in his temper, in his allegiances and hopes he was the prodigy of a race of philosophers native and dominant among people of English speech if not in academic circles at least in the national mind. If we make allowance for a greater personal subtlety and for the difference and perplexities inevitable in the present moral anarchy of the world we may find this same Lockean electricism and prudence in the late Lord Balfour and I have myself had the advantage of being the pupil of a gifted successor in many ways emulator of Locke I mean William James. So great at bottom does their spiritual kinship seem to me to be that I can hardly conceive Locke vividly without seeing him as a sort of William James of the seventeenth century and who of you has not known some other spontaneous inquisitive, unsettled genius no less preoccupied with the marvelous intelligence of some Brazilian parrot than with the sad obstinacy of some bishop of Worcester. Here is the eternal freshness of conviction and ardor for reform. Great keenness of perception in spots and in other spots lacunae and impulsive judgments distrust of tradition of words of constructive argument, horror of vested interests and their smooth defenders, a love of navigating alone and exploring for oneself even the coasts already well charted by others. Here is romanticism united with a scientific conscience and power of destructive analysis balanced by moral enthusiasm. Doubtless Locke might have dug his foundations deeper and integrated his faith better. His system was no metaphysical castle, no theological acropolis, rather a homely ancestral manor house built in several styles of architecture, a tutor chapel, a Palladian front toward the new geometrical garden, a Jacobean parlor for political consultation and learned disputes and even since we are almost in the eighteenth century a Chinese cabinet full of curios. It was an habitable philosophy and not too inharmonious. There was no great incongruity in its parts than in the gentle variants of English weather or in the qualified moods and insights of a civilized mind impoverished as we are morally and humanly we can no longer live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with admiration and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear dogmas and savory diction of the stage, omnivorous, artless, locrecious, whose dwelling it was. End of essay number one, part two. Some terms of thought in modern philosophy. Essay number two, fifty years of British idealism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Some terms of thought in modern philosophy. Five essays by George Santiana. Essay number two, fifty years of British idealism. Reflections on the republication of Bradley's ethical studies. After fifty years, an old milestone in the path of philosophy, Bradley's ethical studies, has been set up again as if to mark the distance which English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular dogmatism to universal bewilderment, and a chief agent in the change has been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit, his candor, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or empiricism, and how smooth and polished were the little stones in his sling, how fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that composite monster if only it had had a forehead. Some of them might even have done murderous execution in Bradley's own camp. For instance, this pebble cast playfully at the metaphysical idol called law. Quote, it is always wet on half-holidays because of the law of raininess. But sometimes it is not wet because of the supplementary law of sunshine. End quote. Bradley and his friends achieved a notable victory in the academic field. Philosophic authority and influence passed largely into their hands in all English-speaking universities. But it was not exactly from these seats of learning that naturalism and utilitarianism needed to be dislodged like the corresponding radicalisms of our day. These doctrines prevailed rather in certain political and intellectual circles outside, consciously revolutionary and often half-educated, and I am afraid that the braggart goliaths of today need chastening at least as much as those of fifty years ago. In a country officially Christian, and especially in Oxford, it is natural and fitting that academic authority should belong to orthodox tradition—theological, platonic, anerist atelian. Bradley, saved for a few learned quotations, strangely ignored this orthodoxy entrenched behind his back. In contrast with it he was himself a heretic, with first principles devastating every settled belief, and it was really his venerable silent partner at home that his victory superseded, at least in appearance and for a season. David did not slay goliath, but he dethroned Saul. Saul was indeed already under a cloud, and all in David's heart was not unkindness in that direction. Bradley might almost be called an unbelieving Newman. Time, especially, seems to have brought his suffering and refined spirit into greater sympathy with ancient sanctities. Originally, for instance, venting the hearty Protestant sentiment that only the Christianity of laymen is sound. He had written, quote, I am happy to say that Riligea has no English equivalent, end quote, but a later note says, quote, this is not true except of modern English only, and in any case it won't do, and was wrong and due to ignorance. However secluded the religious life it may be practical indirectly, if, through the utility of the spiritual body it can be taken as vicarious, end quote. The if here saves the principle that all values must be social and that the social organism is the sole moral reality. Yet how near this bubble comes to being pricked? We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever is stirred and hollowed into spiritual life. All this, however, in that age of progress was regarded as obsolete. There was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times. True, the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of religious devotion with some dubious help from aestheticism, but against the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy and against the mania for rewriting history traditional philosophy then seemed helpless and afraid to defend itself. It is only now beginning to recover its intellectual courage. For the moment speculative radicals saw light in a different quarter. German idealism was nothing if not self-confident. It was relatively new. It was encyclopedic in its display of knowledge, which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling if not stable results. It was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle, and altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly turning the tables on the threatened naturalism. By developing romantic intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly spiritual, personal, and subjective. The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality was consciousness. Quote, people find, writes Bradley, a subject and an object correlated in consciousness. To go out of that unity is for us literally to go out of our minds. When mind is made only a part of the whole, there is a question which must be answered. If about any matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it? Can we even say that it is? And if it is not in consciousness, how can we know it? And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not mind. Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument, and not being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of the British mind that knowledge brings material power and that any figments of consciousness, in religion, for instance, not bringing material power, are dangerous bewitchments and not properly knowledge? Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy, provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or ignored. So in this case, British idealists in the act of defining knowledge idealistically as the presence to consciousness of its own phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material. And they continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists. What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who, on principle, might not trespass beyond the limits of consciousness? Only ethical sentiment. Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day, without seeking to transform it. The most intentionally eloquent passage in his book describes war fever, unifying and carrying away a whole people that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim, even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe moral experience without proposing a different form for it. A man must be a man of his own time or nothing. To set up to be better than the world was the beginning of immorality, and virtue lay in accepting one's station and its duties. The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own ideals upon that tree. This need not prevent moral consciousness from including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health, beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern moralists. Yet they are undeniably good, better perhaps, than any painful and laborious dutifulness, so that the strictly moral consciousness might run over and presently lose itself in something higher. Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view, in the panorama that would ultimately fill the mind, these so-called goods and virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and evils. Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference, might ultimately be superseded, they might appear to have belonged to a partial and a rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness. With this disillusion of his moral judgments always in prospect, why should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all? Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral passion, for he had it, caustic and burning clear, was purely intellectual. It was shame that in England moral consciousness should have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously, that their hearts were in the right place, yet if we are to have ethics at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness, but with the conduct of affairs and reform of institutions. The spectacle of human wretchedness profoundly moved them, their minds were bent on transforming society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a decayed feudal organization and an inhuman industrialism had made of them. They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians were at least intent on existence and on the course of events. They wished to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human nature by those new institutions so that it might better realize its latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts, and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralists. Were they much to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used catch words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in contact with circumstances, yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes, however foolish, are directed expressions of that contact and speak for the soul, whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every rebellion. It was the moral side of utilitarianism, and of the rebellion against irrational morality. Unfortunately, the English reformers were themselves idealists of a sort, entangled in the vehicles of perception and talking about sensations and ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human nature, or even of nature at large, and only the most meager of verbal systems and the most artificial can be constructed out of such materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly at all of misery and pain, whereas it would have been wiser and truer to their real inspiration to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature. Without this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality could have any sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be well? Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians. It lent them an air of frivolity, absurdly contrary to their true character. Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippes, a semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sorted their lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the music of Mozart in the landscape of Vatru or Fragror. But in the land and age of Dickens, the moral idea was not so much pleasure as kindness. This tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work, but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world to make natural kindness laborious and earnest and turn it into a legislative system. Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical. One's station and its duties might have their agreeable side. Quote, it is probably good for you, he tells us, to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner. Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many. But as to three or four they are neither one way nor the other. End quote. If the voluptuary was condemned, it was for the commonplace reason that such a hedonist, too, might invoke that a life of pleasure soon pales and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's objection to pleasure was merely speculative. He found it too abstract. To call a pleasure, when actually felt an abstraction, is an exquisite absurdity, but pleasure in its absolute essence is certainly simple and indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find it strangely dumb. We are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor carried from it by any logical implications to the natural object in which it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxurate in sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster. But why should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The condition of Bradley's absolute, feeling in which all distinctions are transcendent and merged, seems to be something of that kind. But there would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal to such ponderous, worthy as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure at all. But if pleasure in its pure essence might really be the highest good for a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures, and this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point of application in the governance of life, or in benevolent legislation. Some concrete image of a happy human would take the place of the futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course, what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, insofar as their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things, but it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in the War of Words. A pleasure is not a program. It exists here and not there, for me and no one else, once and never again. When past it leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never existed. Pleasure is sand, though it have the color of gold. But this is evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each cycle of the universe, leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps something kindred may refill. A haggle, after identifying himself for a moment with the absolute idea, is in his essence no less subject to sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied with the joys of an oyster. But it is only their common form, or their common worship, that can give the quick moments of life any mutual relevance or sympathy, and existence would not come at all within sight of a good either momentarily or final if it were not inwardly directed upon realizing some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you will. If the nature directed upon it is unified and simple, it would be merely intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so many subdivisions in it as an encyclopedia of the sciences. For the moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life, and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and