Self-Relation

We have seen Kant, ignoring the value of things in themselves, with equal disregard tossing the cause of them to an irresponsible and libertine spontaneity. He was but a Phaenarete, an accoucheur, whose vocation was to insure the proper delivery of conceptions. But his ingenuity and success, especially at a time when philosophy had outworn its welcome in esoteric circles, roused in more ardent spirits a curiosity, not only as to things in themselves but as to the origin of the principle of knowledge itself, of which Kant had so cleverly delineated the logical form. They revived the ancient interest in the relation of thought and being, and in subjective cause.

The quest of these aspirants was the meaning of absolute principle; not so specially of a supreme principle, but of any rational principle. Theretofore thought had affected objective principle, or cause; it had looked only outward; it had no resource but to an Other; and the other called for still another indefinitely. A crisis came in the conviction that principle, in the absolute, must be its own other, in itself and for itself at once, a self-relation—if such were possible.

We stay our leading for a moment here to say that self-relation is the Ultima Thule of philosophy—a land that should be, by the legends, but which, by the bearings of the compass, has not been charted yet.

The reader who has been thwarted and confused in his commendable ambition to understand German philosophy shall be advised that the main cause of his discomfiture was the expert presumption of self-relation; and the hope is here indulged that as a consequence of this treatise he may well throw down and disregard any work that proceeds upon its admission—either as self-consciousness, self-knowledge, self-sustenance, self-cause, or any other relation to self. The fact shall appear, in citation of the most approved of thinkers, ancient and modern, that there is no such possibility as a self-relation.

The leanest metaphysician who ever entertained the conception of a whole, and the clumsiest mechanic who ever built a machine that would “work,” will concur upon four necessary requisites of totality: there is no other outside it; its comprehension shall include that which comprehends; if it is known, or determined, or sustained, all these effects it must produce for itself; if it has or ever had a cause it is and was “causa sui.”

The whole cannot have become, for various reasons: for one, becoming is a process, and the whole could not partly be; for another, even as time, to begin, assumes as already a time in which to begin, so a concrete world as becoming requires an ideal void, a space-world to receive it.

If self-relation were the first principle it should seem that men, who have somehow the good fortune to live, would only voluntarily die. But so far is this from the fact of man’s condition that a cartoonist might cleverly depict him as one of those gyroscopic toys that we have seen attached to a stove-pipe, in which a manikin model appears as mightily cranking the wheel above, which in fact is actuating him. Indeed, the materialist might cartoon the idealist as functioning in a similar delusion—seeming to posit the world that sustains him, or to furnish through a bellows the breath that inspires him. Men, and not the worst of men at that, have been so conventionalized by social necessities as to feel that it is one’s handkerchief that blows one’s nose. Why not, since nothing is something in the professional necessity of discourse?

It will be seen in a criticism of “truth” that the baffling obduracy of the philosophical problem lies in the coincident necessity and impossibility of self-relation.

Truth should be what it never is. It must be of knowledge, and knowledge of somewhat that is; it is not itself ostensibly that somewhat, nor a property of it, but it guarantees a claim that somewhat (as knowledge, or copy, or statement) represents it. Now to represent the somewhat fairly, in a copy, were very well, very practical and plausible; but “very well” will not serve; a fair copy is admissible as such, but your “truth” is precisely what any copy lacks of the original; for thus the original is made no better than an imitation; original merit, that may be unique, is disqualified by a pretended re-presentation.

Truth requires that knowledge shall be equal to reality—which it cannot be, save as identical with it—and then there is no relation between the knower and the known (there is no truth where there is no knowledge); no truth unless the identical knows itself.

It is very obvious that the notion of truth grew out of the failure, or at least the suspicion of knowledge. Making many mistakes himself, and misled by the machinations of others—waking and sleeping and forgetting, all involuntarily—a man is entitled to question his facts not only, but his intelligence itself. Such questioning in due time evolved the abstraction, truth, as challenging all pretensions of knowledge; and thus came philosophy, with all its complications of being and knowing, reality and appearance, etc.

It were a natural thought, that there is no call to make difficulties, or to find problems or puzzles in this simple fact of knowing, or to make criterions and distinctions in knowing; but we find that there are difficulties in the way of absolute definition and distinction. Things will not lie still and be identified. Each is for all; “nothing is fair or good alone.”

This fatality is instantly detected when the professors set out to tell off-hand, in a popular way, the meanings of words. Webster’s Dictionary was begun in 1828, and has since been enlarged under the vigilance and assiduity of more than fifty distinguished scholars, all eager, doubtless, to tell the truth; but the reader shall judge, from what should be one of their capital definitions, how little care or sympathy these scholars had for the problem which haunts our troublesome essay. We quote their definition of truth:

“Truth.—The quality of being true; as (a) conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, has been, or shall be.”

How happy the philosopher might be if the world-secret could be adroitly told with the dash and abandon of this forthright deliverance!

Does conformity embrace all the possible truth and essence of fact and reality? Has all their matter gone up into form, and left no substance to be identified, realized and lived? Fact and reality cover being alone; they leave out thought and relation and difference, which are not properties of factual things, any more than are illusions and negations and nonentities. It might seem a better definition of truth to call it, not conformity, but identity with fact and reality; but when we turn to their definition of identity we receive a slap from Sir William Hamilton: “Identity is a relation between our cognitions of things, not between things themselves.” But in any explanation, are not these cognitions to be things of themselves, even if mere spectres? The fact is that philosophers as a class give truth a sinister fling in quotation marks, as a word for the people, and not for the elect. The reason for this is that they find knowledge a gift that has no confirmation of its pretensions—especially none from itself, its only possible critic. It tries, but fails, to focus its faculties upon itself. In identity it finds at best the same, and the same is another: there needs two for sameness. And when all is said, difference has as good an identity as sameness, and sameness has “all the difference in the world” from difference.

Then as to truth being “accordance to that which is, has been, or shall be,” does it accord in these vital respects, that it has been, or shall be, as really as it is now? And what shall accord to what is—to all that is? Unless all that is can accord to itself in that self-relation which our authorities shall keenly resent. And again as to “accordance to what is, has been or shall be,” we might suggest a few things that ought to be, at least in definition of truth. Hegel, in his definition of truth, held frankly to the self-relation: “Science does not seek truth: it is in truth; it is the truth.”

That there is such a possibility as rational self-relation is a notion taken from popular psychology, assumed from empirical “self-consciousness,” so called. Plato, as I will notice, had no serious use for this conception of the “self-moved,” except as a tentative prop for the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; for recalling in his “Phædrus” the same notion (the self-moved) he cast it aside with something less than approval, saying wearily: “Enough of the immortality of the soul!” He had probably no conviction in regard to it; and when the topic of mental self-relation came specifically before him, as where in “Charmides” he raised the question of a “science of science,” otherwise “self-consciousness,” he made it ridiculous, as I will amply show. I will show also how Kant, Hume and others have utterly disqualified it. Before we come to that citation, however, we must appreciate the agonism of controversy which self-relation, as subject-object, has occasioned.

