Monism

Monism, popularly intending the unity of totality, might be defined as obsession of finite limitation—a fate of the planet-born or orbicular intelligence. In philosophy it implies egotism and self-relation.

As a culture it is incapable of any direct or tangent thought or outlook, its expectation reverting ever to the subjective interest and viewpoint. Compassing no object in its mere freedom to advance, it orients its vision as if to freedom itself as a property of its own nature, rather than the objective extensity of the vulgar space.

Instead of recognizing everywhere as a here, it locates space behind the mental eye instead of before it—finds the only answer to its outward quest—a quasi other to itself, and says with Brahma, “When me they fly I am the wings.”

Its burthen is ever the “universe,” exploited by some theological cosmography which leaves it but a limited object in an unlimited field. It will of course ignore the anomaly herein cited—that of the stars as a limited set in a limitless space that hungers for exploration and occupancy.

A mere makeshift in metaphysics, its psychological plausibility renders it the most alluring recourse of speculative thought.

For a treatise on monism one may start bravely from the saying of Philolaus, “One is made by limit” (plausibly a circle then, or a sphere), and forthwith conclude that all cannot be one; for any such one, however great, leaves a margin unoccupied; it does not fill the canvas. Or if regarded theoretically and rationally, rather than pictorially, or imaginatively, such a one cannot be all, because comprehension, as of all, must include that which comprehends, and the observer of the fact is not yet included in its observation.

But this conclusion will be confronted by the idealist with the undermining charge that it is a judgment based not upon reason but upon impertinent imagination. He will say that the margin by which the one is pictorially exceeded is due to a false pretense of space being objective, instead of being subjective—which it certainly (or also) is; space (in his sense) is not extension, but merely room or mental freedom to extend; so that the one (he assumes) can be founded centrally, or wholly within and related to itself alone; and what imagination regards as space and margin shall be but the freedom of the supreme or absolute subject; the required limit of its oneness shall be self-determination, and its unity and universality shall be the perfection of a harmonious whole. Infinity is but a false greatness: “that that which is should be infinite is not permitted.”

Then as to one failing of all because its observer is not included in its comprehension—assuming that comprehension as universal must include the being that comprehends—the charge confronts the main ground of transcendental idealism, namely, that all knowledge contains or includes self-knowledge, and that any totality is necessarily self-related, subject and object at once. The limit of the One of Philolaus is thus assumed as the self-determined, and the imagined margin is resolved into the infinite liberty of the free subject.

(It will, of course, be seen that a universe thus established from within, with no regard to outer space, would not hinder the existence of other universes; and the claim of its being the universe would be solipsism. The One of Fichte and Hegel and Harris, the absolute ego, is such a centre, whose outlook or infinite is potential in freedom.)

These are the two chief problems of philosophy: to get the world into an absolute whole, self-comprehended, and to prove that knowledge is what it pretends to be; i. e. that as knowledge it knows itself as it knows other facts—comprehends its own being as essentially its own ground. Our safety, in dread of fate, requires the assurance proper to this information; and the cogitation of its possibility has been the main industry of modern philosophy—occasionally satisfied with results which have invariably been outgrown and discarded.

The average citizen is content to believe that he is at least so far whole and original as to be socially responsible; but those whom we prefer as the great thinkers of the race have decided otherwise—not but that man shall render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, but that for or against the government of God, “of himself he can do nothing.”

The capital advantage hypothecated in monism is that it makes a “universe,” symmetrical, dependable and manageable, all within reasonable bounds; but unfortunately it implies a “universal intelligence,” which, if unlimited, or unfinite, could hold no relation to personality as we conceive and represent it. The “universal ego” of Fichte and Hegel is not like the human ego, nor fitly suggested thereby. It is posed as a formal, transcendental, quasi vision or fetich, an institution, an enfolding atmosphere, countenanced as a logical necessity—a concept which, as Kant would say, has no staminal substantiation in a possible perception. And being sole, it must have all its sufficiency in self-relation; there is none to know or sustain or reflect it but itself, subject and object at once (if ever), but for Hegel by degrees and process which Fichte’s instant insight forestalled.

Against this scheme has been opposed the opinion that a universal reason is not a reason at all, and that universal personality is more than contradictory, in fact absurd, although announced by Hegel as “the highest, steepest thought.”

