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With Berkeley's view of the world as a constant revelation of God, many
men will sympathize who have little liking for his idealism as
idealism. They may criticise in detail his arguments to prove the
nonexistence of a genuinely external world, but they will be ready to
admit that his doctrine is an inspiring one in the view that it takes
of the world and of man.

With this I wish to contrast the doctrine of another idealist, Mr.
Bradley, whose work, "Appearance and Reality," has been much discussed
in the last few years, in order that the reader may see how widely
different forms of idealism may differ from each other, and how absurd
it is to praise or blame a man's philosophy merely on the ground that
it is idealistic.

Mr. Bradley holds that those aspects of our experience which we are
accustomed to regard as real--qualities of things, the relations
between things, the things themselves, space, time, motion, causation,
activity, the self--turn out when carefully examined to be
self-contradictory and absurd. They are not real; they are
unrealities, mere appearances.

But these appearances exist, and, hence, must belong to reality. This
reality must be sentient, for "there is no being or fact outside of
that which is commonly called psychical existence."

Now, what is this reality with which appearances--the whole world of
things which seem to be given in our experience--are contrasted? Mr.
Bradley calls it the Absolute, and indicates that it is what other men
recognize as the Deity. How shall we conceive it?

We are told that we are to conceive it as consisting of the contents of
finite minds, or "centers of experience," subjected to "an
all-pervasive transfusion with a reblending of all material." In the
Absolute, finite things are "transmuted" and lose "their individual
natures."

What does this mean in plain language? It means that there are many
finite minds of a higher and of a lower order, "centers of experience,"
and that the contents of these are unreal appearances. There is not a
God or Absolute outside of and distinct from these, but rather one that
in some sense _is their reality_. This mass of unrealities transfused
and transmuted so that no one of them retains its individual nature is
the Absolute. That is to say, time must become indistinguishable from
space, space from motion, motion from the self, the self from the
qualities of things, etc., before they are fit to become constituents
of the Absolute and to be regarded as real.

As the reader has seen, this Absolute has nothing in common with the
God in which Berkeley believed, and in which the plain man usually
believes. It is the night in which all cats are gray, and there
appears to be no reason why any one should harbor toward it the least
sentiment of awe or veneration.

Whether such reasonings as Mr. Bradley's should be accepted as valid or
should not, must be decided after a careful examination into the
foundations upon which they rest and the consistency with which
inferences are drawn from premises. I do not wish to prejudge the
matter. But it is worth while to set forth the conclusions at which he
arrives, that it may be clearly realized that the associations which
often hang about the word "idealism" should be carefully stripped away
when we are forming our estimate of this or that philosophical doctrine.


[1] "Principles of Psychology," Part VII, Chapter VI, section 404.

[2] "Principles," section 148.




CHAPTER XIV

MONISM AND DUALISM

54. THE MEANING OF THE WORDS.--In common life men distinguish between
minds and material things, thus dividing the things, which taken
together make up the world as we know it, into two broad classes. They
think of minds as being very different from material objects, and of
the latter as being very different from minds. It does not occur to
them to find in the one class room for the other, nor does it occur to
them to think of both classes as "manifestations" or "aspects" of some
one "underlying reality." In other words, the plain man to-day is a
_Dualist_.

In the last chapter (section 52) I have called him a Naive Realist; and
here I shall call him a _Naive Dualist_, for a man may regard mind and
matter as quite distinct kinds of things, without trying to elevate his
opinion, through reflection, into a philosophical doctrine. The
reflective man may stand by the opinion of the plain man, merely trying
to make less vague and indefinite the notions of matter and of mind.
He then becomes a _Philosophical Dualist_. There are several varieties
of this doctrine, and I shall consider them a little later (section 58).

But it is possible for one to be less profoundly impressed by the
differences which characterize matter and mind. One may feel inclined
to refer mental phenomena to matter, and to deny them the prominence
accorded them by the dualist. On the other hand, one may be led by
one's reflections to resolve material objects into mere ideas, and to
claim that they can have no existence except in a mind. Finally, it is
possible to hold that both minds and material things, as we know them,
are only manifestations, phenomena, and that they must be referred to
an ulterior "reality" or "substance." One may claim that they are
"aspects" of the one reality, which is neither matter nor mind.

These doctrines are different forms of _Monism_. In whatever else they
differ from one another, they agree in maintaining that the universe
does not contain two kinds of things fundamentally different. Out of
the duality of things as it seems to be revealed to the plain man they
try to make some kind of a unity.

35. MATERIALISM.--The first of the forms of monism above mentioned is
_Materialism_. It is not a doctrine to which the first impulse of the
plain man leads him at the present time. Even those who have done no
reading in philosophy have inherited many of their ways of looking at
things from the thinkers who lived in the ages past, and whose opinions
have become the common property of civilized men. For more than two
thousand years the world and the mind have been discussed, and it is
impossible for any of us to escape from the influence of those
discussions and to look at things with the primitive simplicity of the
wholly untutored.