We must first more clearly define self-relation. There is a wide though illusive difference between anything regarded as moving itself and as moving of itself—which last, as his whole context shows, was Plato’s intention. Any principle must move of itself as excluding all outside influence; and why the principle, as objectively regarded, so moves, is left by all philosophy as the secret of the divine nature or power of the world—at least, no explanation of it is technically proposed. But in the proposition that it “moves itself,” not only is outside assistance excluded, but the principle is actively a divinity in and for itself.

Now as we have the ineluctable fact of the world, to be acknowledged and accounted for as best it may, and as reason is our only recourse, and as God and man are the only intelligences to which we may hopefully resort, we have the alternative of preferring either, or of dividing the onus of the Mystery between them—i. e., between the monads of the Many and the supremacy of the One.

Jesus said, “As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”—“To them gave he power to become sons of God, even they who believe on his name.”

And here I must profess a certain indifference, so far as explanation is concerned. There is a very gratuitous skepticism of “miracles,” as arising among powers or creatures unwarrantably condemned as of course secondary and barren. With the great miracle or mystery of the whole freely and generally acknowledged, I am so much the pluralist as to see no fatal discrepancy in a participation of it by the parts; and this indeed seems ostensibly admitted in any doctrine of responsible free wills. My philosophy balks at self-relation either as divine or human. And German philosophy, too practical to insist that any entity can lift itself by the straps of its own boots, has overborne the human ego and its determining organization, and advanced to the presumption of a “universal” ego as subject-object—rather an institution or an atmosphere than a normal personality, in a purely transcendental field, a conception of mere language and logic, as we shall find, having no authentic ground in perceptual experience—a field which Kant had spent his best efforts in disqualifying by “the sure method of a science.” The fatal fault of the whole dialectic industry is the obsession that besides all fact there is an explanation, a self-relation, that shall satisfy our finitude in the cosmos, however contradictory its expression may appear. The extravagance, the willful blindness with which post-Kantian philosophy exalted this universal self-related ego above all empirical mechanism and common sense evolved and published expressions almost outrageous. Witness the following sentence from Hegel’s private outline of his lectures at Nürnberg in 1808–11: “But the Mind, according to its self-activity within itself in relation to itself independent of all relation to others, is considered in the Science of Mind proper, or ‘Psychology.’”

In his practice Hegel rather avoided responsibility for that instant and constant self-relation which a mechanic would scout, and rather, as in his “Phenomenology of Spirit,” made the soul take up its various attributes successively as partial phases, “until finally” all difference between subject and object is eliminated. This doing by pieces the problem of the absorption of an entity by itself only postponed the whole difficulty of the original problem to the last phase, which for its own part had no piece but itself to work upon, and so the “finality” satisfied the whole inconsequent process. But Hegel knew that the endless future will never test his finality! We may see how clumsily, and all-but cavalierly, he treated self-relation in his “Logic,” when defining “truth”:

“In common life we call truth the agreement between an object and our conception of the object. We thus presuppose an object to which our conception must conform. In the philosophical sense of the word, on the other hand, truth may be described, in a general and one-sided way (!), as the agreement of the subject matter of thought with itself.” He says elsewhere: “Science does not seek truth, but is in the truth, and is the truth itself.”

(Kant himself had forecast a countenance for this maladroit proceeding by a doubtless inadvertent proposition—in “intensive quantity”—that reality could fade to zero “by degrees.” The practical mind must see that the last degree, be it ever so minute, reserves in its wholeness all the degrees of infinite divisibility. Any perceptible degree must carry a gross bulk under the metaphysical microscope.)

The Johannine proem (“In the beginning was the Word,” etc.), which, except the question of Pilate, “What is truth?” Fichte valued as the text of the Christian Scriptures having the most special philosophical appeal, is indeed a most affirmative counterpart of Aristotle’s doctrine of matter and form, later repeated in Kant’s exposition of sense and understanding. As was Dasein to Sein (for Fichte), thought to being, form to matter, difference to identity, so for John (as for Swedenborg) was the Word, the logos, the manifestation and presence, to the divine essence. All things were made, or are such, through and by this expression; this is the light of the world, by reason of which identity attains distinction, or God, whom otherwise no man hath seen at any time, is manifested in flesh and spirit.

It is wonderfully suggestive of the homogeneity of intelligence, to observe how this fine conception of the existence of inherent or latent being, through its manifestation in form, or knowledge, has come to men of genius regardless of each other. Fichte gave no credit to Aristotle’s explanation of nature as matter grading up to form; and in noticing St. John’s doctrine of all things becoming through the Word he made no mention of Swedenborg on the same lines, but claimed (as he doubtless believed) that his doctrine was “now for the first time scientifically set forth.”

The truth is that Swedenborg’s exegesis, whether from insight or inspiration, was at once the clearest and profoundest of them all. He explains that by definition things become, and that definition is a mental act. It is by definition as the Word that things come out of latent being, into existence as knowledge and form. It is through definition by the Word that the One, whom none hath seen at any time, becomes the Many of things and souls.

But our instant concern with Fichte is that perversion of consciousness into self-relation which distinguished him as the primate of that absolute idealism which staggered the sanity of his generation, exhausted his own patience if not his mental force, and humiliated his imperious spirit to the faith and docility of the natural man.

This implicit emphasis of self-relation as science of science began with Fichte in his “Vocation of Man” as self-conscious:

“Thou seest, thou hearest, thou feelest; also thou thinkest. Thou hast also a consciousness of thy seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking, and thereby thou perceivest an object. Thou couldst not perceive it without this consciousness. Thou canst not recognize an object by sight or hearing or feeling, without knowing that thou seest, or hearest, or feelest it. The immediate consciousness of thyself is therefore the imperative condition of all other consciousness, and thou knowest a thing only in that and so far as thou knowest that thou knowest it; no element can enter the former cognition that is not contained in the latter. Thou canst not know anything save as knowing that thou knowest it.”

This subtle and plausible appeal to unsophisticated experience, whereby cognition (a miracle in itself) is doubled and meretriciously explained as re-cognition, is the entering wedge of absolute idealism, disrupting Kant’s “unknown root,” flippantly thrusting into the ego of common consciousness the mystery that can be thought only as the Supreme, and thenceforth exalting speculation from the empirical ego to an ego universal—and transcendental. But the sure method of Kant, that will not permit this light-winged concept to rise without the empirical percept of given experience (and thus to sunder the twin stems of sense and understanding), drags it back under the insuperable criticism of the present tense, and arrests this arrogant self-relation with the question whether it is indeed instantly such, and whether this “knowing that it knows” is not rather a quick remembering that it knew. Science and speculation cannot overbear the rational necessities of a present tense. Assume as we may that the past is gone and the future has yet to come, and that only the present instant is real, we have to compromise the static and dynamic viewpoints—to draw upon both the past and the future, to get a foothold for reality at all.