In lieu of a managing personality modern thought has conceived of necessary laws, under which what we call “design” should appear as due to an appreciation at the end or accomplishment of things, rather than to an intention at their beginning. In other words, that the requisite necessities of mechanism are less mysterious or astounding than the contradictions involved in a primary and self-related intelligence. We know secondary intelligence as an empirical fact, but its primacy or originality would merely double the wonder, as calling for similar necessities to avert its logical contradictions. A necessary machine is as plausible as a self-related mind; for a principle of reason can have no contradiction. Materialism holds that if knowledge is not essentially grounded, is not self-related, mind-stuff is no more explanatory than matter; that God becomes but a convenient limb or fetich whereon to unburden the Mystery. The wilds of nature are as fertile and luminous as are the Elysian fields. [We recall the scientist who grieved that he could not find within him the God whom he recognized everywhere without.]

I can but think that monism will come to be regarded as a needless barrier to explanation—a mere mirage of limitation, a projection of our egotism, through a false psychology of personality as an original principle. There is no louder voice from antiquity than that which declares that One is made by limit; and there can be nothing more convincing to the average thinker than that any One is transcended as but a spot on the true universal. Let there be gods and gods in the “lower cases,” the universe will not stand for the capital G. The true universe is too great for a “personal” God. The margin beyond the One (even as liberty) is an abyss wherein the bats of chance wing blindly in dreams of potential cataclysm and disaster.

The management and comprehension of wholeness seem to be the main difficulties of explanation. When we are once rid of these, which to any second thought are clearly impossible—when we frankly admit that there must be an everywhere as plausible as any here—we are freed from the exaction of management by impossible comprehension, and are at liberty to look for principle, fertility, explanation in the monads and centres of the Midst, where everything for itself must be. One may then “look into his heart and write.” We may possibly find the monads giving explanation without comprehension—find a vast democracy working by immediate contracts and local managements of individual energy, regardless of any autocratic heredity, or any cosmic process or purpose. Get rid of this impossible wholeness and the impossible “purpose of eternity,” and we may find in heart and life something so noble, so willful, so self-sacrificing and magnanimous in suffering, that our most critical curiosity shall call it in itself worth while, sufficient for being—in fine, pure Cause.

It may well be that this bewildering immensity, which yet is not a whole nor demanding treatment as a whole, has exaggerated the dignity or profundity of sufficient explanation. The Mystery may be more homely and secular than our fear and ignorance have come to regard it. Perhaps “He is not far.”

What we would infer is that the notion of wholeness, as of a One, throws all the hope of explanation into the possibility of a universal personality, which could be one only from the inside, by solipsis. Experience teaches us the possibility of monads, Ones of quasi original power, which, while not fully explanatory, still carry the Mystery as feasibly as a God may carry it; but a universal One is objectively impossible, save in a transcendental concept of pure solipsism.

The conception of a continuous democratic many, everywhere as here, vacates the contradiction of a universal objective One, and is embarrassed only by the familiar Mystery which all intelligent monads are to themselves. And this Mystery I have tentatively presumed to alleviate (adopting as the canon of pure reason the empirical “I think”), in the self-respect of some great emotion or agonism that should feel itself worth while—as when Ajax would defy the lightning, or when Job should curse God and die. The conjecture seems to open a vista which, pursued with resolution, might lead toward finite satisfaction, if not to explanation.

The miracle of originality or principle is no more astonishing, theoretically, in a monad than in a god. We are personally conscious and accustomed to a certain amount of “creation”; and we should be well contented in finding the world at large so accounted for; but when the difficulties of universality cut us off from that satisfaction, the immense aggregations and consistent systems of things still get no explanation from the energy and intelligence of mere monads. The stars for instance, and their revolutions: men do their work, making cities, as the coral insects build great reefs, and the instant efficiency is in some degree satisfactory; but even ignoring the One whole, or assuming it as impossible, there are lesser wholes too great to be accounted for by individual and unconcerted agency. There seems to be required some fitness in the elements of things, by which mere aggregation should result in admirable forms and harmonious masses and movements—possibly to be countenanced by the concession of all-enduring time.

