Metaphysics

METAPHYSICS, or Metaphysic (from Gr. µeTa, after, 4'uvctca, things of nature, couaLs, i.e. the natural universe), the accepted name of one of the four great departments of philosophy. The term was first applied to one of the treatises of Aristotle on the basis of the arrangement of the Aristotelian canon made by Andronicus of Rhodes, in which it was placed " after the physical treatises" with the description ra. µeTa Ta 4 iu6etc6. The term was used not in the modern sense of above or transcending nature (a sense which µeTa cannot bear), but simply to convey the idea that the treatise so-called comes " after " the physical treatises.' It is therefore nothing more than a literary accident that the term has been applied to that department or discipline of philosophy which deals with first principles. Aristotle himself described the subject matter of the treatise as " First 1 On the true order of the Aristotelian treatises see Aristotle.

After C. Claus, Untersuch. zur Erforschung Crustaceen-Systems. FIG. 7. - Pupa of Lepas pectinata in optical section.

(I) first antenna; (6) tergum; (2) compound (7) biramous eye; feet; (3) liver; (8) carina; (4) simple eye; (9) cement (5) scutum; gland.

of Lepas (After J. Miiller.) FIG. 8. - A ventral view of a bipinnaria carrying the body of the young star-fish.

Philosophy " or " Theology," which deals with being as being (Meta ph. P. i., iiriv ir tar ] 11] OfCJpeZ 6v fi ov Kai Ta W inrapxovra Ka6' avr6). From this phrase is derived the later term " Ontology " (q.v.). The misapprehension of the significance of µera led to various mistaken uses of the term " metaphysics," e.g. for that which is concerned with the supernatural, not only by the schoolmen but even as late as 17th-century English writers, and within narrower limits the term has been dangerously ambiguous even in the hands of modern philosophers (see below). In the widest sense it may include both the " first philosophy " of Aristotle, and the theory of knowledge (in what sense can there be true knowledge?), i.e. both ontology and epistemology, and this is perhaps the most convenient use of the term; Kant, on the other hand, would represent metaphysics as being " nothing more than the inventory of all that is given us by pure reason, systematically arranged " (i.e. epistemology). The earliest "metaphysicians " concerned themselves with the nature of being (ontology), seeking for the unity which they postulated behind the multiplicity of phenomena (see Ionian School Of Philosophy and articles on the separate thinkers); later thinkers tended to inquire rather into the nature of knowledge as the necessary pre-requisite of ontological investigation. The extent to which these two attitudes have been combined or separated is discussed in the ensuing article which deals with the various schools of modern metaphysics in relation to the principles of the Aristotelian " first philosophy." l (X) I. - THE Science Of Being Side by side with psychology, the science of mind, and with logic, the science of reasoning, metaphysics is tending gradually to reassert its ancient Aristotelian position as the science of being in general. Not long ago, in England at all events, metaphysics was merged in psychology. But with the decline of dogmatic belief and the spread of religious doubt - as the special sciences also grow more general, and the natural sciences become more speculative about matter and force, evolution and teleology - men begin to wonder again about the nature and origin of things, just as it was the decay of polytheism in Greek religion and his own discoveries in natural science which impelled Aristotle to metaphysical questions. There is, however, a certain difference in the way of approaching things. Aristotle emphasized being as being, without always sufficiently asking whether the things whose existence he asserted are really knowable. We, on the contrary, mainly through the influence of Descartes, rather ask what are the things we know, and therefore, some more and some less, come to connect ontology with epistemology, and in consequence come to treat metaphysics in relation to psychology and logic, from which epistemology is an offshoot.

To this pressing question then - What is the world as we know it? - three kinds of definite answers are returned: those of materialism, idealism and realism, according to the emphasis laid by metaphysicians on body, on mind, or on both. Metaphysical materialism is the view that everything known is body or matter; but while according to ancient materialists soul is only another body, according to modern materialists mind without soul is only an attribute or function of body. Metaphysical idealism is the view that everything known is mind, or some mental state or other, which some idealists suppose to require a substantial soul, others not; while all agree that body has no different being apart from mind. Metaphysical realism is the intermediate view that everything known is either body or soul, neither of which alone exhausts the universe of being. Aristotle, the founder of metaphysics as a distinct science, was also the founder of metaphysical realism, and still remains its main authority. His view was that all things are substances, in the sense of distinct individuals, each of which has a being of its 1 The article is supplemented b y e.g. Idealism; Pragmatism; Relativity Of Knowledge, while separate discussions of ancient and medieval philosophers will be found in biographical articles and articles on the chief philosophical schools, e.g. Scholasticism; Neoplatonism.

own different from any other, whereas an attribute has only the being of its substance (Met. Z I-3; Post. An. i. 4); that bodies in nature are obviously natural substances, and as obviously not the only kind of substance; and that there is supernatural substance, e.g. God, who is an eternal, perfect, living being, thinking, but without matter, and therefore not a body.