Our most careful metaphysicians have agreed that for us there is no being or thinking without the lapse, the Heraclitic flux. The present tense, which presumptively carries all reality, is mused of as a platform loaded with the increment of the process of becoming and a residuum of the process of departing—a platform on which the serpent truth has ample room and verge enough to take its tail in its mouth and do the acrobatic stunt of swallowing itself without disappearing. But reflection, second thought, will have all that is sensible also divisible. Your non-existent past and future demand, what is between us? How do we have names, if we have no part in reality? Your present, if substantial and sensible, has its older and younger sides, and only an ideal line or division between them can be strictly real, in the infinite divisibility of the material. The present, as real, is to be sought down the bottomless well of Democritus. How then does the present sustain itself? How does truth climb out of this bottomless well? . . . It must be by some art of livelihood; it is the trick of the chimney-sweep, who has neither foothold nor handhold, but climbs by the lateral impact of his elbows and his knees.11See further in our Chapter IX, on “Ancillary Unity.”

It should be obvious that the attempt to construe self-relation in the instant present tense, as an essentiality without lapse or passage of time, is a failure, and that “self-consciousness,” as a knowing that you know, is an implication of memory and anticipation. The language of the proposition stultifies it. Why, in knowing, know that you know? Is not simple knowing sufficiently wonderful, without invoking its second power? or why not invoke the third power, and say that we know that in knowing we know that we know? This reiteration neither adds to nor accounts for the simple gift of knowledge. This is the central crux of all philosophy, and of religion as well, that knowledge and will are secondary, and not essentially grounded; and although Jesus was the first to utilize the insight for the relief of human conscience, Plato had exhausted the topic metaphysically some 400 years before Jesus was born.

The divine Greek, in his “Charmides,” treated the problem of self-relation as it is involved in the proposition of a science of science, or popularly, self-consciousness. He covered it both mathematically and pragmatically. To test the vulgar illusion of a man’s knowing himself he exchanged the word knowing for excelling—a concept of the same order, whose percept may have a tangible quality and quantity which consciousness lacks—and then argued that anything instantly excelling itself would be at once greater and less than itself, and so mathematically impossible.

Our English Jowett, translator of Plato, emphasizes with a footnote this very palpable hit.

Plato then subjects the topic to his usual Socratic method. Self-consciousness will infer a science of science itself. Now every science can be taught, and its interest will assure and benefit professors. The physician knows and lives by the science of healing, the cobbler by the science or art of mending; but a professor of the science would have no call; however knowing, he knows only that he knows, and would be as useless as a windmill for grinding the wind that drives it.

It is not a natural but a wholly artificial ingenuity that deduces self-determination from the common consciousness, which indeed thinks nothing at all about it. I recall that Jonathan Edwards—who had but the natural wit where dialectic was concerned—in his treatise on the “Freedom of the Will” said he would not make so light of the discretion of “even an Arminian” as to assume that by self-determination (of the will) he meant an activity of causing it to act (i. e., by a self-relation), but consented that he should intend an originating independent principle; for he would credit his opponents with knowing the fling of Thomas Hobbes, which was as follows:

“The question is not whether a man be a free agent, that is to say, whether he can write or forbear, speak or be silent, according to his will; but whether the will to write and the will to forbear come upon him according to his will, or according to anything else in his own power. I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say, I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech. . . . A man hath freedom to do if he will, but whether he hath freedom to will (i. e. is an original rather than a given power) is a question which it seems neither the bishop nor they ever thought on.”

Edwards did shrewdly arraign self-relation in the Calvinistic interest making man wholly subject to the grace of God; but all his arguments against human originality are equally cogent against original principle in any case, even that of God. And the only policy or “plan of salvation” in which man’s dependent quality was useful to free him from the exceeding sinfulness of sin, to be borne rather by its original author in the sole vocation of Jesus as a divine substitute, seems to have never occurred to him.

In attacking the problem of self-knowledge Professor Ladd first staunches his nerve with a backward glance at idealism and its doctrine that objects are determined by (or through) the subjective organs (as lenses, or functions or what not), and then states his general proposition thus:

“In opposition to all views like the foregoing, we desire to maintain the identity of knowledge and being-as-known. . . . What is first of all, really and indubitably existent, is this fact of knowledge. . . . Self-consciousness is; it is an actual datum; and the very attempt to be skeptical thereupon does but lead to confirmation by repetition of this fact of reality. . . . It is not a conclusion drawn in the region of mere thinking; it is rather a rational conviction respecting the envisaged reality which all knowledge involves. . . . It is the inevitable product of the attempt to represent in terms of sensation that which is known to be implicated in sense perception, but is not to be given to thought in terms of sensation. . . . We never envisage or otherwise know, in its naked simplicity, this substance of the states (self), whether physical or psychical. It can only be said to be known as necessarily implicated to reason, present and actually existing. . . . Neither can it be said to be known as the result of reasoning alone. Knowledge of the really existent follows upon processes of analysis and synthesis which we may feel obliged to describe as involving instinctive inference.

“In every act of knowledge through self-consciousness the subject knowing is regarded as having become the object of knowledge to itself. The very essence of ‘self-consciousness’ is that the subject knowing and the object known are one and the same being.

“We may be unable to psychologically explain the fact of self-consciousness. We may represent the case as though the mind could never so far catch up with itself as not to be at least one step behind the act of self-realization in the unity of self-consciousness. But neither in this nor in any other way can we invalidate the primary fact of knowledge, with all the conviction of being really existent which it involves.

“We may doubt whether the being that now knows is the same being as that which knew a moment since; but that the being which, as subject, knows in the self-consciousness act, is really one and the same with the being known, as object in the selfsame act, is a known reality which it is impossible to doubt.”

Mr. Ladd has, it will be seen, committed himself to the infallibility of a controversial notion not nearly so plausible as the vulgar intuition that the sun goes around the earth, and one moreover which the history of speculation so eminently confutes. As for the impossibility of doubting the factual reality of self-relation, the following citations from Kant, Hume and others should rather show it impossible, at least for a scholar, to believe in it. Professor Ladd’s own halting reservations signalize it as merely a modus vivendi for philosophy, and we do not see the necessity for that. In fact Prof. Ladd discounts all that he says above:

“The mind in its highest and wildest flights of self-consciousness never knows by envisaging, as it were (?), its own simplicity of reality; or by rationally attaching to any particular conception which it forms of itself the unquestionable faith of intuitive self-knowledge.”

[This is to say that the transcendental concept of a self-knowledge has no percept in experience.]