To faintly illustrate the intention here: Most people have seen what are called “alum baskets” (rock candy is of the same nature). They are forms automatically constructed or determined upon cottoned wire immersed in a solution of alum or sugar. Regular cubes, usually about a quarter of an inch in diameter, accumulate around the frame of the structure, until each wire is loaded with crystals, and averages about an inch and a half in thickness—the whole capable of any fanciful design. The philosophical spirit, curious as to what or who produces these beautiful and wonderful things, is loth to sing “the hand that made us is divine”; for they are not divinely worth while, at least, a more mechanical reference would be acceptable. What hinders the thought then, that the planes and angles of the elemental atoms of the solution are such that the aggregation gets its form from the adjustment, through a uniform attraction, of all the planes and angles? The wholes, then, would thus be simplified, so far as their greatness is concerned, by reference to the mechanism of the elements. A multiverse might thus be construed, though a universe were impossible.

So in the growth of a plant. If we consider the sap within it as rising, by the general expansion of heat, in tubes of a valvular formation, which hold all they get, against the cooling process of the night, and then, in the returning light and heat, exude the sap into the similarly crystal atmosphere at the ends of the fibres and tendrils, we may indeed admire the grown result, but we look at it as rather scientifically than spiritually mysterious. We see beautiful ferns produced in this manner; and then, on a frosty morning, we may see the nightly dew on the pavement for miles and miles thrown into precisely such fronds and ferns. Our science in the premises, while it does not fully explain as yet, abates the necessity of the superstitious personal intention; it reduces the individual peculiarity to a generalization; it gives the wonder of the many a trend toward a single however mysterious principle.

Why are we so egotistic and suburban as to require for our mental environment a “universe” as limited to unity, rather than a multiverse of cosmopolitan, democratic and uncentred continuity? The rims of the philosopher’s spectacles seem to determine a monism in his outlook. It would seem a not difficult viewpoint to attain, that there are no monistic limits to the world; that everything, great or small, is a monad in the Midst, not of a universe but a pluriverse of centres having no circumference or comprehension. We regard this as the unquestionable fact; its denial results in metaphysical confusion. No one claims a limit to space, yet finite sophistication keeps limiting existence to an All, or a One, not considering how these notions antagonize such an unlimited space. Egoism must have all things under a central and personal control, a mental comprehension of an admitted infinite!

Certainly the cosmos is a problem of management; the appearance of design is to be accounted for as best it may; but I shall show, on positively scientific grounds, that limited matter—as in a set or system of stars—is impossible under either physical or metaphysical gravitation.

The Midst

As in Aristotle nature and becoming are by the graduation of matter into form, or of being into knowing, the actual is ever at a turning point, the Midst. Our ordinary use of the word “universal” is for the inference of greatness; it is for telescopic rather than microscopic extension. But as we must see, in the demonstration of the relativity and ideality of size by the microscope, our determinations of size are limited by material agents; our ordinary Midst, or actuality, is contingent upon our inventional progress, variously with the telescope and the microscope.

(While our greatest telescopes still leave the fixed stars so far that the orb and its orbit are focused as but a motionless point, with the “infinite” still beyond, so the best microscope still raises the question whether in the infinitesimal direction, there is any creature so small but another creature lives upon it; does the infinite divisibility of matter carry the infinite divisibility of life and soul? On the other hand, does the illimitability of space exclude the possibility of personality as effacing the limits inseparable from One? As Truth, pursuing the infinite divisibility of matter, dives into Democritus’ bottomless well, so, following the increasing length of the telescope, she diminishes the probability of intelligent and intelligible comprehension, and prompts all thought to fall back upon the actuality and practicality of the Midst as our only reality, holding with Parmenides, “that that which is should be infinite is not permitted.” That All is One can be true only transcendentally, as a conjecture beyond all experience, either material or mental.)

Circular Monism

The monism of the circle, the recoil of compensation (with the waste and weariness and inconsequence of the whole process) is quaintly put by Emerson in his poem, “Uriel.” He recalls ancient and pre-historic being, before the wild time was coined into calendar months and days, before there were orbs or orbits then, in the empyrean of pure thought, seemingly indifferent (in the poem) whether Nature was in fact or as yet in contemplation. The young gods were discussing necessary laws of form and measure, and resolving what exists and what seems, and Uriel “gave his sentiment divine, against the being of a line”:

“The rash word boded ill to all”; of what avail were ambition or temporal success, if an undiscriminating time could avenge and retrieve it all? “The stern old war gods shook their heads”; what mattered their victories or achievements? The red slayer but dreams that he slays. The balance-beam of fate is bent. Hell cannot hold its own. All glides into confusion and misuse. But

But the conjecture of an essentially centripetal or reverting element in thought, although we should not at all grudge it as implicating self-relation by process, fades before a more practical consideration, pertinent at once to metaphysic and common sense. The law or fact of gravitation renders monism scientifically impossible.

