Duplexity

section first
The Critical and the Dogmatic

Philosophy, as the science of explanation, naturally assumes the coincidence of the possible and the rational, and as well of the rational and the logical. But experience rudely jostles this amicable adjustment. The human finite, as a local and ephemeral parasite, finds his prime concernment in causes and beginnings and ends, while the stable cosmos can afford only vibrations and compensations. To Sufficient Intelligence all things always are; only in a nightmare could it dream of a radical beginning or an utterly ceasing. And as for logic and expression, these can claim only as imitation or re-presentation, which at best may attain similitude, while “truth” is what likeness explicitly lacks, and what identity only could supply.

Reality itself, in and as knowledge, would have no essential being. Knowing is not being—not “thing in itself”—unless, always, knowledge is self-known. It is a fair conjecture that finite rationality is not consistent with cosmic conditions, and may factually be called upon to tolerate the rationally impossible.

Philosophy proposes a weird partnership or equation between man and the world, as subject and object, and these two prove strangely convertible and interwoven. That the transient subject, for all his legends of rainbow “covenants” and conversations face to face, “as of a man with his friend,” should fail as a divine correspondent, is not surprising.

Yet duplexity is the main parenthesis of philosophy, signalizing a more or less explicit duality, a kind of sex, suggestive of attrition and process and result, with their thousand proverbs of reaction and compensation, even of strife as the father of things. Duality is especially the fated nature of consciousness, but whether instantly such in itself, or by a process of shifting viewpoints, making the wonder of a self to itself, is one of the most annoying and persistent problems of philosophy. A rational unity would require an intelligence that is such as an object or topic to itself; it should comprehend and include itself, even in the contradiction that the other is the same. But then, what is the use of contradiction?

We must call upon Emerson here:

“It is all idle, talking. Life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of two amicable powers whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way we can be just is by giving ourselves the lie: Speech is better than silence—silence is better than speech—things are and are not at the same time—and the like. All the universe over there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied.”

To a man on the street (if one could be supposed to stop and listen to it) this diatribe, seeming to discountenance all literary expression, even as confession, were but rigmarole or absurdity, possible under poetic license; but so far from all this, it has to be recognized as the basis of all responsible criticism.

From this classic substratum rose the reluctant confession of Kant: “It is sad and doubtless provoking, that reason, the only tribune for all conflicts, should be in conflict with herself.”

We read in Schwegler also: “Only in the last of days can history account itself a work of reason.”

Herr Eucken exclaims: “Scarcely anything repels so much as the impertinence of representing the world as it is as a realm of reason.” And for this he is awarded the Nobel prize.

It makes good reading too in the Hibbert Journal (July 1910): “There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity. . . . There is no conclusion—what has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? . . . The mystery remains as somewhat to be dealt with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms than to our logical powers.”

In his exhaustive study of “Parmenides” Plato seems to have driven human rationality entirely from the field of explanation: “Whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear and appear not.”

Popular civilization gets a call-down here. How has it responded to this esoteric arraignment of its power of expression and conception, in presence of the old Two-Face “of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied?” And either way under the handicap that no one sentence will hold the whole truth! Think of the numberless writers and teachers and preachers, with very liberal salaries and considerable reputations, taking themselves quite seriously: how has been condoned or compromised the inconsistency of their pretensions with possibility and rationality radically dissociated? Under what apologies or exceptions do the universities assume to have accomplished their thousands of graduates?

We should have expected in such an imbroglio that some determined spirit would long ago have come to the front with either a clarion denunciation of philosophy as the headline of the intellectual program, or with some tour de force in “method” wherein an expert might succeed in expression, even under the handicap that his opponent on his own ground might be as knowing as himself, with an equal standing in court. Why not a “commission” on the subject?

So far from any such ingenious éclaircissement appearing in the record, the position is stalled and camouflaged in a myopic pretence that there is nothing to be concealed—or if there is any inexplicable complication in the premises, it shall redound the more to the glory of God, with whom all things are possible. “Metaphysics” gets but a sinister shrug. “Religion out of church is sacrilege”: it is bad form, such as would be discussion of the sacred privacies of the family physician. But in the church, safe from the free lances of the club and the clinic, rank exhorters who know little of the idealism that alone might tolerate their pretensions, speak as familiarly of God as Master Shallow spoke of John of Gaunt: “he might have been born brother to him.”

It is fairly up to criticism and book-reviewing and reputation-making to adjudicate this challenge of reason by reason. Is the problem of true thought and expression—the classic “truth”—so obdurate as the professional thinkers have left it? Literature as well as metaphysics shall find its prestige at stake upon the question, whether this of Eucken is really the last word of truth—“the difficulty, indeed, the impossibility of its appropriate representation in thought and conception!”

Experts find it easy enough, however idle or inconsequent, flirting between equivalent viewpoints—ideal and real, static and dynamic, and dogmatically setting up half-truths which, when depended upon, directly topple over in their own partiality. Society has helplessly consented that certain oppositions shall be ignored. We cloak over our inconvenient discoveries and suspicions. The astronomer speaks of the “sunrise” quite childlike and bland; and the profoundest idealist constantly confesses to the integrity of matter. A rap on the head gives a conviction of reality that no idea can come forth of it and refute. Criticism of the common sense comes back in its own face; like the wasp and the hornet, it leaves its sting in the wound, and is fatal to itself.