“Strictly speaking, knowledge cannot be defined.” [And yet it is self-known?] “The true definition of knowledge would be a highly complicated instance of that which in its simplicity we seek to define.” This is the crux precisely—the ultimate surd.11From Prof. Ladd’s “Secret of Personality”: “The conception of what it is to be a Self, and equally the conception of my own particular Self, is not a matter for immediate Knowledge, or for mental envisagement, in a single mental act. It is formed by intellectual processes. . . . The Knowledge which is of Self differs from the Knowledge which sense-perception brings. . . . The sensuous elements of consciousness, especially those of the most definitely localized and clearly projected sort, are relatively suppressed. In predominating states of self-consciousness, the sensations are of the vague unlocalized order which are attributable to myself as a sentient organism, rather than to any objective thing . . . by the influence of feeling over attention one often passes back and forth between the objective and the subjective aspects of the same experience.” “But the sanest activities of the same intellect compel it to conceive of the Self as having qualities that cannot be ascribed to any Thing.“This making a static identity of a process, and then passing it back and forth (fully identified) between the two factors (subject and object) which compose it, is about the most pitiable infatuation that any scholar has ever exemplified. And then the smug composure of it all!

It seems hardly necessary here, in passing, to confess what there really is in the conceit of self-knowledge. Of course a man knows himself superficially. He bears in memory the record and attestation of his normal quality. His past experience culminates in a sense of more or less definite individuality; he knows in a general way his natural ability, his courage, and his impulses, and he has reliable conviction as to what he is, and what he would be and do in any given contingency. He knows, too, his civil and social responsibility in the state. And he may well have had moments of reflection upon his relations to his inner as well as to his outer world; he may have become even a professor of philosophy, and yet have never clearly discriminated between the philosophical requirements of an original as distinguished from a secondary and given principle. For example, he may have never contemplated any supposable difference between his accountability to his fellow creatures and his standing before his Creator, as the source of his sustenance and inspiration. In a word, he may have never been concerned in fundamental explanation. Against Prof. Ladd’s naïve and over-confident dictum, let us cite the good-natured comment of Hume:

“There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our ‘self.’ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception, heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”

Said Plotinus: “We feel distinctly only what is alien, not ourselves, not our own inmost being. It is impossible that consciousness should be the essence of the inner life and the source of truth; the fountain-head must be a world behind consciousness.

“In order to seek for reason we must already possess reason.” In a word, The Hound of Heaven is on his own trail and what he seeks is nothing else than a foregone conclusion. . . .

The acute discrimination of Kant invites special attention: “Reason imposes upon us an apparent knowledge only, by representing the constant logical subject of thought as the knowledge of the real subject in which that knowledge inheres. Of that subject, however, we have not and cannot have the slightest knowledge.”

“In what we call soul there is a continuous flux, and nothing permanent, except it may be (if people will have it so) the simple I, so simple because this representation has no contents. . . . But this I is neither an intuition nor a concept of any object.”

“The reason why that being which thinks within us imagines that it knows itself by means of pure categories, and especially by that which expresses absolute unity under each head, is . . . it does not know itself through the categories, but knows the categories only. It appears self-evidently that I cannot know as an object that which is presupposed in order to enable me to know an object, and that the determining self (thought) differs from the self that is to be determined, as knowledge from its object. Nevertheless nothing is more natural, or at least more tempting, than the illusion which makes us look upon the unity in the synthesis of thoughts as a perceived unity in the subject of the thoughts. One might call it the surreptitious admission of a hypostatized consciousness.”

“What I maintain is, that all the difficulties which we imagine to exist in these questions, and with which, as dogmatical objections, people wish to give themselves an air of deeper insight than the common understanding can claim, rests on a mere illusion, which leads us to hypostatize what exists in thought only as a real object outside the thinking subject.”

(The reader should forecast from this notion of hypostatizing a thing outside itself—like Fichte’s “being out of its being”—the struggles for causa sui, and the Heraclitic and Hegelian claims of something from nothing, the inevitable, etc.)

“Such a concept is necessary for practical purposes, and sufficient, but we can never pride ourselves on it as helping to expand our knowledge of ourself by means of pure reason. . . that concept is only constantly turning around itself in a circle, and does not help us with respect to any question which aims at synthetical knowledge.”

“I put my concept and its unity in the place of the qualities that belong to me as an object, and thus really take for granted what was wished to be known.”

“The internal sense by means of which the mind perceives itself or its internal state does not give an intuition of the soul itself, as an object.” “Besides this logical meaning of the ‘I’ we have no knowledge of the subject in itself, which forms the substratum and foundation of it (consciousness) and of all our thoughts . . . it signifies a substance in idea only, and not in reality.”

“The subjective I can never be divided and distributed; and it is this I which we presuppose in every thought.”

“Although the whole of a thought may be divided and distributed under many objects, the subjective I can never be divided and distributed; and it is this I which we presuppose in every thought. . . but that concept, or that proposition, teaches us nothing at all with reference to myself, as an object of experience, because the concept of substance itself is used as a function of synthesis only, without any intuition to rest on, and therefore without any object—valid with reference to the condition of our knowledge but not with reference to any object of it.”

By this I, or he, or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing is represented beyond a transcendental subject of thought = x, which is known only through the thoughts (remembered?) that are its predicates, and of which, apart from them, we can never have the slightest concept—so that we are really turning round it in a perpetual circle, having already to use its representation, before we can have any judgment about it.”

“Though the I exists in all thoughts, not the slightest intuition is connected with that representation by which it might be distinguished from other objects of intuition. . . . The internal sensuous intuition of our mind (as an object of consciousness) which is represented as determined by the succession of different states in time, is not a real self, as it exists by itself, or what is called the transcendental subject, but a phenomenon only, given to the sensibility of this to us unknown being.”

“The non-sensuous cause of these representations is entirely unknown to us, and we can never perceive it as an object.”

“The whole representation is nothing but the idea of a possible experience.”

Schwegler subsumes the whole matter thus: “In the traditional psychology the soul was regarded as a psychical thing, a simple substance—an intellectual, numerically identical substance with the predicate of personality. All these statements are subreptitious, petitiones principii, derived from the simple ‘I think’ which is neither perception nor notion, but a mere consciousness, an act of the mind. This act of thought is falsely converted into a thing; for the existence of the ego as subject, the existence of the ego as object, as soul, is substituted. That the ego might be treated as an object and apply categories in its regard, it would have required to have been empirically given in a perception, which is impossible.” (No one ever saw such a thing, or dreamed of such an experience.) “There is no rational psychology which might procure us an additional knowledge of ourselves, but only a discipline which sets insurmountable bounds to speculative reason in this field. We may view this discipline, too, as admonishing us to confess the refusal of reason perfectly to satisfy the curious in reference to questions that transcend this life.”

In contrast with these clean-cut sentences, which appeal to the plainest common sense, the reader shall have a specimen of the mental contortion which, assuming that philosophy must of course succeed, has exploited the opposite position: he shall see how haltingly the explorer sets his feet upon the quaking ground. Observe first the hopeless entanglement of the dialectic in this concession of the preface to “The Secret of Hegel”:

“There is no concrete which consists not of two antagonistic characters, where, at the same time, strangely somehow, the one is not only through the other, but actually is the other.”

