CHAPTER III. THE EXTERNAL WORLD. "The real existence of an external world made up of objects possessing qualities such as our faculties declare they do possess, cannot be logically denied, and may rationally be affirmed." tion of our external logically re IN the two preceding chapters the endeavour has been made. to take for granted as little as might be possible A Justifica such facts as are not given in immediate conscious- belief in the ness. It has, indeed, been sought to show that world here our very consciousness itself demands, at the price quired." of utter scepticism, the recognition of the validity of our conviction that something beyond consciousness really exists. But the very title of this work implies the belief of its author in the real existence of external, material nature, and its purpose cannot further be pursued consistently without an attempt to justify such belief. Fortunately, that justification is as little really required for the mass of even the most cultivated part of mankind, as is the justification of our conviction of our own continued existence. As, however, to be logical, it was necessary for us to start by justifying the latter conviction, it is similarly needful that the more or less sceptical cavils prevalent with respect to our real knowledge of the material world should be disposed of in order that the subsequently treated matters may not come before us out of their logical order. Ever since Descartes and Locke, more or less scepticism, more or less uncertainty respecting the truth of our conviction as to a really existing material world has prevailed amongst Prevalent scepticism on this sub ject amongst losophers, the metaphysical writers most popularly known in England, such as, e.g., Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Bain, Spencer, &c., &c. Starting with the conception that the modern phi- objects immediately known are sensations, and and its cause. that the objects of perception are but mediately known by inference from such sensations, they have, with more or less accord, naturally arrived at the conclusion that as inferences are liable to error there can be no certain truth but in feelings. Yet examination of that which self-consciousness tells us takes place in our own minds shows that when we look at anything, as, e.g., at a tree, we do not perceive sensations, and infer from them that we have before us a single, solid, enduring object of a certain shape and colour which we call a tree; but that our intellect at once and instantaneously in the very act of feeling immediately and directly perceives the tree itself. This is what my mind declares to me to be here and now the case. It says that it does not perceive an image of the tree, either in the eye or elsewhere; that the tree is not presented to it by any intermediate agency whatever, but that the mind, in the act of sensation, directly makes the very tree itself present before it, while at the same time it equally declares that the sensations themselves are not the tree but are caused by the action of my sensitive nature (my various organs of sense) and the tree perceived. It must be borne in mind that in our inquiry we are compelled to start from subjectivity, and that our supreme test is what the mind declares here and now to be its clear, positive, and absolute conviction. Appeals, then, from that conviction to the infant mind, or to theoretical notions as to the development of reason, are quite out of court. Nevertheless, lest we should seem to shirk a familiar objection, we may here note that as soon as the infant's mind knows colours, smells, shapes, &c., it also knows the coloured, odorous, extended objects themselves. Even the infant never infers from sensations to objects, its intellect recognises the one as soon as the other, though at first it can of course recognise neither. Stuart Mill. He who is often spoken of as the parent of idealism, Berkeley, taught that nothing existed outside us but other minds, and that the apparently existing external world was but the action of the Divine mind upon created minds; and some modification of idealism, of a less pious nature, is professed by most of the writers on philosophy popular in England to-day—by Tyndall and by Huxley equally with Bain and Mill. John Stuart Mill conceived the material world as made up of "permanent possibilities of sensation," but Mr. John admitted the reasonableness of the belief in some kind of an external world beyond consciousness, and in the existence of other "threads of consciousness" besides our own. Mill, for a logician, had a singular tendency to contradict and refute himself, and Mr. Martineau has pointed out how, by Mill's system, "we are landed in this singular result; our only sphere of cognisable reality is subjective: and that is generated from an objective world which we have no reason to believe exists. In our author's theory of cognition, the non-ego disappears in the ego; in the theory of being, the ego lapses back into the non-ego. Idealist in the former, he is materialist in the latter." * But if Mill is open to this charge of inconsistency, à fortiori are those teachers of physical science or psychology open to it, who, professing idealism, teach what is practically materialism—keeping "the word of promise to our ear to break it to our hope." As to such teachers, Mr. Sterling remarks (referring immediately to Mr. Bain): "is not materialism all that is for them fundamental? and is not the idealism but, profanely to say it, the tongue in the cheek— to the priest, who incontinently sinks silent, dumbfounded ?" Mr. Herbert Spencer differs notably from the general run of thinkers of the school of Mill in that he asserts Mr. Spencer's Transfigured himself to be not an Idealist but a Realist, and Realism. 7 * Essays,' p. 101. As regards Protoplasm,' p. 62. even actively combats idealism. To his own system he gives the title of "Transfigured Realism." In the seventh part of his Psychology, Mr. Spencer justifies in several ways what he thus calls "realism," that is, his belief that the external, material world really exists objectively, "and in such a way that each change in the objective reality causes in the subjective state a change exactly answering to it-so answering as to constitute a cognition of it."* This view he justifies by an argument from "priority,” i.e., His justifica from the fact that the realistic conception is prior tion of it. to the idealistic conception, so that↑ "in no mind whatever can the idealistic conception be reached except through the realistic one." He also justifies it by an "argument from simplicity,” which consists of a demonstration that, if our conviction of the world's existence is not an intuition but an inference, then the system of idealism is an inference indefinitely more cumbrous and complex, and therefore more liable to error. He says: "While the first involves but a single mediate act, the second involves a succession of mediate acts, each of which is itself made up of several mediate acts. Hence, if the one mediate act of Realism is to be invalidated by the multitudinous acts of Idealism, it must be on the supposition that if there is doubtfulness in a single step of a given kind, there is less doubtfulness in many steps of this kind." Finally, he advances an "argument from distinctness," which reposes on the far greater vividness of sensations than of ideas which, according to Mr. Spencer, are but plexuses of faint sensations. He also contends against thinkers of the schools of Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, that their very expositions of idealism cannot be made without the use of terms which imply that very realism they deny. * 'Psychology,' vol. ii. p. 497. The italics are ours. † Op. cit. p. 374. Op. cit. p. 378. § Op. cit. pp. 312-366. Here, then, we are led to infer that the common belief is valid, and that space, time, figure, number, extension, motion, &c., really exist objectively as they are subjectively apprehended. It must be so, since no system can be deemed either primitive, simple, or distinct, which asserts that neither extension, nor figure, nor number is in reality what it appears, or that the objective connexions amongst these properties are what they seem to us to be, or that* "what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable." Yet this is the outcome actually arrived at by our authora result which to most will appear little distin- Outcome guished from scepticism, since it is admitted by of it. him to agree with idealism and scepticism in affirming that the subjective modification of consciousness in the perception of any external body" contains no element, relation, or law that is like any element, relation, or law," in such external body. Thus the universe, as we know it, disappears not merely from our gaze, but from our very thought. Not only the song of the nightingale, the brilliancy of the diamond, the perfume of the rose, and the savour of the peach lose for us all objective reality-these we might spare and live-but the solidity of the very ground we tread on, nay, even the coherence and integrity of our own material frame, dissolve from us, and leave us vaguely floating in an insensible ocean of unknowable potentiality. And this is REALISM; this is what is justified to us by being primitive, simple, and distinct, as being prior to idealism, "everywhere and always, in child, in savage, in rustic, in the metaphysician himself.” † Mr. Spencer may well call this "Transfigured Realism." If he were to invite hungry men to a feast, and having discoursed to them on the digestibility of sauces and meats, the relations of appetite, digestion, and nutrition, then led them into a room not furnished with tables supporting the meats * 'Psychology,' vol. ii. p. 493. |