For there does seem to be in the world, and more or less as the world, an essential opposition, which throws truth into contradiction. And the opposition is elemental, integral, punitive, entitling vitally opposing viewpoints, and encouraging antagonistic creeds. Down upon the practical field it entails the survival of the fittest. In metaphysics we see being and not-being insisting upon and pervading each other. We read of “negation positive in its result.”

Such is really the genius of being, such the burden of philosophy. If possibility will stand for essential opposition it must stand for logical contradiction; there must be contrary knowledges at the same integral point. But opposing knowledges (not mere opinions) at the same point are null except upon one condition: the reality shall not be objectively determined, not a thing in itself, but rather what it is known as, the subjects themselves furnishing any apparent difference. But these knowledges may be good and sufficient for their subjects—half-truths perhaps, but wholes to half-natures. A man may stake life and soul that the sun goes around the earth; “to whom a thing appears that thing is,” said the ancient; but for this to be true and not an illusion of sense reality must be subjectively determined, and not an alien thing in itself.

Reality by right should be essentially, or in and of itself; but for philosophy, which is a kind of impertinence, it can be only what it is known as. In truth being and essence should be identical, but in philosophy they are merely the same, and dialectically the same is another (there needs two for sameness). Though it were a re-presentation it were not truly the same though similar, or at best a likeness, and “truth” is explicitly what likeness lacks: pure being, rightly same in its identity, without limit or distinction, for philosophy becomes “one”—a being of limit and comprehension; and when philosophy would comprehend its all as one it has to negotiate the anomaly of somewhat limiting and comprehending itself. For, as said Philolaus, “one is made by limiting,” and if all is one or a whole it is such by the limiting and comprehension of itself. The whole has no environment or room containing it: these if necessary shall be in the whole’s own essence; and hence its comprehension is from within, spiritual, as of an ego or personal intelligence.

In taking the world as a problem philosophy necessarily raises the question, whether reality is objectively essential—a thing in itself—or merely what it is known as; and this again becomes under criticism a double question. Knowledge itself will in turn be called upon as to whether it is authentically such, or only what it can be critically proved—possibly only secondary and given.

For idealism reality has no objective integrity; or if at best it has position the same is questionable and indifferent. For pure philosophy the world must be what it is known as; and if knowledge itself is in question it must be self-determined.

That reality is identical for only what it is known as, consider the matter of its different sizes.

All sane human beings are agreed as to the apparent sizes of different things as something genuine and reliable; the world (we assume) is real as in and of these sizes. But when we subject an object to the microscope and enlarge its size many times, and find potentially in it beautiful features, and perchance living creatures for which the unaided eye is inadequate, we learn that in true æsthetic value our sizes are but arbitrary and accidental determinations of our own lenses, and that the world may have as many sizes as it has observers, and that it is identical only as position in some occult order of being, with no size at all of its own, in fact that all things in themselves (if there are such) are the same.

For instance we may say categorically that light and darkness are the same. Every one knows the sense in which they are different, but he may need to be advised of a vital sense in which they are alike, to wit, that neither is essential, or anything at all in itself—and further that there may be no reality in itself, but specifically only what it is known as.

As for light and darkness, we know that if all the light should go out there would be left no distinction—no form nor line nor shade of difference. But consider: if all the darkness should go out, the pure light would be equally void of any line or form or difference. It should appear then that neither light nor darkness essentially affords distinction, nor one more than the other, but that distinction in itself is a property of intelligence. The difference of two things is not a property of either.

In practical life we easily condone our opposing viewpoints. We assume a duplex consciousness of the sun going around the earth and the earth going around the sun; we allow them to mingle their motions,

But we are not quite so ready in accepting as half-truths universe and pluriverse, or theism and atheism, as they arise in the consideration of space as either going on-and-on beyond comprehension, unity or personality, or as being in itself nothing, save by the voluntary occupying of subjective spirit. Concurring freely with Herr Eucken as to the impertinent presumption of the finite in assuming that the cosmos, to be at all, must be rational, or consistent with its parasitical nature, and agreeing generally that the rational and the possible are not necessarily coincident, we regard it as no heroic undertaking, holding theism and atheism as half-truths equally defensible.

Said Novalis: “Philosophy can bake no bread, but she can give us God, freedom and immortality.”

By baking no bread he doubtless alluded to our utter ignorance of any natural law, the fact being that we know nothing of natural causes or elements; but for idealism (which was his only intention as philosophy) the world is not an alien imposition upon consciousness, but rather is determined by (or through) consciousness; and the seeming extensity of space is a mirage of spiritual liberty—the room and possibility of the spirit’s action, and nothing at all in itself, nothing “out there.”

The advantage of this absorption of space is to the spirit’s unity and comprehension. Philosophy as explanation requiring a being that is sufficient in itself, and unity or one being due to limitation and comprehension, the vagary of a mere space-comprehension, a one in an unlimited other, would not be the one of all that supremacy and safety require. The one must furnish or contain its own limit, and philosophy as idealism proposes this in the self-knowing, self-limiting and every way self-determining (they would say self-creating if they dared) of the one.

(For scientific purposes it is better to understand here by the popular words, God, freedom and immortality, the plainer meanings of unity, spontaneity and safety.)