In his last book, entitled “What Is Thought?” Dr. Stirling has this, of self-relation:

“I as I is the subject, and Me as Me is the object; but both are identically the same. This is the primitive relation—the unit of what is, the unit of what it is to think, and the unit of what it is to be.”

To countenance this doctrine he quotes as follows from his “Secret of Hegel”: (The reader may safely skip the entire quotation.)

“The idea is Thought, self-identical Thinking; self-identical because in its own nature the Idea is two-sided—an objective side is, as it were, exposed and offered to a subjective side, and the result is the return, so to speak, of the Idea from its other, which is the objective side, into its self or subjective side, as satisfied, gratified, and contented knowledge.”

“Cogito ergo sum. That is, Thought is; it has come to be, it simply is—as yet, however, only in itself: there is as yet only blank self-identity—it can only say is, rather than am, of itself, or to itself.”

“This is just a description in abstracto of self-consciousness. The Ego is first unal simplicity—that is unal or simple negativity; but just, as it were, for this very reason (that is, to know itself and be no longer negative, or because it finds itself in a state of negativity) it becomes self-separated into duality—it becomes a duplication, a duad, the units of which confront each other, in the forms of Ego-subject and Ego-object; and then, again, this very self-separation, this very self-duplication, becomes its own negation—the negation of the duality, inasmuch as its confronting units are seen to be identical, and the antithesis is reduced, the antagonism vanishes. This process of self-consciousness has just to be transferred to the All, the Absolute, the Substance, to enable us to form a conception of unal negativity of Spirit passing into the alienation of external nature, finally to return reconciled, harmonious, and free into its own self.”

Opposing this we quote a few sentences from Bradley’s “Appearance and Reality”:

“It is not only possible but most probable that in every man there are elements in the internal felt core which are never made objects, and which practically cannot be.” “Metaphysics pays no regard to the origin of our ideas.” (In a logical conflict you may use vacuums for balls. In all efforts at self-knowledge the subject still is such, still retains the observant and superior side, and cannot forfeit it.) “It is not known, and never as a whole can be known, in such a sense that knowledge would be the same as experience or reality.” “There can be really no such science as a theory of cognition.” “Every soul has existed as a not-self.” “The self is one of the results gained by transcending the first imperfect form of experience.” “A complete state of existence as a whole is at any one moment utterly impossible.”

“There is no self-consciousness in which the object is the same as the subject, none in which what is perceived exhausts the whole self. In self-consciousness a part or element, or again a general aspect or character, becomes distinct from the whole mass, and stands over against the felt background. But the background is never exhausted by this object, and it never could be so. An experiment should convince any man that in self-consciousness what he feels cannot wholly come before him. It can be exhausted, if at all, only by a long series of observations; and the summed result of these observations cannot be experienced as a fact. Such a result cannot be verified as quite true at any particular given moment. . . . If self-consciousness is appealed to, it is evident that at any moment I am more than the self which I can think of. . . . In thinking, the subject that thinks is more than thought.” “In practice, thought always is found with, and appears to demand, an Other.” “The emotion we attend to is, taken strictly, never precisely the same as the emotion which we feel . . . it has become a factor in a new felt totality. . . . Our experience is always from time to time a unity which, as such, is destroyed in becoming an object. . . . The Other which it asserts is found on inquiry to be no other. . . . If I attempt to elaborate this point I should perhaps obscure it.”

“Truth made adequate to reality would have become something else, for us unattainable.” (A relation must have terms, which it relates, or connects, as by a line between them. What are the terms of a self-relation? If a thing knows itself it is known by itself; the terms are identical, or else doubled in defiance of the unity assumed.)

“To say of any temporal process whatever that it is in the end self-intelligible, is, so far as I can perceive, a mistake. There is a difference unremoved between the subject and the predicate which shows a failure in thought” (surd?) “but which, if removed, would wholly destroy the special essence of thinking.” “There is no idea which as such contains its own existence.” “A relation which can get on somehow without (different) terms, and with no difference beyond the mere ends of a line of connection, is really a phrase without meaning.” “Self-relation has a double character as both supporting and being made by the relation. It is a false abstraction, a thing that loudly contradicts itself.” “Without entering into psychological refinements and difficulties we may be sure of this main result: The actual subject is never, in any state of mind, brought before itself as an object. . . . The actual subject never feels that it is out there in its object, that there is nothing more left within, and that the difference has disappeared.”

“I stand on this: Present your doctrine (whatever it is) in a form which will bear criticism, and enable me to understand this confused mass of facts; do this and I will follow you, and I will worship the source of such a true revelation; but I will not accept nonsense for reality though it be vouched for by a miracle, or proceed from the mouth of a psychological monster.”

Late as it is, I muse that the consciousness of Hegel has never been reflected; at least I have not recognized it in literature. As not only a teacher but the highest authority in a quasi State-philosophy, it was not his cue to emphasize the Socratic concession, “We do not know”; the right German retort would have relegated the whole profession to innocuous desuetude, since one man’s ignorance can hardly be more relevant than another’s. But the problem is ever pressing, and by dexterously alternating the static and dynamic viewpoints—one the eleatic Sufficient Intelligence, in which all things always are, and the other the process and novelty of Nature, which it were suicidal to deny—he knew that only a superhuman detective could impeach his profession. The philosophical position is unique. Let one boldly declare, and who shall ask him to explain? or to explain what? for, this is the problem of the world: to know by self-relation the nature of knowledge itself—the curiosity that would turn upon and envisage itself (which “of itself can do nothing”).

Well assured of the futility of Fichte’s endeavor to embrace ego and non-ego in an immediate self-related unit, and for his own part so far compromising the régime of self-knowing as to assume the man gradually analysing his composite faculties one at a time (still postponing the real problem to a last with which futurity could never confront him), he determined the Absolute as the process of the in-itself to for-itself, and disingenuously allowed the practical process of Nature to countenance a meretricious violence to logical pure reason.

But this was only one of the “moments” of his strenuous and prodigious versatility, which doubtless realized the utmost agonism of mortal speculation. Thought long ago transcended the dilemma, “to be or not to be,” and proffered the duplexity of being and not-being at once—not consecutively, but jointly and essentially. If there is no self-relation of Something, the key to sufficiency is either nowhere or else in Nothing as logically construed.

As another instance of the delusive presumption of self-relation I will recall an elaborate attempt of Stephen Pearl Andrews to reorganize philosophy under the ambitious title of “Universology”—a book of 764 pages, published by Dion Thomas (New York, 1872).