It is a matter of philosophical importance to determine the truth or falsity of this dictum, that “unit and universe are round”; that is, to know whether existence is a continuous democracy or a somewhat centered autocracy, for which space is wholly subjective, mere room or freedom from obstruction. This is no idle speculation. Any educated mechanic knows that his rules are perversions of scientific fact. He knows that his water-level is not the true tangent, which practically would bow up into the atmosphere, and that his plumb-lines converge at the bottom like the sides of a bell-crowned hat. It is of prime theological importance to know if intelligence has a centripetal or backlooking tendency, as has the flying foot of the compass, or the lost man in the woods, whose best leg brings him back to his starting point. For as before noticed, the fact, if such it may be, is no proof of self-relation, save as in the process of the Hegelian absolute—which ends nowhere and amounts to nothing.

We want a new or at least an additional critique of pure reason. Kant was thorough enough to see that man’s limit of penetration and explanation is drawn in the plain “I think.” But the liberty of transcendental speculation opens the field to very ambitious and pretentious thinking, and to the invention of new words; and at the same time, given the canon of reason as his own “I think,” “I feel” must claim a large share in the matter of thinking. Hereby we get those exclamations of Herbart and Jacobi, and philosophy comes down to psychology—asking the opinion of the natural man and the unsophisticated child, appealing to the “heart” as well as to the mind, to sense as well as to understanding, to satisfy the obsession of Cause, or Why. Here the inarticulate divine gets utterance: Why not the same when a man, opposed or grieved or disappointed, growls of “God,” or “damnation”? He gives the heart of reason, which has no profounder expression. We cannot go deeper than this for cause or explanation.

Needs there a deeper cause for the conception of a child than is experienced in the venereal heat, born of accidental contact and occasion? Shall we ascribe to primogeniture and succession the thousand seminal germs—active creatures under the microscope—of which but one or two are preserved and cherished? Why shall I doubt that my own need of contact or material company on a dangerous eminence explains, is the same as the gravitation of matter? It is not a highbrow explanation, but it shall serve if science can offer none more appealing to the something higher or deeper than science which Schelling declared he certainly did know. If philosophy ever succeeds it may have the discomfiture of finding its spectacles on its nose.

This consideration makes philosophy easier, or at least more hopeful. If we could discover some one thought or thing—whether form or matter or harmony or whatsoever—which, given time, could initiate and continue the results of nature in their variety and manyness, we would not so insist upon a superstitious primogeniture, but would give more credit to the mechanical impersonality of the environment. We are possibly too superstitious as to this primogeniture. We rightly assume, in general, that the oak comes from the acorn, and the acorn in turn from the oak, so telescoping the whole process out of a divine original, for which the environment seems merely negative and receptive. But the fact shows that this line of descent has no sacred integrity; there are organic wholes whose norm is to be credited to the environment alone, outside of the line of sacred heredity.

For example, here is a willow tree, a beautiful whole in æsthetic thought—root, stem and branches appealing to designing intelligence. We may regard it as of two parts, the roots and the apparent tree—a primogenital whole. But now as a fact of experience we may cut off a limb or a twig of the proper tree and plant it in the ground, and the environment will furnish it a root of its own, and make it a goodly organic whole; and if we sever the old top from the new root, the environment will furnish a new top from the remaining root—fulfilling a perfect organism outside the line of hereditary descent, and affording a complete break in the primogenitive succession, and so vacating any original intention of heredity in that instance.

A fact like this looms large in teleology, where we have to concur with M. Bergson, that however the positive activity appears in current life, the negative shores react and determine the course of the stream quite as much as they are worn and determined by it. The check is as potent in the result as is the ostensible intention, yet it gets credit for only a brute resistance or stolidity. So that modern philosophy, better affecting mechanism which it assumes to understand, is using in its explanation as little as possible of personality and metaphysics, preferring rather to ignore intention altogether than seek it in first principles, where it would be a mystery still and at last, and also lacking the familiarity and habitude of mechanical explanation—it being satisfied with science without speculating on the science of it. And given the fulcrum of Archimedes, and the hair trigger with which to let off M. Bergson’s explosions of stored energy, a clever thinker can make a very plausible demonstration with matter and mechanism. He shall need only that his leading cornet finesse the high C.