All turns here upon the notion of space—whether it is concrete objective extensity, or else the spirit’s reflection of its own capacity and freedom of achievement, in a world where things are not alien and integral in themselves, but are what they are known as, determined by or through the lenses and forms of personal organization.

If space is physical extensity—out there, a concrete terrain whether it be occupied or empty, going on and on with nothing to stop it—then there is no more to be said of unity or comprehension, no more of “all” or “the whole.” Pluriverse is the word, the everywhere as here, the democracy of the many, the impossibility of autocracy or supremacy or general personality.

(There needs care here to avoid the whim of “the infinite.” We vacantly see space going on, and let it go at that: “infinite,” because we neglect the finishing and carrying out of the thought of it. But it makes a radical difference in theology whether our outlook is mere indifference and negligence or a concrete continuum beyond comprehension. If the spirit determines its own space and unity and comprehension [as self-consciousness is supposed to demonstrate] then there is a possibility of God, freedom and immortality, self-centred and safe from any dangerous environment.)

Obviously there are here two ostensible viewpoints from which to rationalize a no less formidable opposition than that of theism and atheism. To the average culture pluriverse is inevitable; space goes on and on, and there is no comprehension nor limit nor unity, and no whole save the solipsist’s whim of another than himself. But against this rises the world of idealism, which from its viewpoint cannot be disqualified.

The seemingly necessary and logical going on of space can be countered by an equally fated necessity of intelligence itself, whereby thought has a centripetal and self-relating tendency, a transcending excess of its own essence as knowledge in and of itself (possible if not rational) whereby it may constantly revert from the true tangent of extensity to the down-curving water-level of the planet-born, and prove the space which is conceived of as outward extension to be the freedom of its own will to extend, and that its limit and its wholeness are its own property—not framed or stayed by otherness, but essential as self-related.

Of course we of the scientific world know how this trick of orbicular intelligence is played upon us in the water-level, and we know that while in our logic nothing can be related to itself, yet we do constantly entertain the conceit of knowing ourselves without definite objectification, and of having an independent autonomous spontaneity of power—such as someone or something somewhere or somehow should afford for explanation. And as for our so confident assurance that space goes on and on whether occupied or not, let us see by an easy psychological experiment how Novalis would prove that philosophy can “give us God, freedom and immortality.”

He has but to show that space-extensity is mental, and then all the objective world will respond to the subjective spirit, and dwell in the sphericity of a freedom in which it may advance equally and infinitely in any direction—a universe founded from within, not prescribed or framed by otherness, but having in itself essentially the otherness wherein reason or fancy would produce or sustain existence.

Let the experimenter then resolutely set forth to walk off the planet into space and prove its endless outward extensity an objective reality.

We should foresee that in achieving this field or route our protagonist as an ingenious spirit will, as we might say, have one eye upon himself; and while, on his passage, he will at first measure this achievement by the bounds and barriers which he passes, he will also credit himself with the exertion that he puts forth; and in this regard he might well perceive that a blind man on a treadmill would be covering space at the same rate, and to the same extent. In the outer field of the empyrean our experimenter’s eyes will be useless as to his advance; there will be no guideboards to pass, and he will be ready to confess that space so demonstrated or accomplished is literally nothing, and that the only considerable thing or fact to be objectified in the premises is his own liberty of action, which he has been erroneously construing as an atmosphere in which he lived.

As an intellectual problem, this proving space by units of outer exertion is the same as would be the proving of possibility by inward steps of the infinite divisibility of number. Our traveller (for the higher thought) is only marking time, and proving that space is his own freedom, while for the lower or pragmatic thought he is pursuing the water-level of the planet-born, and like the compass-foot that is ever returning while advancing, he will but identify his position by process, and prove that “unit and universe are round.”

Nevertheless, over against this demonstration of orbicular intelligence, the pluriversal continuum stands immovably transcendent of all unity, comprehension or personality, and in the name of science protests that only the boor and the bigot bow to the rising sun.

Science can have no quarrel with Novalis for recalling space into himself, for we shall find under “Idealism” that all our world is a deposition of consciousness; but what we claim for duplexity is that the reverse of his doctrine is an equally plausible argument from grounds whose reality is as invincibly real as his own. We are not taking a side, but rather claiming that philosophy has been an inconsequent excursion. Our exclamation, Pluriverse, is here preferred to Universe only as emphasizing the clumsiness of those who live constantly in the dream of Novalis with no scintil of the idealism without which it is crudely irrational.

It is peremptorily obvious to the modern man, whom the astronomers have driven to the Copernican viewpoint, that facts as sure as the rising of the sun have to pass as illusions in order to give sanity and “sense” to doctrines that have grown out of unquestionable accuracy of thinking, which none the less stands loyally by the old ideas from the old viewpoints, which can be neither ignored nor superseded. The best form will not necessarily take a side in the theistic controversy. When the insistent dogmatist puts his question, “Is not one or the other of these propositions absolutely and exclusively true?” the best culture can but smiling put the question by, or like Socrates refer it to the professional experts.

Surely whatever is to be admitted in our world of thought should be expressible in words; we do no consecutive thinking otherwise than in conventional terms; but we are to consider that language is an invention slowly produced, and our philosophy infers the morning of the times. So far it is an inconsequent excursion in the hope of comprehension.