I shall not offer any sketch of his endeavor, except as explaining that he subsumed all explanation under the three categories, Unism, Duism, and Trinism. It will serve our immediate purpose to indicate the necessity that, as a universologist, he had to assume a transcendental viewpoint—i. e. to oversee the universe; so that he naturally fell into the method of assuming a “wholeness aspect” and a “partness aspect” of being. Taking occasion to remind him that an aspect presupposed an observer, I addressed to him the unsophisticated but surely pertinent question, “To whom is the wholeness aspect of being?” He answered:

“Your question seems to read: ‘To whom is “the wholeness aspect of being”’?

“I confess that your question is as blind to me as Trinism, or all beyond Unism and Duism, is to you. The wholeness aspect of being is the antithet or counterpart of the partness aspect, of the same being, of whatsoever being, and to any beholder or contemplator. It is the Unism contrasted with the Duism—the two combined being the Trinism. But there is no good in letter-writing. Come and see me and I will tell you all about it. N. E. corner 54th Street and Fifth Avenue, up two flights—a houseful of splendid fellows, male and female, the incipient Pantarchy.”

To sum up: Starting from the naïve position that the being that knows, in what is called “self-consciousness,” is the same being that is known (i. e. that the subject and the object, by whatever authority separately named, are instantly and identically one—miraculously, as held by Fichte, without help or compromise from the “process” of Hegel, wherein the in-itself becomes for-itself by being taken up piecemeal, and so avoiding the charge of absolute and immediate self-relation), we have laboriously arrayed against that merely popular and psychological notion the profounder insights of Plato, Jesus, Swedenborg, Plotinus, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Schwegler, Jowett, Bradley, Hodgson, Emerson, and Eucken.

At the same time we have had to endure the weak defection of Kant, in view of his orthodox popularity, by assuming as a categorical imperative the uncultured consciousness of “the plain man,” so stultifying all his metaphysical excellence and industry.

It behooves us to see more clearly the proper use and philosophical importance of the doctrine for or against the claim of self-relation. Is the want of it fatal to philosophy? With this granted would the problem be solved? Many presumptive experts have claimed in the notion of Hegel the plausibility of self-relation by the process of in-itself to for-itself as “finally” self-knowledge. Notwithstanding all the admonitions that self-knowledge is but a whim of words, is but a transcendental concept which no perception ever corroborated; that no man ever saw a self or a soul; that the subject would forfeit its whole supremacy in becoming an object and cease being a subject at all; that the gun cannot shoot into its own muzzle; that “truth” is precisely what every representation or pretence of knowledge without identity must lack, etc. and etc.—the claim still seems to hold that in a man’s taking himself or his faculties up piecemeal, or by degrees, he should exhaust his entire contents, and leave no such wonderful “secret” undiscovered. For example, he would visualize his courage, or his conscience, or his memory. None of these, as abstracted from his subjective totality and made an object, should very seriously cripple his critical judgment, so what recondite element of his “self” should escape the inventory? Have you not seen “the nation” if you have seen all the people? do not the parts comprise the entire contents of a whole? What is the crux, the mystery, which our long catalogue of authorities grudges to the claim of “self-relation”? Or, allowing the claim, as it is endorsed by the popular psychology, does philosophy succeed as explanation? In brief, why do we cite these authorities against the very natural notion that personality explains, and that the world in itself becomes rational in and only in the presence of God? The grudge of science as against the pretence of self-relation is that our highest claim and achievement namely, knowledge, is therein made to countenance with its full authority and significance a claim to have attained the comprehension and mastery of that which halts our curiosity, controls our interest, and occasions our discontent, while in fact it does not fundamentally understand the least and simplest thing in the world. Our consciousness, even as it glows, is a helpless projection from an alien energy, bottomless in its own regard, utterly unqualified to declare or to determine anything as necessary, and therefore wholly incompetent to radical explanation.

It is its insult to rational principle and real power that condemns self-relation, for those who question reality as dependent upon conventional terms. And as mere self-knowledge it is still hopeless of being and of power, all-requisite to the pose of the universal—the Supreme.

Supplementary Note on the “Speculative Philosophy” of W. T. Harris.

Speculative knowledge, or knowing, is for its professors a grade beyond the transcendental, and would be inadmissible by Kant, as being what he would call transcendent, or beyond the mental purview—in fact out of the world. Transcendentalism uses the pure forms of the mind, indifferent as to their contents (i. e. it is concerned with pure thinking, regardless of what it is about); and to pure formality only contradiction can be fatal. Although the topic of its thought has no element of perceptual experience, and is of concepts wholly, the transcendental must still have consistent forms, capable of logical expression. Borne on the current of pure logic, it may think what it shall not really know, as lacking the perceptual and corroborating ground of experience.

(I have before instanced the converse of this last position, in the fact that we may know what we cannot think—as appears in the failure of mathematics to articulate in its digits the side of the double square, or of √2 or √8.)

But the speculative will not be withheld from truth by the impossibility of its appearance in either imaginable or logically conceptual form, nor will it allow truth to be discredited by its practically necessary appearance in the form of contradiction. Its claim is to “the unpicturable notions of intelligence”; and these notions are not amenable to immediate or direct knowing, but are to be achieved by method and system, in a mediate or roundabout process, which must defer the student’s conclusion until he has learned to think properly.

And this delay is in any event advisable; for there are various cases in which immediate conclusion and forthright expression may result in utter confusion. Truth is largely amenable to its viewpoint; and there appear various overt contradictions in the countenance of half-truths used as whole ones, affording expression in contradictions which necessitate no antagonism in reality.

Two observers, of but partial experience, may truthfully declare, one that a given shield is concave, the other that it is convex; the result, as a matter of evidence, can be assured only methodically, by a duodiction, or a uniting of the two assertions. An honest man may swear that the sun goes around the earth; an astronomer may swear, by the light of his science, that the earth goes around the sun; the truth of the matter, if it is a single or toto-truth, is determinable only upon considerations which neither of the two witnesses can have ever exploited—to wit, whether the “universe” is one or many, or both, or neither. And the two assertions, although different, are not contradictory. Neither says that the other is not true.

From the speculative viewpoint the ultimate truth is a methodical deduction, to be entertained only under a trained and scientific vision, which can conclude esoterically in spite of, and without the assistance of either language or imagination, both of which, though necessarily to be used in declaring the speculative insight, are used under protest, as handicapping the true meaning. At least its advocates will not balk at the assertion that all reality is the cause of itself.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, edited and published by William T. Harris, superintendent of the schools of St. Louis, first appeared in 1867, and continued quarterly until 1899, when Mr. Harris was appointed by President McKinley as U. S. Commissioner of Education. The initial and constant inspiration of the magazine was “causa sui,” or self-determination, as the philosophical first principle of thought and being, and the only fundamental basis of explanation. With the first number the editor began an elaborate “Introduction to Philosophy,” which was rather, as is usual in such cases, an introduction to the reader of what philosophy the author knew. All such introductions are but reveries as to what the problem really is—or how to state it.