But it was not always so. There was a time when men who were not
savages, but possessed great intellectual vigor and much cultivation,
found it easy and natural to be materialists. This I have spoken of
before (section 30), but it will repay us to take up again a little
more at length the clearest of the ancient forms of materialism, that
of the Atomists, and to see what may be said for and against it.

Democritus of Abdera taught that nothing exists except atoms and empty
space. The atoms, he maintained, differ from one another in size,
shape, and position. In other respects they are alike. They have
always been in motion. Perhaps he conceived of that motion as
originally a fall through space, but there seems to be uncertainty upon
this point. However, the atoms in motion collide with one another, and
these collisions result in mechanical combinations from which spring
into being world-systems.

According to this doctrine, nothing comes from nothing, and nothing can
become nonexistent. All the changes which have ever taken place in the
world are only changes in the position of material particles--they are
regroupings of atoms. We cannot directly perceive them to be such, for
our senses are too dull to make such fine observations, but our reason
tells us that such is the case.

Where, in such a world as this, is there room for mind, and what can we
mean by mind? Democritus finds a place for mind by conceiving it to
consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, which are the same as the atoms
which constitute fire. These are distributed through the whole body,
and lie among the other atoms which compose it. They are inhaled with
and exhaled into the outer air. While they are in the body their
functions are different according as they are located in this organ or
in that. In the brain they give rise to thought, in the heart to
anger, and in the liver to desire.

I suppose no one would care, at the present time, to become a
Democritean. The "Reason," which tells us that the mind consists of
fine, round atoms, appears to have nothing but its bare word to offer
us. But, apart from this, a peculiar difficulty seems to face us; even
supposing there are atoms of fire in the brain, the heart, and the
liver, what are the _thought_, _anger_, and _desire_, of which mention
is made?

Shall we conceive of these last as atoms, as void space, or as the
motion of atoms? There really seems to be no place in the world for
them, and _these are the mind so far as the mind appears to be
revealed_--they are _mental phenomena_. It does not seem that they are
to be identified with anything that the Atomistic doctrine admits as
existing. They are simply overlooked.

Is the modern materialism more satisfactory? About half a century ago
there was in the scientific world something like a revival of
materialistic thinking. It did not occur to any one to maintain that
the mind consists of fine atoms disseminated through the body, but
statements almost as crude were made. It was said, for example, that
the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

It seems a gratuitous labor to criticise such statements as these in
detail. There are no glands the secretions of which are not as
unequivocally material as are the glands themselves. This means that
such secretions can be captured and analyzed; the chemical elements of
which they are composed can be enumerated. They are open to inspection
in precisely the same way as are the glands which secrete them.

Does it seem reasonable to maintain that thoughts and feelings are
related to brains in this way? Does the chemist ever dream of
collecting them in a test tube, and of drawing up for us a list of
their constituent elements? When the brain is active, there are, to be
sure, certain material products which pass into the blood and are
finally eliminated from the body; but among these products no one would
be more surprised than the materialist to discover pains and pleasures,
memories and anticipations, desires and volitions. This talk of
thought as a "secretion" we can afford to set aside.

Nor need we take much more seriously the seemingly more sober statement
that thought is a "function" of the brain. There is, of course, a
sense in which we all admit the statement; minds are not disembodied,
and we have reason to believe that mind and brain are most intimately
related. But the word "function" is used in a very broad and loose
sense when it serves to indicate this relation; and one may employ it
in this way without being a materialist at all. In a stricter sense of
the word, the brain has no functions that may not be conceived as
mechanical changes,--as the motion of atoms in space,--and to identify
mental phenomena with these is inexcusable. It is not theoretically
inconceivable that, with finer senses, we might directly perceive the
motions of the atoms in another man's brain; it is inconceivable that
we should thus directly perceive his melancholy or his joy; they belong
to another world.

56. SPIRITUALISM.--The name _Spiritualism_ is sometimes given to the
doctrine that there is no existence which we may not properly call mind
or spirit. It errs in the one direction as materialism errs in the
other.

One must not confound with this doctrine that very different one,
Spiritism, which teaches that a certain favored class of persons called
mediums may bring back the spirits of the departed and enable us to
hold communication with them. Such beliefs have always existed among
the common people, but they have rarely interested philosophers. I
shall have nothing to say of them in this book.

There have been various kinds of spiritualists. The name may be
applied to the idealists, from Berkeley down to those of our day; at
some of the varieties of their doctrine we have taken a glance
(sections 49, 53). To these we need not recur; but there is one type
of spiritualistic doctrine which is much discussed at the present day
and which appears to appeal strongly to a number of scientific men. We
must consider it for a moment.