It is confessedly a strenuous and thankless rôle of thinking assuming the equivalence of opposing hypotheses in the same premises, and allowing a fighting chance to half-truths while denying any unity of generalization. Consistently we could never speak at all in the presence of the old “Two-Face,” under whose countenance “any proposition may be affirmed or denied”; but convention has politely shelved these ultimate questions in the presumptive interest of religion, and before advancing to scientific idealism we shall speak more popularly of duplexity, less as of the critical and the dogmatic, and more as of the static and the dynamic.

section second
Static and Dynamic Relations

Only confusion can result from the exploitation of any philosophical topic without a previous appreciation of the ineluctable duplexity which involves all thought and things, and which primarily and most portentously divides the field of speculation into time and eternity; demanding two opposing viewpoints, to be severally characterized as the static and the dynamic, equally defensible.11See Chapter IX.

From the static viewpoint all things always are. For sufficient reason nothing could newly become; for becoming is in a time process, and in it the identical might only partly be, except under the startling concession of a reality both being and not being in the same instant, congenitally splitting the tongue of truth.

We may notice here, and perhaps as fitly as if anywhere else, that in the matter of a complete being between the past and the future (neither of which presently is), or of complete being as embracing being and not-being in contradiction, the understanding of Hegelism is that the truth of the absolute fact is process, or transcendental nature, in which being and not-being (logically apprehended) are moments, or mental elements. These, in the Hegelian exposition of the topic, appear and disappear in a tergiversation between the static and dynamic viewpoints, either of which may be dogmatically defended—although they can be reconciled only in a confessed contradiction—by unifying identity and difference, and by claiming as (logically) instant a self-relation confessedly achieved by a lapsing process of the “in-itself” to the “for-itself.” His dexterity in this tergiversation is “the secret of Hegel.”

We may as well here notice especially the duplex nature of man.

Note firstly in his make-up the primeval equation of substance and form, or extension and thought, as he stands visible and invisible, apprehensible only by the joint faculties of sensation and reflection, of sense and spirit. Next see him double and opposed as male and female; and curious science has gone so far as to detect in either of these orders a rudimentary incipience of the other—as if, were one sex destroyed, the other might project the lost one from itself. Note further the duplexity of his two sides, right and left. From head to foot he seems put together as two variously independent parts, each with its leg and arm, and eye and ear, and its side of the organs of taste and smell—each with its half of the brain, the lungs, kidneys and heart; each with its system of nerves and vessels; and one of these sides may be at least partially paralyzed while the other is working comparatively well.

More intimately observe how each of the sides in turn is double in the method of its construction, in that it is throughout tubular—hollow and filled, container and content; the binding web, of which we might say, it is the man proper, is filled with blood and juices and food increment, formally accessory; the food and the juices inhabit their proper channels, and with regard to the integral man may be said to enter the form but not the substance: like a knife stabbed into a billet of wood, it may dynamically knock but it does not chemically enter.

The same persistent duplexity characterises the tubular web; for this in turn is made up of tubes. As in the ancient homoiomeria hair was made of lesser hairs, and feathers of lesser feathers, and stones of lesser stones, and the world at large of lesser worlds, so every tube seems made of lesser tubes that are made of tubes themselves, until, beyond the limits of microscopic observation, the sensible identity fades in the infinite divisibility of matter, lost in the bottomless well where, according to Democritus, Truth disappears from mortal view.

From the dynamic viewpoint, whence we naïvely recognize Nature and becoming, and seem to visualize change and increase and diminution, the static schema excludes any such idea of intelligence as we can admit or understand; and it vacates the reality of all human experience. It denies the possibility of novelty in nature and consciousness, and imposes an All-knower, with a “general” personality, yet competent to identify individual idiosyncrasies of thought and feeling within a compass as small as their own. If a man were down, in life’s battle, and had “taken the count” up to nine, this All-knower should himself be within one tick of the knock-out. How else could he realize the finite measure of such a consciousness?

Wavering between these adverse viewpoints, philosophy develops various “activity situations,” in which being and change are so confused that a logical statement of the case involves an identity of difference. Our conscious experience of life and time is of a continuüm of process and change, growth and decay, becoming and deceasing, in which philosophy raises a question as to what really is. She must insist that only what fully is is real, and she challenges a condition of becoming for somewhat that has fully become. We are loth to admit that any reality can only partly be—as if it were half in and half out of the real world, or as if the world were but half real, or as if what we mean by identity is difference and process. All these questions arise from any careful consideration of what we thoughtlessly call the present tense.

A contract for a working model, or even a “side elevation” of the present tense, done under all its scientific exactitudes, would drive the best inspired architect to either a madhouse or the ultimate surd. He would have to first effect a compromise with the static viewpoint, which can only under protest countenance any present tense at all. For to Sufficient Intelligence (and no other can obtain) all things always are, and the form of eternity excludes any form of time. An “eternal present” is a whim which the sure method quickly evaporates. But adopting the dynamic viewpoint, as the only feasible one for us, his first outlook would encounter two cross-universals. The spacial universe cuts like a disk at right angles across the universe of duration, and the crux of reality is at the instant junction of the two. Around this point swarm like bees and hornets the positive and negative queries of speculation. Here the time current offers to criticism its three moments of present, past and future, to be construed under the requirements of community, contrast, opposition and compensation; and at the same intersection the spacial universe presents to the wavering time element the sympathy of a problematic unity of matter and form, of real and ideal.