This “Introduction’s” chief appeal to the reader was the alleged inconsequence of objective or historical cause as preceding effect—a first cause as originating all effects in a succession of dependent beings—while no dependent being could have any causality to spare—whence first cause (whether first in history or in the order of reason) must be independent, having all causality in, for and of itself.

This very cheap and very peremptory assertion seems to ignore the clôture imminent in the previous question, whether there is or must be any cause at all—or who shall determine the sufficiency of anything alleged as a cause—and whether in fact a cause is objective or subjective. One does not need much logic to perceive that even the admission of the claim (that self-cause is the only possible cause) gives cause no standing as yet in any court.

Now Doctor Harris knew as well as any other man (and far better than most men) the logical impossibility of self-relation as we have sufficiently exposed it; but encouraged by the vulgar psychology of “self-consciousness,” and by the propriety of certain systematic conclusions which outface immediate knowledge although handicapped by contradiction, he called in the assistance of an inadvertent remark of Kant that space is “an infinite quantity”—whence, since quantity founds upon quality, space could be regarded as objective. And now, before citing the use that Prof. Harris made of this inadvertence of Kant, it is highly important that we have a correct definition of space, even as Kant himself more carefully defined it.

Space is purely ideal—that is to say, vernacularly, it is nothing save as it is made a topic by thinking of it. Space is a contemplation, a subjective concession or informal judgment, implying absolute freedom, room or opportunity for any mental project of either adventure or conjecture—i. e. there is in space no hindrance or objection to any proposition. Space does not in itself imply extensity, but means liberty to extend.

Space taken objectively, as a quantity, would infer a field of thought which its proprietor might sublet by the yard or the acre, and guarantee it from trespass or interference—there being just so much of it on record and no more. On the contrary the occupancy of space is infinitely heterogeneous and doubled up. Taken as mere extension, there is double space here in the street, where the mirror on the wall shows my room projected several feet over the pavement, including color and form as real as such can be. In the room itself are heat and light in the same space; there is appreciation and speculation, and there is certainly room for improvement.

Kant’s scientific definition of space is as follows:

“Space, as prior to all things which determine it (fill or limit it) is nothing but the mere possibility of external phenomena, so far as they exist already, or can be added to phenomena given.”

This argues something very different from “an infinite quantity.”

Now returning to Harris’s different kinds of knowing, the reader may grudge the space required here, but he should know the quality of what for twenty years passed as the best thought of America, and was carefully reflected in various European publications.

[From Harris’s “Introduction to Philosophy”:]

“It is a mistake, to attempt to introduce the beginner of philosophy at once into the dialectic. The content of philosophy must be first presented under its sensuous and reflective forms, and a gradual progress established. In this chapter an attempt will be made to approach again the ultimate principle which we have hitherto fixed only in a general manner as Mind. We will use the method of external reflection, and demonstrate three propositions: 1. There is an independent being; 2. That being is self-determined; 3. Self-determined being is in the form of personality, i. e. is an ego.

“1.—a. Dependent being, implying its complement upon which it depends, cannot be explained through itself, but through that upon which it depends.

“b. This being upon which it depends cannot be also a dependent being, for the dependent being has no support of its own to lend to another; all that it has is borrowed. A chain of dependent beings collapses into one dependent being. Dependence is not converted into independence by mere multiplication.

“c. The dependent, therefore, depends upon the independent and has its explanation in it. Since all being is of one kind or the other, it follows that all being is independent, or a complemental element of it. Reciprocal dependence makes an independent including whole, which is the negative unity.

“Definition.—One of the most important implements of the thinker is the comprehension of “negative unity.” It is a unity resulting from the reciprocal cancelling of elements; e. g., salt is the negative unity of acid and alkali. It is called negative because it negates the independence of the elements within it. In the negative unity water, the elements oxygen and hydrogen have their independence negated.

“2—a. The independent being cannot exist without determinations. Without these, it could not distinguish itself or be distinguished from nought.

“b. Nor can the independent being be determined (i. e. limited or modified in any way) from without, or through another. For all that is determined through another is a dependent somewhat.

“c. Hence the independent being can be only a self-determined. If self-determined, it can exist through itself.

“3.—a. Self-determination implies that the constitution or nature be self-originated. There is nothing about a self-determined that is created by anything without.

“b. Thus self-determined being exists dually—it is (a) as determining, and (b) as determined. (a) As determining, it is the active, which contains merely the possibility of determinations; (b) as determined, it is the passive result—the matter upon which the subject acts.

“c. But since both are the same being, each side returns into itself: (a) as determining or active, it acts only upon its own determining, and (b) as passive or determined, it is, as result of the former, the selfsame active itself. Hence its movement is a movement of self-recognition—a posting of distinction which is cancelled in the same act. (In self-recognition something is made an object, and identified with the subject in the same act.) Moreover, the determiner, on account of its pure generality (i. e. its having no concrete determinations as yet), can only be ideal—can only exist as the ego exists, in thought; not as a thing, but as a generic entity. The passive side can exist only as the self exists in consciousness—as that which is in opposition and yet in identity at the same time. No finite existence could endure this contradiction, for all such must possess a nature or constitution which is self-determined; if not, each finite could negate all its properties and qualities, and yet remain itself—just as the person does when he makes abstraction of all, in thinking of the ego or pure self.

“Thus we find again our former conclusion:—All finite or dependent things must originate in and depend upon independent or absolute being, which must be an ego. The ego has the form of infinitude (see Chap. 2—“The Infinite is its own Other”).

“We hope to see those necessities of thought which underlie all philosophical systems.

“Many of the ‘impossibilities’ of thought are easily shown to rest upon ignorance of psychological appliances. The person is not able because he does not know how—just as in other things. We must take care that we do not confound the incapacity of ignorance with the necessity of thought.

“Among the first distinctions to be learned by the student in philosophy is that between the imaginative form of thinking and pure thinking. The former is a sensuous grade of thinking which uses images, while the latter is a more developed stage, and is able to think objects in and for themselves (i. e., as ‘unpicturable’).

“At first one might suppose that when finite things are the subject of thought, it would make little difference whether the first or second form of thinking is employed. This is, however, a great error. The Philosopher must always ‘think things under the form of eternity’ if he would think the truth.

“Imagination pictures objects. It represents to itself only the bounded. If it tries to realize the conception of infinitude, it represents a limited somewhat, and then Reflection or the Understanding (a form of thought lying between Imagination and Reason) passes beyond the limits and annuls them. This process may be continued indefinitely, or until Reason (or pure thinking) comes in and solves the dilemma. Thus we have a dialogue resultant somewhat as follows:

“Imagination: Come and see the Infinite, just as I have pictured it.

“Understanding (peeping cautiously about it): Where is your frame? Ah! I see it now clearly. How is this? Your frame does not include all. There is a ‘beyond’ to your picture. I cannot tell whether you intend the inside or outside for your picture of the Infinite; I see it on both.