At the present day realism is despised on the ground that its differentiation of body and soul, natural and supernatural, ignores the unity of being. Indeed, in order to oppose this unity of being to the realistic duality, both materialists and idealists describe themselves as monists, and call realists dualists by way of disparagement. But we cannot classify metaphysics by the antithesis of monism and dualism without making confusion worse confounded. Not to mention that it has led to another variety, calling itself pluralism, it confuses materialism and idealism. Extremes meet; and those who believe only in body and those who believe only in mind, have an equal right to the equivocal term " monist." Moreover, there is no real opposition between monism and dualism, for there can very well be one kind of being, without being all body or all soul; and as a matter of fact, Aristotelian realism is both a monism of substance and a dualism of body and soul.

It is in any case unfair to decide questions by disparaging terms, and to argue as if the whole choice were between materialistic or idealistic monism, leaving realism out of court. In this case it would also hide the truth of things, which requires two different kinds of substance, body and soul. The strength of materialism consists in recognizing nature without explaining it away, its weakness in its utter inability to explain consciousness either in its nature or in its origin. On the other hand, it is the virtue of idealism to emphasize the fact of consciousness, but its vice to exaggerate it, with the consequence of resorting to every kind of paradox to deny the obvious and get rid of bodies. There are in reality two species of substances, or entirely distinct things, those which are impenetrably resisting, and those which are conscious substances; and it is impossible to reduce bodies and souls to one another, because resistance is incompatible with the attributes of spirit, and consciousness inexplicable by the attributes of body. So far true metaphysics is a dualism of body and soul. But this very dualism is also monism: both bodies and souls are substances, as Aristotle said; and we can go farther than Aristotle. Men are apt to dwell too much on the co-existence and too little on the inclusiveness of substances. The fact is that many substances are often in one; e.g. many bodies in the one body, and both body and soul in the one substance, of man. So far true metaphysics is a monism of substance, in the sense that all things are substances and that all substances, however different, are members of one substance, the whole universe of body and spirit. In this case metaphysics generally will have to recognize three monisms, a materialistic monism of body, an idealistic monism of soul, and a realistic monism of substance, which is also a dualism of substances. But a term so equivocal, leading to an antithesis so misleading as that between monism and dualism, can never represent the real difference between metaphysical schools. We shall return, then, to the clearer and more authoritative division, and proceed to discuss materialism, idealism and realism in their order.

2

Materialism I. Materialism Proper. - Materialism in its modern sense is the view that all we know is body, of which mind is an attribute or function. Several causes, beginning towards the end of the 18th century, gradually led up to the materialism of Moleschott, Vogt and Buchner, which flourished in the middle of the 19th century. The first cause was the rapid progress of natural science, e.g. the chemistry of Lavoisier, the zoology of Lamarck, the astronomy of Laplace and the geology of Lyell. These advances in natural science, which pointed to a unity and gradual evolution in nature, were accompanied by a growth in commerce, manufactures and industrialism; the same kind of spirit showed itself in the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, and in the materialistic publications which immediately followed, while these XVIII. 8 publications have reacted on the industrial socialism of our own time. Meanwhile, philosophic forces to counteract materialism were weak. Realism was at a low ebb. Idealism was receding for the moment. Hegelianism had made itself unpopular, and its confusion of God, nature and man had led to differences within the school itself (see Hegel).

These causes, scientific, industrial and philosophical, led to the domination of materialism in the middle of the 19th century in Germany, or rather to its revival; for in its main position, that matter and motion are everything and eternal, it was a repetition of the materialism of the i 8th century in France. Thus Karl Christoph Vogt repeated the saying of the French physician Cabanis, " The brain is determined to thought as the stomach is to digestion, or the liver to the secretion of bile," in the form, " Thought stands in the same relation to the brain as the bile to the liver or the urine to the kidneys." But the new materialism was not mere repetition. J. Moleschott (1822-1893) made a diligent use of the science of his day in his Kreislauf des Lebens (1852). Starting from Lavoisier's discoveries, he held that life is metabolism, a perpetual circulation. of matter from the inorganic to the organic world, moleschott and back again, and he urged this metabolism against the hypothesis of vital force. Aristotle had imputed to all living beings a soul, though to plants only in the sense of a vegetative, not a sensitive, activity, and in Moleschott's time many scientific men still accepted some sort of vital principle, not exactly soul, yet over and above bodily forces in organisms. Moleschott, like Lotze, not only resisted the whole hypothesis of a vital principle, but also, on the basis of Lavoisier's discovery that respiration is combustion, argued that the heat so produced is the only force developed in the organism, and that matter therefore rules man. He put the whole materialistic view of the world into the following form: Without matter no force, without force no matter. L. Buchner (q.v.) himself said that he owed to Moleschott the first impulse to composing his important Buchner. work Kraft and Stoff (1855), which became a kind of B textbook of materialism. Passing from Moleschott to Lyell's view of the evolution of the earth's crust and later to Darwin's theory of natural selection and environment, he reached the general inference that, not God but evolution of matter, is the cause of the order of the world; that life is a combination of matter which in favourable circumstances is spontaneously generated; that there is no vital principle, because all forces, non-vital and vital, are movements; that movement and evolution proceed from life to consciousness; that it is foolish for man to believe that the earth was made for him, in the face of the difficulties he encounters in inhabiting it; that there is no God, no final cause, no immortality, no freedom, no substance of the soul; and that mind, like light or heat, electricity or magnetism, or any other physical fact, is a movement of matter. Sometimes he spoke of mind as an effect of matter; but, though his expressions may be careless, nothing is to be made of the difference, for he called it movement and effect indifferently in the same context. His definitely expressed view was that psychical activity is " nothing but a radiation through the cells of the grey substance of the brain of a motion set up by external stimuli." E. Haeckel belongs to a slightly later time than the materialists hitherto mentioned. His book Die Weltriithsel (Eng. trans.