We have examined Professor Clifford's doctrine of Mind-stuff (section
43). Clifford maintained that all the material things we perceive are
our perceptions--they are in our consciousness, and are not properly
external at all. But, believing, as he did, that all nature is
animated, he held that every material thing, every perception, may be
taken as a revelation of something not in our consciousness, of a mind
or, at least, of a certain amount of mind-stuff. How shall we conceive
the relation between what is in our mind and the something
corresponding to it not in our mind?

We must, says Clifford, regard the latter as the _reality_ of which the
former is the _appearance_ or _manifestation_. "What I perceive as
your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You; but then
that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my
perception."

This doctrine is _Panpsychism_, in the form in which it is usually
brought to our attention. It holds that the only real existences are
minds, and that physical phenomena must be regarded as the
manifestations under which these real existences make us aware of their
presence. The term panpsychism may, it is true, be used in a somewhat
different sense. It may be employed merely to indicate the doctrine
that all nature is animated, and without implying a theory as to the
relation between bodies perceived and the minds supposed to accompany
them.

What shall we say to panpsychism of the type represented by Clifford?
It is, I think, sufficiently answered in the earlier chapters of this
volume:--

(1) If I call material facts my perceptions, I do an injustice to the
distinction between the physical and the mental (Chapter IV).

(2) If I say that all nature is animated, I extend illegitimately the
argument for other minds (Chapter X).

(3) If I say that mind is the reality of which the brain is the
appearance, I misconceive what is meant by the distinction between
appearance and reality (Chapter V).

57. THE DOCTRINE OF THE ONE SUBSTANCE.--In the seventeenth century
Descartes maintained that, although mind and matter may justly be
regarded as two substances, yet it should be recognized that they are
not really independent substances in the strictest sense of the word,
but that there is only one substance, in this sense, and mind and
matter are, as it were, its attributes.

His thought was that by attribute we mean that which is not
independent, but must be referred to something else; by substance, we
mean that which exists independently and is not referred to any other
thing. It seemed to follow that there could be only one substance.

Spinoza modified Descartes' doctrine in that he refused to regard mind
and matter as substances at all. He made them unequivocally attributes
of the one and only substance, which he called God.

The thought which influenced Spinoza had impressed many minds before
his time, and it has influenced many since. One need not follow him in
naming the unitary something to which mind and matter are referred
substance. One may call it Being, or Reality, or the Unknowable, or
Energy, or the Absolute, or, perhaps, still something else. The
doctrine has taken many forms, but he who reads with discrimination
will see that the various forms have much in common.

They agree in maintaining that matter and mind, as they are revealed in
our experience, are not to be regarded as, in the last analysis, two
distinct kinds of thing. They are, rather, modes or manifestations of
one and the same thing, and this is not to be confounded with either.

Those who incline to this doctrine take issue with the materialist, who
assimilates mental phenomena to physical; and they oppose the idealist,
who assimilates physical phenomena to mental, and calls material things
"ideas." We have no right, they argue, to call that of which ideas and
things are manifestations either mind or matter. It is to be
distinguished from both.

To this doctrine the title of _Monism_ is often appropriated. In this
chapter I have used the term in a broader sense, for both the
materialist and the spiritualist maintain that there is in the universe
but one kind of thing. Nevertheless, when we hear a man called a
monist without qualification, we may, perhaps, be justified in
assuming, in the absence of further information, that he holds to some
one of the forms of doctrine indicated above. There may be no logical
justification for thus narrowing the use of the term, but logical
justification goes for little in such matters.

Various considerations have moved men to become monists in this sense
of the word. Some have been influenced by the assumption--one which
men felt impelled to make early in the history of speculative
thought--that the whole universe must be the expression of some unitary
principle. A rather different argument is well illustrated in the
writings of Professor Hoeffding, a learned and acute writer of our own
time. It has influenced so many that it is worth while to delay upon
it.

Professor Hoeffding holds that mental phenomena and physical phenomena
must be regarded as parallel (see Chapter IX), and that we must not
conceive of ideas and material things as interacting. He writes:[1]--

"If it is contrary to the doctrine of the persistence of physical
energy to suppose a transition from the one province to the other, and
if, nevertheless, the two provinces exist in our experience as
distinct, then the two sets of phenomena must be unfolded
simultaneously, each according to its laws, so that for every
phenomenon in the world of consciousness there is a corresponding
phenomenon in the world of matter, and conversely (so far as there is
reason to suppose that conscious life is correlated with material
phenomena). The parallels already drawn point directly to such a
relation; it would be an amazing accident, if, while the characteristic
marks repeated themselves in this way, there were not at the foundation
an inner connection. Both the _parallelism_ and the _proportionality_
between the activity of consciousness and cerebral activity point to an
_identity_ at bottom. The difference which remains in spite of the
points of agreement compels us to suppose that one and the same
principle has found its expression in a double form. We have no right
to take mind and body for two beings or substances in reciprocal
interaction. We are, on the contrary, impelled to conceive the
material interaction between the elements composing the brain and
nervous system _as an outer form of the inner ideal unity of
consciousness_. What we in our inner experience become conscious of as
thought, feeling, and resolution, is thus represented in the material
world by certain material processes of the brain, which as such are
subject to the law of the persistence of energy, although this law
cannot be applied to the relation between cerebral and conscious
processes. It is as though the same thing were said in two languages."