We shall not dwell upon this crucial collocation just here, but will offer a suggestion as to “the nature of things,” always intending by the word nature, the gerund or noun-participle, as the act, fact and substance of being born.

An object of sensation is presumptively such in the present tense only; but as subject to the passage of time it is also presumptively in continual change, and therefore never wholly identical, never quite the same; but since it may not at once be wholly other in its change, the object as such is a quasi identity of changing aspects, and the endurance of similarity in any one of its aspects constitutes it as a “thing.” A cross-section, or a breaking-off of the stream of time at any given instant, would show an aspect on its hither end.

As a merely provisional simile I will instance the body of time as a confectioner’s batch of candy, made to be drawn out into the usual “sticks.” In making up the batch (ordinarily of 25 pounds), the expert makes a fasces or rope of rolls of differently colored stock, so ingeniously disposed that when drawn out, and broken at any point, the ends of any stick will present a picture, possibly of a star, or a rose, or a bird. If these various strands of the fasces may represent the elements or laws in the body of the stream of time, we may envisage a thing in the present tense as an aspect or a picture done on the hither ends of the laws.

Certain thoughts in passing are inevitable in view of the present tense, or of its genius as we apprehend it. Our first necessity is, in attempting to assume a definite present as distinct from the future and the past, we materialize or embody it, and subject it to the infinite divisibility—the real centre of the ideal centre, etc. (i. e. reconciling matter and form). But when we pause in satisfaction at the present tense in its three stadia of present, past, and future, the same acumen which proposes these divisions finds itself called upon to grade the three into one another: there are as many degrees between the present and the future as there are between the future and the past. Infinity, the bottomless well, intercepts every possible distinction.

It was our thought to apply these necessities to practical music. The maestro may pride himself on his distinction of tones and semitones, and so determine the matter of music, but the genius of music holds its carousal between his lines, in infinite division. Here it is that we learn how the violin is queen of all instruments. The piano, the organ, the harp, are fixed at given intervals; only the violin finds the infinite difference, where even the pulse of the artist varies the pressure on the string, and denotes the soul.

The recognition of these opposing viewpoints is the most venerable characteristic of the sagacity of our earliest historical past. Long before the Greeks had contemplated the problematical aspects of the One and the Many, or of being and not-being, the Semitic genius had detected the subtlety and the fatality of truth’s double tongue. Even to the Talmudic sages the legend of Job was antique, yet therein the duplexity of the ultimate was as distinctly pronounced as it was by Parmenides or Zeno.

In the Vulgate translation of this ancient scripture we read that Zophar the Naamathite, said unto Job: “And that He would show thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are double to that which is.” (Job xi, 6.)

The last clause here rather exaggerates the duplexity intended. In the correct translation of the original Hebrew (as I am instructed) it is wisdom, not the secrets, that is double; and further, the clause here is incomplete, and this as to its most relevant and ingenious import. I may be permitted to offer a more accurate translation:

“And that He would reveal unto thee the secrets of wisdom—for it is double to that which is really in our comprehension.”

The last word is convertible as either physical possession or mental comprehension. The sages of the Talmud have used “toosi io” as synonymous with wisdom itself:

“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” (Psalms, cxxxix, 16.)

Another translation:

“My undeveloped substance did thy eyes see, and in thy book were all of them written down—the days which have been formed while yet none of them was here.”

Again the Preacher said:

“That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath been already: and God requireth that which is past.”

These ancient sentences overhang our lucubrations, warning us how old is philosophy—how early man tried to turn upon himself—to put being into thought, and thought into language, to objectify an ultimate generalization, a one of it all—only to find, at second-thought, that at best he was other to his one, and that his ultimate unity was duplexity at last—that the truth of his knowledge was a vanishing phantom of endeavor to know—to effect a self-relation, to realize being in thought, matter in form, the divine spirit in the Word, and the Word in the flesh. All this comes down to us in the confessed failure and discontent of philosophers: for modern instance, in the dream of Fichte, of “being out of its being,” as into “existence,” or the claim of Schelling that “something deeper than science he certainly did know,” or the despair of Jacobi that there was a light in his heart which failed when he would bring it into his understanding, even as Saint Paul’s law in his members antagonized the law in his mind.

These troubles will in course recur to us as we advance toward the revelation of the Mystery, wherein the unique must fail to be articulate and factual, because there can be nothing comparable as either like to it or different from it—it being feasible in personal experience alone.

Right here, for a modus vivendi, we must apologize and if possible conciliate. We began by disqualifying philosophy at its ostensible best—not promising on our own part to philosophize any better, but rather intimating another kind of satisfaction—and still we are in a way philosophising. We acknowledge the discrepancy; we have to dogmatize even in declaring our ignorance, using an intelligence whose finality we question: a kind of knowing that we do not know.

A claim of Sufficient Intelligence would assume the radical solution of the philosophical problem, while all the intelligence that we know of is secondary and unaccountably given to us—so that our course is ever wavering between an ideal of certainty and a practical plausibility. We shall hold that there is no “sufficient reason” short of a self-relation which we cannot admit; and while we deplore our uncertainty we cannot greatly admire a consistency due to an arbitrary and meretricious partiality for either horn of an incorrigible dilemma. We have simply found the problem of its practical unity insoluble in the philosophic methods of the past; and our treatise is not necessarily impeached by the adoption, more or less satisfactorily, of a different standard of satisfaction and a different method of attaining it. We admit equally the horns of the dilemma, and by the adoption of a name for it hold it in a merely nominal though philosophically useful existence.