J. M`Cabe, The Riddle of the Universe) identifies tfaecdcel. substance with body. Starting like his predecessors with the indestructibility of matter, Haeckel makes more than they do of the conservation of energy, and merges the persistence of matter and energy in one universal law of substance, which, on the ground that body is subject to eternal transformation, is also' the universal law of evolution. His strong point consists in inferring the fact of evolution of some sort from the consideration of the evidence of comparative anatomy, palaeontology and embryology. On the strength of the consilience of arguments for evolution in the organic world, he carries back the process in the whole world, until he comes to a cosmology which recalls the rash hypotheses of the Presocratics.

He supposes that all organisms have developed from the simple cell, and that this has its origin by spontaneous generation, to explain which he propounds the " carbon-theory," that protoplasm comes from inorganic carbonates. He not only agrees with Laplace and Lyell about the evolution of the solar system, but also supposes that the affinities, pointed out by Lothar Meyer and Mendeleeff, between groups of chemical elements prove an evolution of these elements from a primitive matter (prothyl) consisting of homogeneous atoms. These, however, are not ultimate enough for him; he thinks that everything, ponderable and imponderable or ether, is evolved from a primitive substance, which condenses first into centres of condensation (pyknatoms), and then into masses, which when they exceed the mean consistency become ponderables, and when they fall below it become imponderables. Here he stops; according to him substance is eternal and eternally subject to the law of substance; and God is the eternal force or energy of substance. What, then, is the origin of mind or soul? Haeckel answers that it has no origin, because sensation is an inherent property of all substance. He supposes that aesthesis and tropesis, as rudimentary sensation and will, are the very causes of condensation; that they belong to pyknatoms, to ponderables and imponderables, to chemical atoms and molecules. Hence, when he returns to organisms, it does not surprise us that he assigns to ova and spermatozoa cell-souls, to the impregnated ovum germ-soul, to plants tissue-souls, to animals nerve-souls; or that he regards man's body and soul as born together in the impregnated ovum, and gradually evolved from the bodies and souls of lower animals. It appears to his imagination that the affinity of two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen, the attraction of the spermatozoon to the ovum, and the elective affinity of d pair of lovers are all alike due to sensation and will.

But has Haeckel solved the problems of mind ? When he applies sensation and will to nature, and through plants to the lowest animals, he considers their sensation and will to be rudimentary and unconscious. Consciousness, according to his own admission, is not found even in all animals, although it. is present not only in the highest vertebrates - men, mammals,. birds - but also in ants, spiders, the higher crabs and molluscs. He holds indeed that, in accordance with the law of substance, consciousness must be evolved from unconsciousness with the development of sense organs and a central nervous organ. At the same time he admits, firstly, that to mark the barrier between unconscious and conscious is difficult; secondly, that it is impossible to trace the first beginning of consciousness in the lower animals; and, thirdly, that " however certain we are of the fact of this natural evolution of consciousness, we are, unfortunately, not yet in a position to enter more deeply into the question " (Riddle of the Universe, 191). Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all. He is certain, however, that the law of substance somehow proves that conscious soul is a mere function of brain, that soul is a function of all substances, and that God is the force or energy, or soul or spirit, of nature. He, in fact, returns to ancient hylozoism, which has tended to revive from time to time in the history of thought. He believes that mind and soul are inherent attributes of all bodies. Curiously enough, he supposes that by making mind a universal attribute of matter he has made his philosophy not materialism, but monism. It is really both: monistic, because it reduces substance to one kind; materialistic, because it identifies that one kind of substance with body or matter, and reduces mindto an attribute of matter. It makes no difference to attribute mind to all matter, so long as it is attributed as an attribute. It is at least as materialistic to say that unconscious mind is an attribute of nature as to say that conscious mind is an attribute of brain; and this is the position of Haeckel. Materialists seem to dread the word " materialism." Buchner also entreats us " to abandon the word ` materialism,' to which (it is not clear why) a. certain scientific odium attaches, and substitute ` monism ' for it " (Last Words on Materialism, 273). His reason, however, is different: it is that a philosophy, not of matter as such, but of the unity of force and matter, is not materialism. But if a philosophy makes force an attribute of matter only, as his does, it will recognize nothing but matter possessing force, and will therefore be materialism as well as monism, and in short materialistic monism. The point is that neither Buchner nor Haeckel could on their assumptions recognize any force but force of body, or any mind but mind of body, or any distinct thing or substance except body. This is materialism.