Here then I invoke Kant’s canon of pure reason, the plain “I think” of the cultivated man. This permits the entrance of the common sense, of the One of first principles, as well as the expert of the Many, who in his vast and labored complications may presume to determine such data as the parallaxes of fixed stars. There are certainties of sense below the threshold of relations, and there may be intimations of the first principle had in placing one’s hand on the heart of Nature, or one’s ear close to the ground—not as a great “reasoner” but with a simple faith—say of Herbart or Jacobi, or of Jesus, when he declared, “If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine.” For it was thus that Plato conceived the first principle of being as the Good, the sense of value—not by an activity or equation (as Heraclitus made being inevitable in the equality of being and not being dialectically), and by a direct empirical appreciation of reality.

So I find gravitation a disproof of monism; and as no scientist assumes to account for gravitation as either an effect or a cause, I offer my insight of it as a heart experience, partly prompted by the ancient Scripture, the first afterthought of creation, “It is not good to be alone.” Even God wants company in all the philosophies that I have read.

Gravitation, primarily, is not mere attraction to the earth, but a general principle, the affection of matter for its kind. A chip floating in a basin of water will draw up the motes beneath it; it would not float alone. Beasts and men alike want company. He who finds a prize is ill content therewith until he has found some one to share his admiration. A man at any high elevation must have contact with some material thing. When he has climbed the great pyramid and found himself in the empty heaven, on a square not wider than a bedroom, he may kneel toward the dear earth, “the ancient Mother, for some comfort yet.” Is not this a gravitation that everywhere affects the local centres and prompts the thought of a one centre for the All, forgetting that such an All must be limitless and not one? Kant (inadvertantly doubtless) alluded to “the gravitation that holds the universe together”; he did not think of the gravitation which must hold the universe apart; for any system or limited set of centres held in gravitation must finally all come together.

It matters not what orbital independence, or what complication of alien forces may obtain within a limited set of stars; the uniform togetherness due to gravitation as a persistent whole would ultimately constrict their limited plurality to a central and motionless mass.

Under countenance of our idealism and monism we may now revert more familiarly to our original ground and purpose. It should be obvious that monism, or oneism in philosophy, is a vision through the lens of the human ego as a pattern on which its cosmos is designed. Disrupting the umbilical connection with his environment, no longer like a plant locally fixed and drawing sustenance from the earth, the man walks forth a more or less independent being, with a will and an intelligence of his own —practically one on his own account. And when, condoning his parasital dependencies, he becomes a philosopher, a critic of complete and real independence and original principle, he forthright conjectures the cosmos, the philosophical totality, as an ego like himself. It must be an independent Whole and One, a totality within its own comprehension, and known of itself, as he of himself affects to be. And herein was the latest triumph of his philosophy, the metaphysical insight that a totality must be an ego. For one is not one unless known as such, comprising in itself the limitation by which one is one, essentially combining as subject with the non-ego requisite to an objective intelligence. It was the German Fichte who first authorized this position as a psychological “fact of consciousness.”

Fichte was fully awake and sensitive to the logical contradiction of such a subject-object, while still insisting upon it, as not only a fact but the one fact without which philosophy is forever impossible; and to all objectors he had but one answer: “Ask not for the how; be satisfied with the fact.” Our Professor Ladd, of Yale University, in his “Introduction to Philosophy” still insists, with the same trepidation and embarrassment, upon self-relation as the “prime fact of consciousness.”

With the human ego thus regarded as the necessary model of the cosmos or theoretical world, we may understand how readily the later philosophers fell into the lines of the ancient cosmologies and their consequent theologies, in which unity and comprehension were the supreme and prevailing principles, while man and his destiny were the objects contemplated in their operation.

But what seems to us the greatest mistake in modern history, and that which is the main provocative of the present treatise, is the myopic and impudent assumption, not only that man is unique in nature, and that such a comparatively insignificant and incidental parasite can in any comprehensive sense represent the necessary qualities of the world, as his own best thought must conceive it, but that because a totality confessedly must be an ego there must be any totality at all; or again, that the stars, however many, must have a whole number, as so many and no more—this, although space will not be held to have limits, as possibly walled in or broken off, but must still extend, and presumptively carry an increment of stars.