When we say that to a Sufficient Intelligence all things always are (since for it all causes or rational principles shall have emptied their effects, and forestalled from it all novelty and surprise), we are entertaining an ideal of intelligence higher than our own practice exemplifies; and only by a degradation of this reason (as knowing all causes or fertilities exhausted) can we admit the reality of our ever-becoming world, which nevertheless our pains and pleasures so positively and even punitively authenticate.

Nevertheless such an all-knowing intelligence is a transcendental presumption. Critically considered, no intelligence as merely such is sufficient for fundamental explanation. Intelligence, as we exemplify or acknowledge it, is after the fact known—except upon a condition which we shall find inadmissible: to wit, that there is no lapse or passage of time between the intention of the subject and the existence of the fact known. Any such lapse, for the thinkers whom we shall prefer and defend (as opposed to “self-consciousness,” so called), is a merely nominal “identity of difference,” a clever logical puzzle which would meretriciously annul all distinction, since, forsooth, difference must be (to be at all) identically such, while identity itself has “all the difference in the world” from difference—making strife the ill-begotten father of things: a fact, if fact it is, of little credit to philosophy as satisfactory explanation.

The dialectic position best appealing to us would assume a chasm between the static and dynamic viewpoints, the breadth and potentiality of which vary with the cultural and temperamental differences of philosophers themselves, some of whom have fancied “truth” as in absolute contradiction—resolutely holding being and not-being as the same—while others have shaded or mellowed direct opposition by a bias diversion of it into process (through time’s becoming), or else making conceptual abstractions serve for perceptual or empirical uses—which Kant forbade.

It may amuse, however little it may edify us, to observe how quasi or half truths and flimsy abstractions have in their ingenuity, and their novelty in the growth of thought, lulled temporarily the yearning for absolute explanation. In this humor we shall propose a substitute for creation out of nothing, which shall give full credit to Sufficient Intelligence while yet saving the vital experience of the Many.

We saw in Section First, under the hypothesis that reality is what it is known as, that the sizes of things are determined by organic lenses, and that knowledge through the lenses is to that extent ostensibly creative.

The popular supposition is of the One’s divinely creating Many in a time process, and credit herein is given to some occult activity or fertility from which things come as out of nothing. Mere knowledge seems incompetent to produce, and rather fitted to witness or attend. In the case of the sizes, as determined through the organs, the effective power is left a mystery within or behind the subjective spirit; but as for the One creating the Many, or being creditably responsible for the Many, we shall see that in the nature of things, without any dynamic action or fertility, the Many belong, and are potential in the One, as a necessity seen in its nature from the static viewpoint of Sufficient Intelligence, whence all things always are.

We are now to suppose a human eye placed just without the perimeter of the revolving earth, which would pass it at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. In the unity of the intelligence behind the eye there is the many-ness of 1,000 miles. If now, in the freedom of our hypothesis, we increase the intelligent unity by enlarging the eye to the size of the earth, the 1,000 miles, as a reality of organic consciousness (a Many), would fade into a mere potentiality in the unity of the larger consciousness. For the earth would be, to the larger consciousness, not larger comparatively than a lady’s watch, so slow that the hour-hand, though taking all day for one revolution and hardly seen to move, would beat her two to one. To the Sufficient Intelligence the Many belong in and are as real as the One.

The One of identity, or pure being, shall hold involved and nullified all difference and form. To illustrate this position:

Taking a bushel of crude stones, we may beat them down to say three pecks of dust, a smaller bulk; but while the crude stones, piled as a cairn upon a windy knoll, might so endure for many years, the dust in the same exposure would soon be blown away.

This familiar fact becomes curious when we consider that the particles of dust are likely, each by itself, to be of the same specific gravity essentially as the bulk it helped to constitute, if not heavier, for presumably the bulk would have taken fracture where it was least substantial. But a moment’s reflection warns us that the particle of dust has a larger surface-exposure in proportion to its weight. When you cut a body in two you expose two new surfaces, while the weight remains unchanged; and the wind, having the advantage of pressure upon a greater superficial area, more easily carries the particle away.

We are concerned here with two units of identity in the same environment. A stone is a stone, surely, but in this experiment it appears that the larger stone is not only more but more in proportion than the smaller; and if we ask, in proportion to what? the answer is, to the show it makes in the sensible world. From the viewpoint of mere appearance, increase is creative of identity by the degradation or absorption of form; the accretion of the one bulk vacates the discretion of the many of the dust; it takes in all of their form, which as an abstraction enhances the identical and concrete. And if identity appreciates by the accretion and destruction of form, the supreme One, the identity of totality is, within, dark and formless; for all externality or marginality or aught of discretion must disappear—unless, always, the One is not only one, but other to itself, and in so far not itself; i. e., its “truth” is contradiction.