2. Materialistic Tendencies. - Besides these direct instances of materialism, there are philosophers to whom the scientific tendencies of the age have given a materialistic tendency. In Germany, for example, Eugen Diihring (q.v.) was a realist, whose intention is to prove against Kant a knowledge of the thing in itself by attributing time, space and categories generally to the real world. But, under the influence of Trendelenburg's attempt to reconcile thought and being by assigning motion to both, his Wirklichkeitsphilosophie, in a similar effort after a unity of being, lands him in the contention that matter is absolute being, the support of all reality underlying all bodily and mental states. So Avenarius (q.v.) was no materialist, but only an empiricist anxious to reclaim man's natural view of the world from philosophic incrustations; yet when his Empiriokriticismus ends in nothing but environment, nervous system, and statements dependent on them, without soul, though within experience, he comes near to materialism, as Wundt has remarked. In France, again, positivism is not materialism, but rather the refusal to frame a metaphysical theory. Comte tells us that man first gets over theology, then over metaphysics, and finally rests in positivism. Yet in getting over theology he ceases to believe in God, and in getting over metaphysics he ceases to believe in soul. As Paul Janet truly remarked, positivism contains an unconscious metaphysics in rejecting final causes and an immaterial soul. Now, when in surrendering theology and metaphysics we have also to surrender God and the soul, we are not free from materialism. Positivism, however, shelters itself behind the vague word " phenomena." Lastly, in England we have not only an influence of positivism, but also, what is more important, the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. The point of this philosophy is not materialism, but realism. The author himself says that it is transfigured realism - which is realism in asserting objective existence as separate from subjective existence, but anti-realism in denying that objective existence is to be known. In his Principles of Psychology he twice quotes his point that " what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable." This then is his transfigured realism, which, as far as what is known goes, is idealism, but as far as what exists goes, realism - of a sort. His First Principles, his book on metaphysics, is founded on this same point, that what we know is phenomena produced by an unknown noumenal power. He himself identifies phenomenon, appearance, effect or impression produced on consciousness through any of the senses. He divides phenomena into impressions and ideas, vivid and faint, object and subject, non-ego and ego, outer and inner, physical and psychical, matter and spirit; all of which are expressions of the same antithesis among phenomena. He holds that all the time, space, motion, matter known to us are phenomena; and that force, the ultimate of ultimates, is, as known to us, a phenomenon, " an affection of consciousness." If so, then all we know is these phenomena, affections of consciousness, subjective affections, but produced by an unknown power. So far as this main point of transfigured realism is steadily maintained, it is a compound of idealism and realism, but not materialism. But it is not maintained, on the side either of phenomena or of noumena; and hence its tendency to materialism.

In the first place, the term " phenomenon " is ambiguous, sometimes meaning a conscious affection and sometimes any fact whatever. Spencer sets himself to find the laws of all phenomena. He finds that throughout the universe there is an unceasing redistribution of matter and motion, and that this redistribution constitutes evolution when there is a predominant integration of matter and dissipation of motion, and constitutes dissolution where there is a predominant absorption of motion and disintegration of matter. He supposes that evolution is primarily integration, from the incoherent to the coherent, exemplified in the solar nebula evolving into the solar system; secondly differentiation, from the more homogeneous to the more heterogeneous, exemplified by the solar system evolving into different bodies; thirdly determination, from the indefinite to the definite, exemplified by the solar system with different bodies evolving into an order. He supposes that this evolution does not remain cosmic, but becomes organic. In accordance with Lamarck's hypothesis, he supposes an evolution of organisms by hereditary adaptation to the environment (which he considers necessary to natural selection), and even the possibility of an evolution of life, which, according to him, is the continuous adjustment of internal to external relations. Next, he supposes that mind obeys the same law of evolution, and exemplifies integration by generalization, differentiation by the development of the five senses, and determination by the development of the order of consciousness. He holds that we pass without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life, that consciousness arises in the course of the living being's adaptation to its environment, and that there is a continuous evolution from reflex action through instinct and memory up to reason. He throws out the brilliant suggestion that the experience of the race is in a sense inherited by the individual; which is true in the sense that animal organisms become hereditarily better adapted to perform mental operations, though no proof that any elements of knowledge become a priori.

Now, Spencer has clearly, though unconsciously, changed the meaning of the term " phenomenon " from subjective affection of consciousness to any fact of nature, in regarding all this evolution, cosmic, organic, mental, social and ethical, as an evolution of phenomena. The greater part of the process is a change in the facts of nature before consciousness; and in all that part, at all events, the phenomena evolved must mean physical facts which are not conscious affections, but, as they develop, are causes which gradually produce life and consciousness. Moreover, evolution is defined. universally as an " integration of matter and dissipation of motion," and yet mental, social and moral developments are also called evolution, so that, in accordance with the definition, they are also integrations of matter and dissipations of motion. It is true that the author did not see that he was passing from transfigured realism into materialism. He thinks that he is always speaking of phenomena in the sense of subjective affections; and in spite of his definition, he half unconsciously changes the meaning of evolution from a change in matter and motion, first into a change in states of consciousness, then to a change in social institutions, and finally into a change in moral motives. He also admits himself that mental evolution exemplifies integration of matter and dissipation of motion only indirectly. But here he becomes hopelessly inconsistent, because he had already said, in defining it, that " evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion " (First Principles, § 145). However, with all the author's disclaimers, the general effect left on the reader's mind is that throughout the universe there is an unceasing change of matter and motion, that evolution is always such a change, that it begins with phenomena in the sense of physical facts, gradually issues in life and consciousness, and ends with phenomena in the sense of subjective affections of consciousness.