“Imagination (tries to extend the frame, but with the same result as before): I believe you are right. I am well nigh exhausted by my efforts to include the unlimited.

“Understanding: Ah! you see, the Infinite is merely the negative of the finite or positive. It is the negative of those conditions which you place there in order to have any representation at all.

“While Understanding proceeds to deliver a course of wise saws and moral reflections on the inability of the Finite to grasp the Infinite, sitting apart upon its bipod—for tripod it has none, one of the legs being broken—it self-complacently and oracularly admonishes the human mind to cultivate humility. Imagination drops her brush and pencil in confusion at these words. Very opportunely Reason steps in and takes an impartial survey of the scene.)

“Reason: Did you say that the Infinite is unknowable?

“Understanding: Yes. To think is to limit, and hence to think the Infinite is to limit it, and thus to destroy it.

“Reason: Apply your remarks to space. Is not space infinite?

“Understanding: If I attempt to realize space I conceive a bounded, but I at once perceive that I have placed my limits within Space, and hence my realization is inadequate. The Infinite, therefore, seems to be a beyond to my clear conception.

“Reason: Indeed! When you reflect on Space, do you not perceive that it is of such a nature that it can be limited only by itself? Do not all its limits imply Space to exist in?

“Understanding: Yes, that is the difficulty.

“Reason: I do not see the ‘difficulty.’ If Space can be limited only by itself, its limit continues it instead of bounding it. Hence it is universally continuous or infinite.

“Understanding: But a mere negative.

“Reason: No, not a mere negative, but the negative of all negation, and hence truly affirmative. It is the exhibition of the utter impossibility of any negative to it. All attempts to limit it, continue it. It is its own other. Its negative is itself. Here, then, we have a truly affirmative infinite in contradistinction to the negative infinite—the ‘infinite progress’ that you and Imagination were engaged upon when I came in.

“Understanding: What you say seems to me a distinction in words merely.

“Reason: Doubtless. All distinctions are merely in words until one has learned to see them independent of words. But you must go and mend that bipod on which you are sitting; for how can one think at ease and exhaustively, when he is all the time propping up his basis from without?

“Understanding: I cannot understand you. (Exit.) ”

I think that the reader who has gone over our previous ground may be trusted to sympathize with poor “Understanding,” who plays the rôle of common-sense in the above colloquy. He should detect both the misuse of the notion of objective space as a quantity, and the distortion of the negative into a positive quality in a merely logical field.

How can space, in the mere fact of its being continuous, be held as “limiting itself” because, forsooth, it can have no other limit? How does the word limit get into the discussion at all? One may have said in an unnecessary criticism that space is unlimited—unnecessary and impertinent because the very constitution or nature or meaning of space would, if called upon, exclude limit—but why should it be called upon to reject an idle qualification, to touch a pitch that would defile it? It is no more unlimited than it is unpainted, or uneducated; the un excludes all qualification; yet by mere verbal mention in the same connection a logical expression soils the pure reality.

It is as if a crier should go through the streets proclaiming that Cæsar’s wife is not unchaste; the announcement may be true, and is surely commendatory, but the parties in interest would hardly be grateful for it. It was held as slanderous in our courts, that one man had said to another, “You never stole a sheep, oh, no!”

The aggravation is still heavier when the fact (that any space as given or contemplated can be regarded as limited only by more of the same) is construed as rendering space self-limited, and as countenancing various other claims of self-relation: especially that of the ego, which, although confessed as an “impossibility” for understanding and imagination, is speculative fact. It is Harris’s illusion that the unlimited gets unity and limit from its mention as the or this—a nominal concept—as if the unknowable were really known as such. This is the sphinx riddle: he who knows the universe shall be swallowed by it. There is no such knowledge, nor any such object for knowledge.

Especially Harris labored under the Hegelian obsession that negation is determination, always positive in its results; that all assertion is affirmative, the negation of negation; that destruction is logically impossible. If the red slayer thinks he slays, he makes the mistake of his life; he knows not of the cunning ways in which the dialectic can pass and turn again. That a thing has no quality—is not that a quality? The unknowable—is it not known as such? Does not the breath that would vacate it come back into your own face? Not being? well, since you mention it, is it not one kind of being? Nothing—if it is not something, how can you think of it? or the ego—if not self-known, how does it think of itself?

But Kant said well, you do not think of it; you merely talk about it. The Kantian yataghan cuts the props from under these dialectic constructions—these verbal concepts which no percepts, which no experience may confirm. Negation that does not vacate and destroy is but a scrap of paper. What is meant by nothing does not get into thought, nor into print. Non-being is flatus vocis—a mist that rises in our dreams from the compost of decay and death. With Parmenides behind us we shall hardly countenance a not-being which can be only in a delusive array of words.

The solution of all this dialectic confusion, in which the plain man’s understanding is insulted, and truth is stultified as impossible or contradictory, lies in the fact that its propagators have not sufficient dignity or self-respect to question what has unfortunately become conventional—to discern that many words are misused, and that many have no meaning whatsoever. The greatest mistake of all is that the world must be rational, and that there must be possible a true statement and explanation of it, commensurate with our finite capacity. How puerile, or at least how inexpert, is this argument that since the whole can have no other cause it must be the cause of itself—even though the doctrine shall revolt our understanding, and pretend that words need no basis in empirical reality—boasting with Novalis, that “although Philosophy can bake no bread she can give us God, freedom and immortality”—three words of wholly problematical meaning. A cause that would really explain should hardly fail us for daily bread; it might even afford an occasional pot of beer.

It will be perceived, as regards Mr. Harris’s recognition of the psychological embarrassment in thinking self-relation—which he like the majority of thinkers, has to confess as mechanically contradictory—his main assurance as to first cause being “causa sui,” is that it is the only possible cause or reason that can be used as explanation. He would be well disposed to say with Fichte, “Ask not for the how—be satisfied with the fact.” He would join heartily with Prof. Ladd in boundless reverence for the unaccountable “prime fact of knowledge.” But if one shall say to them, Have it your own way: there can be no other first cause than “causa sui”: yet how if there is no cause at all, in the sense of radical explanation to us or to reason? The merely formal phrase, “causa sui,” will not come down to the relief of mechanical sense, or of imagination endeavoring to picture the self-swallowing stunt, or of a thing’s being its own creator before it is born. Admit that “causa sui” is the only logical statement of the problem; that or any other statement may be worthless for explanation—which will require a certain treatment of the time element—which they have not yet achieved. Every active relation implies a lapse of time, which divides the instant integrity of any hypothetic self-relation. This is the difficulty with all self-relation, as a principle, or a fertility, that the miracle which it is to perform by its activity is already pre-supposed as accomplished in its divine nature or essence.

It recalls the juggler, Katerfelte, “with his hair on end at his own wonders—wondering for his bread.”