We may well rest a moment amid these baffling subtleties to better account for them. They do not explain; we can at best discover the grounds of their plausibility. There is no standpoint from which philosophy can be despised. The cosmos is a momentous affair, and we are ourselves so clever, we cannot repress the presumption that it can be understood. We have but to watch the stars to believe in “perpetual motion,” at least with their assistance. But our immediate interest is in the quasi principles or half-truths, abstractions partway across the dialectic chasm, which have been meretriciously posed in their day as explanatory. There is no great risk of credit in quoting from Pythagoras that number is the substance of things, or from Aristotle that matter is by the degradation of form, when we see Kant with no other first principle than “spontaneity”—just an empty word, presuming fertility; or see Hegel and Fichte impregnating negation and self-relation; or see the modern Germans, discomfited by a stale personality, depersonalizing the popular attributes of God, and using them sans credit; or see M. Bergson investing life and time and evolution with all the efficiency of creative intention. We do not disparage the ingenuity of these professors, at least not so much as we distrust their veracity, or regret their shortsightedness in deeming their results “philosophy.”

Resuming consideration of the quasi power of abstractions: When we reflect upon our utter ignorance of the origin of the world’s dynamic forces, and recall that the most ambitious account of the metaphysical forces halts at an inane “spontaneity”—a pseudo-fertility of emptiness—or at best at a “free will” whose freedom is essentially its exemption from any native influence or tendency—we are startled and interested by any hint from the dynamic world that force may be due to liberty. It seems at first a rather hopeless resource, but some admissions are necessary to unaccountable fact.

The amateur in dialectic may well need some coaching here, lest he too hastily retort that getting force out of liberty is nonsense; the sophist may catch him if he does not watch out. All talk is dangerous. The amateur might not hesitate in saying that nothing can create—he meaning that creation is impossible; but the sophist will stare in mock admiration at the oracle: he is interested in production, and wonders at this account of it, and he proceeds to magnify it with his largest lens: “Nothing can create! nothing, nothing, nothing!” By capitalizing nonentity, and “taking you at your word,” and pretending that the oracle is worth while, he finds a position in your amateur negation: nothing, logically, is “something” (i. e. something for discussion); and indeed a professor of capital reputation has held half the civilized world for a hundred years staring at the paradox (transcendentally true) that “negation is positive in its result.” The cue of the dignified skeptic is possibly rather silence than dogmatism. And as a sop to Hegelians we may mention an instance where the negative seems to have positive effect, not merely as logical but as empirical. We allude to the tacking of a ship against the wind, an everyday affair.

With the wind blowing, say directly from the west, the expert skipper faces his sails diagonally to its pressure, and so, by tacking alternately to the right and left, glides forward by degrees in the direction of its very source. When we consider how the water is entirely negative or inert, while the wind is the only motive force, the fact that the west wind blows the vessel to the west calls for an explanation of the “dialectic” of the skipper, which out of the negative water achieves his positive advance. Now all this involves a curious question of our practical experience of physical motion and momentum. When I was young, in almost any attic in our Eastern States there was liable to be found the débris of some device for “perpetual motion.” The latter is not a necessarily extravagant dream. The stars seem to exemplify it; and even if one could not independently produce momentum for mechanical uses, still with the help of the motion everywhere apparent he might hope to “hitch his wagon to a star,” and get the benefit of its impulse. And a certain striking fact in physics encouraged the hope of an absolute production of momentum from freedom, as if thereby one might share the fortune of the stars themselves, however they come by it.

This fact is certainly occult at least, however it may be ultimately demonstrated as superficial. In any event it seems to have been the spur to many fruitless Yankee inventions. The fact was this:

A pound-weight falling to the platform of a spring balance-scale will, in a fall of twenty inches, gain about nine pounds; it will deliver the impact of a ten pound weight; or practically it will weigh ten pounds. Whence are the extra nine pounds? The earth itself weighs but one pound less while the pound weight is free and falling; and of course, to that extent, “the belt is off,” the moon gets away, etc., but the impact, the blow, the momentum, seems wholly due to time and freedom, which have no material cost. The hope of inventors has been to so use the momentum gained as to replace the fallen pound for another fall, with some advantage won for mechanical uses. But unfortunately the time required to replace the pound weight is as exacting as the time of the falling was liberal, and the experiment fails.

The lesson is not unimportant for us. If the stars are a limited set, the outermost orbs in their circular courses may advance toward the unlimited and unoccupied space, against the general gravitation of the system as a whole, in this false hope that the momentum gained will restore them to perihelium, so that their motion, however originally given, will be retained forever. But this hypothesis has no standing in any rational court. Gravitation admitted as a general principle of matter will “hold the universe together” with a vengeance! No gain of momentum from “freedom,” no series of motions within a limited set of stars, can withhold the whole system from falling to a single center. There must be as much gravitation outward as inward, to keep the stars apart; and the conception of space as wholly subjective does not reach the problem at all, for transcendental and empirical realities alike are necessarily subject to the same a priori rules. Sidereal orbits are possible only in a limitless field.

Still this growth and momentum, born of freedom (which metaphysically costs just nothing), awaken curious reflection. You may see a woodsman with his axe by a mere twist of his wrist sever a three-inch limb by use of momentum, though the steady pressure of all his strength might not sever it in an hour. So a man with one blow of a sledge will crush a stone that may have upheld a temple for a thousand years. Why did not the still pressure of the temple accumulate momentum from time, as does the free swing of the sledge or the axe, or the falling pound?

And there is a psychological momentum of the same kind. A man may wind up his resolution for an emergency, as the boy cries “One, two, three,” and “Go!”