In the second place, having declared the noumenal power, which causes phenomena, or conscious affections, to be unknowable, and having left anybody who pleased to make it a god and an object of religion, he proceeds to describe it as if it were known force, and known in two respects as persistent and as resistant force. He supposes that the law of evolution is deducible from the law of persistent force, and includes in force what is now called energy. Then having discussed force as something thoroughly material, and laying special emphasis on resistance, he tells us that " the force of which we assert persistence is that Absolute Force of which we are indefinitely conscious as the necessary correlate of the force we know " (First Principles, § 62). Similarly, both in First Principles and in the Principles of Psychology, he assigns to us, in addition to our definite consciousness of our subjective affections, an indefinite consciousness of something out of consciousness, of something which resists, of objective existence. Thus it turns out that the objective agency, the noumenal power, the absolute force, declared unknown and unknowable, is known after all to exist, persist, resist and cause our subjective affections or phenomena, yet not to think or to will. Such a noumenon looks very like body or matter. Lastly, when a theory of the world supposes a noumenal power, a resistent and persistent force, which results in an evolution, defined as an integration of matter and a dissipation of motion, which having resulted in inorganic nature and organic nature, further results without break in consciousness, reason, society and morals, then such a theory will be construed as materialistically as that of Haeckel by the reader, whatever the intention of the author.

It may be urged in reply that the synthetic philosophy could be made consistent by transferring the knowable resistance and persistence of the unknowable noumenon to knowable phenomena on the one hand, and on the other hand by maintaining that all phenomena from the original nebula to the rise of consciousness are only ` 0 impressions produced on consciousness through any of the senses," after all. But in that case what will become of Spencer's theory of evolution? It will have asserted the evolution of man and his consciousness out of the phenomena of his consciousness. The truth is that his theory of evolution can be carried through the whole process without a break, only by giving the synthetic philosophy a materialistic interpretation, and by adhering consistently to [[[Metaphysical Idealism]] Spencer's own materialistic definition of evolution; otherwise there will be a break at least between life and mind. If everything knowable is an example of evolution, and evolution is by definition a transformation of matter and motion, then everything knowable is an example of a transformation of matter and motion. As an exponent of universal evolution Haeckel is more consistent than Spencer.

Huxley (1825-1895) developed views very like those of Spencer, and similarly materialistic without being materialism, because inconsistent. He regarded everything known as evolved from matter, and reduced consciousness to a mere collateral product (` ` epiphenomenon ") of cerebral operations without any power of influencing them. Matter, according to him, impresses the afferent nervous system, this the brain, this the efferent nervous system, while consciousness remains a mere spectator. " In man, as in brutes," said he, " there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the nature of the matter of the organism "; so that " we are conscious automata." But, in spite of these materialistic tendencies, he followed Hume in reducing matter and everything knowable to phenomena of consciousness; and, supposing that nothing is knowable beyond phenomena, concluded that we can neither affirm nor deny that anything exists beyond, but ought to take up an attitude which the ancient sceptics called Aphasia, but he dubbed by the new name of Agnosticism. Thus Huxley first reduced consciousness to a product of matter, and then matter to a phenomenon of consciousness. By combining materialism with idealism he made consciousness a product of itself. Tyndall (5820- Tyndall . 1893), again, came still nearer to materialism, and yet avoided it. In his Belfast address (1874), while admitting that matter as understood by Democritus is insufficient, because atoms without sensation cannot be imagined to produce sensation, he contended, nevertheless, that matter properly understood is " the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." In thus endowing all matter with sensation like Haeckel he was not avoiding materialism. But in the very same address, as well as on other occasions, he did not identify mind with matter, but regarded them as concomitant.