Some monists are in the habit of speaking of the one Being to which
they refer phenomena of all sorts as the "Absolute." The word is a
vague one, and means very different things in different philosophies.
It has been somewhat broadly defined as "the ultimate principle of
explanation of the universe." He who turns to one principle of
explanation will conceive the Absolute in one way, and he who turns to
another will, naturally, understand something else by the word.

Thus, the idealist may conceive of the Absolute as an all-inclusive
Mind, of which finite minds are parts. To Spencer, it is the
Unknowable, a something behind the veil of phenomena. Sometimes it
means to a writer much the same thing that the word God means to other
men; sometimes it has a significance at the farthest remove from this
(section 53). Indeed, the word is so vague and ambiguous, and has
proved itself the mother of so many confusions, that it would seem a
desirable thing to drop it out of philosophy altogether, and to
substitute for it some less ambiguous expression.

It seems clear from the preceding pages, that, before one either
accepts or rejects monism, one should very carefully determine just
what one means by the word, and should scrutinize the considerations
which may be urged in favor of the particular doctrine in question.
There are all sorts of monism, and men embrace them for all sorts of
reasons. Let me beg the reader to bear in mind;--

(1) The monist may be a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be
neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one
Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he
may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other
shades of opinion are open to him, if he cares to choose them.

(2) It does not seem wise to assent hastily to such statements as; "The
universe is the manifestation of one unitary Being"; or: "Mind and
matter are the expression of one and the same principle." We find
revealed in our experience mental phenomena and physical phenomena. In
what sense they are one, or whether they are one in any sense,--this is
something to be determined by an examination of the phenomena and of
the relations in which we find them. It may turn out that the universe
is one only in the sense that all phenomena belong to the one orderly
system. If we find that this is the case, we may still, if we choose,
call our doctrine monism, but we should carefully distinguish such a
monism from those represented by Hoeffding and Spencer and many others.
There seems little reason to use the word, when the doctrine has been
so far modified.

58. DUALISM.--The plain man finds himself in a world of physical things
and of minds, and it seems to him that his experience directly
testifies to the existence of both. This means that the things of
which he has experience appear to belong to two distinct classes.

It does not mean, of course, that he has only two kinds of experiences.
The phenomena which are revealed to us are indefinitely varied; all
physical phenomena are not just alike, and all mental phenomena are not
just alike.

Nevertheless, amid all the bewildering variety that forces itself upon
our attention, there stands out one broad distinction, that of the
physical and the mental. It is a distinction that the man who has done
no reading in the philosophers is scarcely tempted to obliterate; to
him the world consists of two kinds of things widely different from
each other; minds are not material things and material things are not
minds. We are justified in regarding this as the opinion of the plain
man even when we recognize that, in his endeavor to make clear to
himself what he means by minds, he sometimes speaks as though he were
talking about something material or semi-material.

Now, the materialist allows these two classes to run together; so does
the idealist. The one says that everything is matter; the other, that
everything is mind. It would be foolish to maintain that nothing can
be said for either doctrine, for men of ability have embraced each.
But one may at least say that both seem to be refuted by our common
experience of the world, an experience which, so far as it is permitted
to testify at all, lifts up its voice in favor of _Dualism_.

Dualism is sometimes defined as the doctrine that there are in the
world two kinds of substances, matter and mind, which are different in
kind and should be kept distinct. There are dualists who prefer to
avoid the use of the word substance, and to say that the world of our
experiences consists of physical phenomena and of mental phenomena, and
that these two classes of facts should be kept separate.

The dualist may maintain that we have a direct knowledge of matter and
of mind, and he may content himself with such a statement, doing little
to make clear what we mean by matter and by mind. In this case, his
position is little different from that of the plain man who does not
attempt to philosophize. Thomas Reid (section 50) belongs to this
class.

On the other hand, the dualist may attempt to make clear, through
philosophical reflection, what we mean by the matter and mind which
experience seems to give us. He may conclude:--

(1) That he must hold, as did Sir William Hamilton, that we perceive
directly only physical and mental phenomena, but are justified in
inferring that, since the phenomena are different, there must be two
kinds of underlying substances to which the phenomena are referred.
Thus, he may distinguish between the two substances and their
manifestations, as some monists distinguish between the one substance
and its manifestations.

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