There is such an instance in the play of “Othello,” which Shaksperian critics seem to have disregarded. Just before stabbing himself, and after having protested his hard fate, the Moor says:

I find no historical warrant for the precedent here cited. I rather suspect that the great dramatist depended upon his audience to realize that in this rigmarole, possibly preconcerted for such an occasion, the desperate hero was screwing his courage to the sticking point.

Our Americans may well regard it as an endorsement of our ostensible freedom that a little more than a century of it has evoked more patented inventions than are recorded in the whole history of England, saying nothing of our more liberal religious thought. We may infer that idle freedom is a more prolific mother of invention than is the proverbial necessity.

An Italian peasant enters the lofty vestibule of St. Peter’s with bowed and uncovered head; before him, in the dim religious light, the pillared silence stoops from arches vast to uplift the melody of the finest voices to be gathered in Europe, while haply the great organ, yearning in the pathos of its theme, shudders at the memory of Calvary and the Via Dolorosa. On every side around him appear the loving contributions of a thousand years of art and culture. Who or what is he among these æsthetic treasures, which for his unsophisticated reverence have an equal date with Andes and Ararat, to question or to criticise the doctrine that he hears? An original thought if he could have one would be anomalous, even profane; he is both mentally and materially overborne and outclassed. Meantime, in a land far from this sacred establishment,

the plainsman, with his rope and his gun, takes the withers of the bay mare lovingly between his calloused knees for the long lope that covers her thirty leagues between sun and sun. Your thousand years are but as yesterday to him, and if he wants a church he must build it, under no other authority or inspiration than his own.

These philosophical controversies, so confident and at times so bitter, what are they more or other than cultured and temperamental preferences vibrating between the static and dynamic viewpoints, as in turn matter and form, identity and difference, and all the other nominal abstractions are allowed to exchange places in an incorrigible duplexity which in turn stultifies its claimant as of an ultimate generalization? How shall one claim the “world” as thus or this and no other, with the deeps of being as other behind his eye? What hope of explanation remains when the last word of dialectics shows an equal alternity of being and not-being, identity and difference, reality and appearance, and finally of reason and unreason?

The coil is about us, and at once we are and are not the coil. Can this be “true”? or if true is it worth while? Since it seems that whatever we may say will from some point of view pass as true, we shall venture the paradox that chance is the only sure thing.

The vulgar reverence which accounts him an imbecile who accepts anything as referable to other than personality, or in fact to fate, is subject to criticism as a psychological and possibly erroneous conceit; and we take occasion to say a word for chance, as quite as explanatory as any other hypothesis—as essentially just, and certainly exempt from the whims and vagaries whose possibility is the chief prerogative of spontaneous and independent personality.

It can be only through positive injustice and partiality if all being and becoming have not an equal chance; for chance is a daughter of justice, if justice should be, and her deformity would be a scandal to the cosmic empyrean.

Chance could be only half-bad at the worst—surely as apt to be good as bad—and experience, in all our human policy, finds it dependable and sufficiently fair. Be it as blind as you please, all business defers to it. And why not? Is it not obvious that only some monstrous malignity could permanently overbalance the normal equality and indifference of things in themselves? Why should they go crazy, and destroy value (so opposing the Good, which was Plato’s first principle of possibility and continuance)?

(We are not assuming to explain, but proposing to the reader the contingency under which the question, why things are, is no more important than the question, why should they not be.)

With three true dice, marked respectively G, o, and d, you will, as a rule, in six throws get the name, God, with no intention of so doing. With the appropriate nine dice and letters you will in 362,880 throws get the sentence, God is good; that is to say, the fact will be extraordinary and remarkable if you do not; failure of such a result would prompt the player to seek, and usually to find a malformation of the dice. The sentiment suggested to him by the disposition of the letters infers no bearing of its intention on the result. It would be irrational, saying you should not expect such a result. Similarly reasoning, the elements being given, in x throws one should get the universe (if it were a whole); and any sentiment of wonder arising at its contemplation would be overborne by the afterthought that, given any conservative principle of value, there is an equal wonder why it should not be.

The popular doctrine of evolution is a coarse-hand script of the persistence of value, or the Good, whereby the fittest survives in heredity. Given such a conservative principle, in the profusion of nature which affords a host of germs as against one that survives, the aggressive force of the fittest must hereditarily improve the species by selecting the most vivacious; and not so in general, but in every detail of animal organization the conservative principle must adopt the betterments which happen; and in the limitless time, which costs nothing, chance and heredity will have rationally contributed all that, afterwards, appeals to æsthetic appreciation.

We are not to wonder then, when the æsthetic parasite, ingenious and capable on his own account, flatters his vanity as a representative or model of the genius of the cosmos, and attributes all things to personality—forgetting, or rather not thinking, that under criticism personality is the greatest wonder of all.

Thus we may readily suppose him misconstruing, under a claim of “final cause,” an appreciation at the end of things into an intention at their beginning.

The reliability and permanence of chance are the most consolatory elements of philosophy. The notion that, left to chance, all would go wild and undependable, miscalculates experience, and (as before noticed) calls for a positive malignity to overweigh the just indifference and stolidity or essential inertia of things in themselves. There needs a positive and peremptory why the ace should come up an inconvenient number of times. Justice is balance. The Good is not best, upon the whole; it does not appear to have been deserved, and it is unjust, by comparison, to the indifferent and commonplace; it shows a heat in the bosom of fate.