All these materialistic tendencies seem to have one explanation. They emanate from scientific writers who rightly try to rise from science to metaphysics, but, as Bacon says, build a universal philosophy on a few experiments. The study of evolution, without considering how many conditions are required for " the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion " to begin, and the undoubted discoveries which have resulted from the study of inorganic and organic evolution, have led men to expect too much from this one law of Nature. This tendency especially prevails in biology, which is so far off the general principles of natural philosophy that its votaries are often ignorant of the real nature of body as matter and force. The close dependency of all mental operations on brain also tempts them to the conclusion that brain is not only an organ, but the whole organ of conscious mind.' It appears also that Darwin, having extended his theory of evolution as far as the rational and moral nature of man, in the Descent of Man, ended in his Autobiography by declaring his attitude to first and final causes to be that of an agnostic. Not that he was a materialist, and shortly before his death, in a conversation with Buchner, he maintained his agnosticism against his opponent's atheism. Still, his agnosticism meant that, though he did not assert that there is no God, he did assert that we cannot know whether there is or is not. To the evolutionary biologist brain is apt to appear to be the crowning object of knowledge. On the other hand, scientific men, such as Herschel, Maxwell and Stokes, who approach nature from mathematics and mechanics, and therefore from the universal laws of motion, have the opposite tendency, because they perceive that nature is not its own explanation. In order to exert force, or at all events that force of reciprocal pressure which we best understand, and on which, in impact, the third law of motion was founded, there are always at least two bodies, enduring, triply extended, mobile, each inert, mutually impenetrable or resistent, different yet similar; and in order to have produced any effect but equilibrium, some bodies must at some time have differed either in mass or in velocity, otherwise forces would only have neutralized one another. Why do bodies exist, with all these conditions, so similar yet different - that is, in so harmonious an order? Natural science has no answer: natural theology has an answer. This essence of bodies, this resemblance in difference, this prevailing ' Cf. H. Maudesley, Lessons of Materialism (1879).

order of Nature, is the deepest proof of God; and it cannot be the result of evolution, because it is the condition of natural force, and therefore of natural evolution. A second argument for God is the prevailing goodness or adaptation of Nature to the ends of conscious beings, which might conceivably be explained by Lamarckian evolution, but has not yet been so explained, and if it were, would not be inconsistent with a divine design in evolution. Further, the very existence of conscious beings is the best proof of the distinct or substantial being of the soul, existing in man with body, in God as pure spirit. It seems hopeless to expect that natural science, even with the aid of evolution, can explain by mere body the origin and nature of this fact of consciousness. If so, materialism is not the whole truth of metaphysics.

3

THE Rise Of Metaphysical Idealism I. Descartes to Leibnitz. - Metaphysical arises from psychological idealism, and always retains more or less of an epistemological character. Psychological idealism assumes without proof that we perceive nothing but mental objects, and metaphysical idealism draws the logical but hypothetical conclusion that all we can know from these mental objects of sense is mental objects of knowledge. But at first this logical conclusion was not drawn. Descartes, the founder of psychological idealism, having proceeded from the conscious fact, cogito ergo sum, to the non sequitur that I am a soul, and all a soul can perceive is its ideas, nevertheless went on to the further illogical conclusion that from these mental ideas I can (by the grace of God) infer things which are extended substances or bodies, as well as thinking substances or souls. He was a psychological idealist and a metaphysical realist. This illogicality could not last. Even the Cartesian school, as it came more and more to feel the difficulty of explaining the interaction of body and mind, and, indeed, any efficient causation whatever, gradually tended to the hypothesis that the real cause is God, who, on the occasion of changes in body, causes corresponding changes in mind, and vice versa. This occasionalism is not idealism, but its emphasis on the will of God gave it an idealistic tendency. Thereupon Spinoza advanced a pantheism which supposed that bodies and souls are not, as Descartes thought, different substances, but merely attributes - the one the extension and the other the thought of one substance, Nature or God. Taking the Aristotelian theory that a substance is a thing in Spinoza. itself, not in Aristotle's sense of any individual existing differently from anything else, but in the novel meaning of something existing alone, he concluded, logically enough from this mere misunderstanding, that there can be only one substance, and that, as no finite body or soul can exist alone, everything finite is merely a mode of one of the attributes of the one infinite substance which alone can exist by itself. Spinozism, however, though it tramples down the barrier between body and soul, is not yet metaphysical idealism, because it does not reduce extension to thought, but only says that the same substance is at once extended and thinking - a position more akin to materialism. At the same time Spinoza maintained a parallelism between extension and thinking so close as to say that the order of ideas is the same as the order of things, so that any mode of extension and the idea of it are the same thing expressed in two ways, under the attribute of extension and under the attribute of thought (see H. H. Joachim's Study of the Ethics of Spinoza, 1901, p. 72). It remained, however, for Schelling to convert this parallelism into identity by identifying motion with the intelligence of God, and so to transform the pantheism of Spinoza into pantheistic idealism. Leibnitz, again, having become equally dissatisfied with Cartesianism, Spinozism and the Epicurean realism of Gassendi, in the latter part of his life came still nearer than Spinoza to metaphysical idealism in his monadology, or half-Pythagorean,half-Brunistic analysis of bodies into monads, or units, or simple substances, indivisible and unextended, but endowed with perception and appetite.