This confusion as to number ignores the ideality of number itself—a very frequent mistake, such as is also the phrase “an infinite number,” which cancels the explicit discretion for which number is intended. The slight “puzzle” which was mentioned in our Chapter I, wherein a new star, as one more than what are, must increase their number, and so prove that they have a whole number, so many and no more, will become “one more” by the addition of a new one, will depend upon the question whether they have already a number to be added to. Your “more” is a relative and comparative, and must have its much to begin with, and a definite limit which it may exceed; and such a factual limit is the very requirement at issue. If the stars go on and on, as an increment and occupancy of space, all thought of wholeness is excluded, and your “number” exhales as a merely subjective discrimination, or fanciful conjecture of addition by one, regardless of any sum resulting.

It is here that one needs most urgently the doctrine of idealism, that “consciousness posits this world,” and that difference or distinction is mental, and not a property of “things in themselves.” Our habits of thought have in many instances turned things inside out, so far as explanation is concerned. For instance, the ordinary notion of a volcano is of a huge tube that spouts lava and ashes; whereas in scientific fact the volcano proper is a cancerous hole in the earth, from which in time has been built up the mountain itself. So the civilized man is dreadfully weak and shameful without his clothes; your policeman feels most formidable in the buckram of his official overcoat, while your real fighter feels efficient only when he is naked.

Our most eminent thinkers seem to be still obsessed by the half-savage cosmologies which make man and his ego the centre of explanation. We cannot easily evade or positively deny the large field of thought in which all size is relative to organic lenses; there are worlds within what some kind of sanity must still believe in as the real world. A modern man must indeed be tainted with one of Mr. Spencer’s “insanities of idealism,” to doubt that even if the earth were stripped of all living things and left barren and blasted as our moon appears—man and his philosophies and his histories and religions vanished into less than thin air—the glorious stars, among which by analogical reckoning his earth is but a speck, would still revolve as, theoretically at least, they have ever revolved, regardless of all impertinent sensitiveness to time or times.

It would seem that any rational contemplation of this scientific extensity and authentic endurance should obliterate the small prejudice of oneness and limitation, so obviously due to the subjective egotism in which it matriculates.

Yet it is not on the metaphysical necessities of the case that this essay mainly proceeds—at least not so much as upon the scientific and empirical induction that, whatever forces may be held to account for the local revolutions of the individual stars, the general impulse of togetherness (under which even their minor evolutions are performed) demands and assures an ever-external field of balance and compensation which excludes the possibility of wholeness and its limitation, lest the pluriversal Many, factually apparent, should become a conglomerate ball.

In brief then, monism is the general egotism which in idealism ends as pure solipsism. The worlds of idealism are home made; they are the microcosms of which monism is a macrocosm constricted to unity by its own egotistic limitation, founded, philosophically, upon faith in “self-consciousness.” In monism, ego and non-ego culminate as God and the world.

Vulgar monism founds largely on the uncultured sentiment that there must be recognized an all and whole of the world that is other than the intelligent witness of it. Philosophical monism, assured of the metaphysical percept that comprehension and totality must include the being that comprehends, founds upon the hypothesis of self-relation as science of science, and confirms its position psychologically by the assumption of “self-consciousness” as empirical and unquestionable fact—however meritorious or unaccountable such fact may be.

Our position ignores (or at best condones) the subjective ideality of space, standing by the empirical commonsense in its inference of an element in existence that is opaque and objectively negative to knowledge, and is operated under laws as mysterious and as respectable as the laws prevailing over intelligence itself, as we exemplify it: that we have no science of science other than as the gift of an alien energy of which we have no comprehension or any such limitation as is requisite to the objective unity either of it or of ourselves. Restrained therefore from any other than the philosophy of fact, and confined to law as we empirically find it, we accept space as unlimited extensity; analogically carrying in it the sidereal increment which our science has revealed, and confirming our judgment of sideral continuity and innumerability: from the general law of togetherness, which, relaxing its force only according to the distance of its material, would ultimately tolerate no vacant space or room for orbital motion (by whatever cause) under any other condition than an extensity transcending all conception of centrality or unity, or such wholeness or comprehension as the word “universe” is obviously meant to infer.

To popularly establish this position—not as ultimate explanation—we now proceed to the consideration of cause or reason itself, and thence to a citation of the superior and most plausible judgments which have disqualified that notion of self-relation, or subject-object, which has been the staminal element of modern philosophy.

We are not to say that idealism and self-relation are not good philosophy—perhaps the best—but that philosophy at its best is not a satisfactory explanation.