evil. We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realization, but what is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed, its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious, and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly social insofar as the soul demands society, but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good for him and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or the individual to the state is sheer barbarism. The Greeks sometimes invoked to support this form of idolatry were never guilty of it. On the contrary, their law givers were always reforming and planting the state so that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline is a help to the spirit, but even social relations, when like love, friendship or sport they are spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the pressure of the world and build their paradise apart, simple and hidden in the wilderness. While all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up for their tyranny by their instability for the prevalent moral fashion is always growing old and human nature is always becoming young again. World worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is in them, look for it in things external where there is no soul and by a curious recoil it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul in actual consciousness where it also is not. For sensations and ideas are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and would be gratuitous save for the ferocious bias of a natural living creature defending itself against its thousand enemies nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition of essence such as the sensualist, the poet or the dialectician may rest in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey knowledge it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external things for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice which one part of the world may take of another part and it is this momentous cognizance no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms for its prosody that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences which form the content of consciousness may be vivified and trippingly run over like the syllables of a familiar word in the active recognition of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature for essences being eternal and non-existent in themselves cannot come to consciousness by their own initiative but only as occasion and the subtle movements of the soul may evoke their forms so that the fact that they are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the material world and is part of the same natural event as the movement of the soul and body which support that consciousness. There is therefore no need of refuting idealism which is an honest examination of conscious in a reflective mind. Refutations and proofs depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations. On any different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and refutations fall to the ground and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at all. How far the terms in either case describe anything extant, if by knowledge we understand intuition of essences. Idealism follows, but it follows only in respect to essences given in intuition. Nothing follows concerning the seat, origin, conditions or symptomatic value of such intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs. Idealism therefore without being refuted may be hemmed in and humanized by natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation. The most recalcitrant materialist, like myself, might see its plausibility during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness. Consciousness itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of action and passion, recognizing it in its proud isolation and specious autonomy like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino. German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a self-conscious and reflective being, but it is hardly a system, since it contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable. It may therefore be readily swallowed, but it can never be digested. Neither of its two ingredients, romantic skepticism and romantic superstition, agrees particularly with the British stomach, not romantic skepticism, for in England an instructive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air. Its purity was alloyed with all sorts of conventions, so much so that we find British Helgians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology or religion, as if they took their idealism for a kind of physics and wished merely to reinterpret the facts of nature in a netifying way without uprooting them from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an objective, non-psychological turn, events and especially feelings and ideas will then be swallowed up by the essences which they display. Thus, Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other in time or space, were identically the same and not merely similar, if only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in this way to mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence, and intelligence in its turn was identified with the idea, or logos, which might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind, so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe visible to omniscience. As to romantic skepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be when left to itself if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up their idealism late and with open eyes. In Crosci and Gentili, the transcendental attitude is kept pure. For them, there is really no universe save spirit creating its experience, and if we ask whence or on what principle occasions arise for all this compulsory fiction, we are reminded that this question with any answer which spirit might invent for it belongs not to philosophy, but to some special science like physiology itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus, the more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not the remotest chance of reaching his imaginary bait, God, nature, or truth, for to seek such things is to presuppose them, and to presuppose anything, if spirit be absolute, is to invent it. Even those philosophies of history which the idealist may, for some secret reason, be impelled to construct would be superstitions according to his own principles, if he took them for more than poetic fictions of the historian. So that in the study of history, as in every other study, all the diligence and sober learning which the philosopher may possess are non-philosophical, since they presuppose independent events and material documents. This perfect idealism turns out to be pure literary sport, like lyric poetry, in which no truth is conveyed save the miscellaneous truth taken over from common sense or the special sciences, and the gay spirit supposed to be living and shining of its own sweet will and find nothing to live or shine upon save the common natural world. Such at least would be the case if romantic superstition did not supervene demanding that the spirit should impose some arbitrary rhythm or destiny on the world which it creates. But this side of idealism has been cultivated chiefly by the intrepid Germans, some of them like Spengler and Kiesling still thrive and grow famous on it without a blush. The modest English in these matters take shelter under the wing of science speculatively extended or traditional religious prudently rationalized. The scope of the spirit like its psychological distribution is conceived realistically. It might also prove an enthusiasm for British idealism to lose itself in the new metaphysics of nature, which the mathematicians are evolving. And since this metaphysics, though materialistic in effect, is more subtle and abtruse than popular materialism, British idealism might perhaps be said to survive in it having now passed victoriously into its opposite and being merged in something higher. End of essay number two.