He gradually fell under the dominion of two false assumptions. On the one hand, essentially a mathematician, he supposed that ] unity is indivisibility, whereas everything known to be one is merely undivided or individual, and that there must be simple because there are compound substances, although composition only requires simpler or relatively simple elements. On the other hand, under the influence of the mechanics of his day, which had hardly distinguished between inertia, or the inability of a body to change itself, and resistance or the ability of bodies to oppose one another, he concluded that, as inertia is passive, so is resistance, and refused to recognize that in collision the mutual resistance of moving bodies is a force, or active power, of changing their movements in opposite directions. From these two arbitrary hypotheses about corporeal motion, that it requires indivisibly simple elements, and that it offers only passive resistance, he concluded that behind bodies there must be units, or monads, which would be at once substantial, simple, indivisible and active. He further supposed that the monads are " incorporeal automata," not interacting like bodies, but each perceiving what was passing in the other, and acting in consequence by appetite, or self-acting. Such mentally endowed substances might be called souls; but, as he distinguished between perception and apperception or consciousness, and considered that perceptions are often unconscious, he preferred to divide monads into unconscious entelechies of inorganic bodies, sentient souls of animals, and rational souls, or spirits, of men; while he further concluded that all these are derivative monads created by God, the monad of monads. All derivative monads, he allowed, are accompanied by bodies, which, however, are composed of other monads dominated by a central monad. Further, he explained the old Cartesian difficulty of the relation of body and mind by transforming the Spinozistic parallelism of extension and thought into a parallelism between the motions of bodies and the perceptions of their monads; motions always proceeding from motions, and perceptions from perceptions; bodies acting according to efficient causes, and souls according to final causes by appetition, and as if one influenced the other without actually doing so. Finally, he explained the concomitance of these two series, as well as that between the perceptions of different monads, by supposing a pre-established harmony ordained by the primitive monad, God.

Up to this point, then, Leibnitz opened one of the chief avenues to metaphysical idealism, the resolution of the material into the immaterial, the analysis of bodies into mental elements. His theory of bodies involved an idealistic analysis neither into bodily atoms nor into mathematical units, but into mentally endowed simple substances. There remained, however, his theory of the nature of bodies; and here he hesitated between two alternatives. According to one alternative, which consistently flowed from the psychological idealism of Descartes, as well as from his own monadism, he suggested that bodies are real phenomena; phenomena, because they are aggregates of monads, which derive their unity only from appearing together to our perceptions; real phenomena well founded, because they result from real monads. In support of this view, he said that bodies are not substances, though substantiata; that their apparent motion and resistance are results of the passions of their monads; that their primary matter is nothing but passive power of their monads; that the series of efficient causes between them is merely phenomenal. According to this alternative, then, there is nothing but mental monads and mental phenomena; and Leibnitz is a metaphysical idealist. According to the other alternative, however, he suggested that at least organic bodies are compound or corporeal substances, which are not phenomena; but something realizing or rather substantializing phenomena, and not mere aggregates of monads, but something substantial beyond their monads, because an organic body, though composed of monads, has a real unity (unio realis). From this point of view he believed that the real unity of a body is a vinculum substantiale, which gives it its real continuity and is the principle of its actions; that its primary matter is its own principle of resistance; and that it has not only this passive, but also an active, power of its own. He suggested that this theory of the substantial unity of a body might explain transubstantiation, by supposing that, while the monads and phenomena of bread remain, the vinculum substantiale of the body of Christ is substituted. He feared also whether we can explain the mystery of the Incarnation, and other things, unless real bonds or unions are added to monads and phenomena. According to this alternative, these organic bodies are compound or corporeal substances, between monads and phenomena; and Leibnitz is a metaphysical realist. He was held to this belief in the substantiality of bodies by his Christianity, by the influence of Aristotle, of scholasticism and of Cartesianism, as well as by his own mechanics. But the strange thing is that at the very end of his life and at the very same time, in 1714-1716, he was writing the idealistic alternative to Remond de Montmort and Dangicourt, and the realistic alternative to Father des Bosses. He must have died in doubt. We cannot, therefore, agree with many recent idealists who regard Leibnitz as one of themselves, though it is true that, when stripped of its realism, his metaphysics easily passed into the metaphysical idealisms of Lotze and of Fechner. It is true, also, that on its idealistic side the philosophy of Leibnitz is the source of many current views of panpsychism, of psychophysical parallelism as well as of the. phenomenalism of bodies, and of the analysis of bodies into mental elements.

2. Locke to Hume. - Meanwhile in England, Locke, though differing from Descartes about the origin of ideas, followed him in the illogical combination of psychological idealism with metaphysical realism. He thought that we perceive nothing but ideas both of primary and of secondary qualities, and yet that somehow we are able to infer that, while our ideas of secondary qualities are not, those of primary qualities are, like the real qualities of external things. Berkeley saw the inconsistency of this position, and, in asserting that all we perceive and all we know is nothing but ideas in " mind, spirit, soul, or myself," has the merit of having made, as Paulsen remarks, " epistemological idealism the basis of metaphysical idealism." According to him, a body such as the sun is my idea, your idea, ideas of other minds, and always an idea of God's mind; and when we have sensible ideas of the sun, what causes them to arise in our different minds is no single physical substance, the sun, but the will of God's spirit. Hume saw that in making all the objects of perception ideas Berkeley had given as little reason for inferring substantial souls as substantial bodies. He therefore concluded that all we know from the data of psychological idealism is impressions or sensations, ideas, and associations of ideas, making us believe without proof in substances and causes, together with " a certain unknown, inexplicable something as the cause of our preceptions." We have here, in this sceptical idealism, the source of the characteristically English form of idealism still to be read in the writings of Mill and Spencer, and still the starting-point of more recent works, such as Pearson's Grammar of Science and James's Principles of Psychology. 3. Kant and Fichte. - Lastly, in Germany, partly influenced by Leibnitz and partly roused by Hume, Kant elaborated his transcendental or critical idealism, which if not, as he thought, the prolegomena to all future metaphysics, is still the starting-point of most metaphysical idealists. Kantism consists of four main positions, which it will be well to lay out, as follows: a. As to the origin of knowledge, Kant's position is that sense, outer and inner, affected by things in themselves, receives mere sensations or sensible ideas (Vorstellungen) as the matter which sense itself places in the a priori forms of space and time; that thereupon understanding, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception, " I think " - an act of spontaneity beyond sense, in all consciousness one and the same, and combining all my ideas as mine in one universal consciousness - and under a priori categories, or fundamental notions, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, &c., unites groups of sensations or sensible ideas into objects and events, e.g. a house, one ball moving another; and that, accordingly, perception and experience, requiring both sense and understanding, are partly a posteriori and partly a priori, and constitute a knowledge of objects which, being sensations combined by synthetic unity under a priori forms, are more than mere sensations, but less than things in themselves. This first position is psychological idealism in a new form and supported by new reasons; for, if experience derives its matter from mental sensations and its form from mental synthesis of sensations, it can apprehend nothing but mental objects of sense, which, according to Kant, are sensible ideas having no existence outside our thought, not things in themselves; or phenomena, not noumena. b. As to the known world, Kant's position was the logical deduction that from such phenomena of experience all we can know by logical reason is similar phenomena of actual or possible experience; and therefore that the known world, whether bodily or mental, is not a Cartesian world of bodies and souls, nor a Spinozistic world of one substance, nor a Leibnitzian world of monadic substances [[[Metaphysical Idealism]] created by God, but a world of sensations, such as Hume supposed, only combined, not by association, but by synthetic understanding into phenomenal objects of experience, which are phenomenal substances and causes - a world of phenomena not noumena. This second position is a new form of metaphysical idealism, containing the supposition, which lies at the foundation of later German philosophy, that since understanding shapes the objects out of sensations, and since nature, as we know it, consists of such objects, " understanding, though it does not make, shapes nature," as well as our knowledge. Known nature is a mental construction in part, according to Kant.

c. As to existence, Kant's position is the wholly illogical one that, though all known things are phenomena, there are things in themselves, or noumena; things which are said to cause sensations of outer sense and to receive sensations of inner sense, though they are beyond the category of causality which is defined as one of the notions uniting phenomena; and things which are assumed to exist and have these causal attributes, though declared unknowable by any logical use of reason, because logical reason is limited by the mental matter and form of experience to phenomena; and all this according to Kant himself. This third position isarelic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig). In this form we shall find the thing in itself revived by A. Riehl.

d. As to the use of reason beyond knowledge, Kant's position is that, in spite of its logical inability to transcend phenomena, reason in its pure, or a priori use, contains necessary a priori " ideals " (Ideen), and practical reason, in order to account for moral responsibility, frames postulates of the existence of things in themselves, or noumena, corresponding to these " ideals "; postulates of a real free-will to practise morality, of a real immortality of soul to perfect it, and of a real God to crown it with happiness.

The fourth position is the coping-stone of Kant's metaphysics. It is quite inconsistent with its foundation and structure. Kant first deduced that from the experience of mental phenomena all logical use of reason is limited to mental phenomena, and then maintained that to explain moral responsibility practical reason postulates the existence of real noumena. But what is a postulate of practical reason to explain moral responsibility except a logical use of reason ? Nevertheless, in his own mind Kant's whole speculative and practical philosophy was meant to form one system. In the preface to the second edition of the Kritik he says that it was necessary to limit speculative reason to a knowledge of phenomena, in order to allow practical reason to proceed from morality to the assumption of God, freedom, and immortality, existing beyond phenomena: " Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, urn zum Glauben Platz zu machen." He forgot that he had also limited all logical use of reason, and therefore of practical reason, to phenomena, and thereby undermined the rationality not only of knowledge, but also of faith.

Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.

F His point was that there are no things in themselves different from minds or acting on them; that man is no product of things; nor does his thinking arise from passive sensations caused by things; nor is the end of his existence attainable in a world of things; but that he is the absolute free activity constructing his own world, which is only his own determination, his self-imposed limit, and means to his duty which allies him with God. In order to prove this novel conclusion he started afresh from the Cartesian " I think " in the Kantian form of the synthetic unity of apperception acting by a priori categories; but instead of allowing, with all previous metaphysicians, that the Ego passively receives sensations from something different, and not contenting himself with Kant's view that the Ego, by synthetically combining the matter of sensations with a priori forms, partially constructs objects, and therefore Nature as we know it, he boldly asserted that the Ego, in its synthetic unity, entirely constructs things; that its act of spontaneity is not mere synthesis of passive sensations, but construction of sensations into an object within itself; and that therefore understanding makes as well as shapes Nature.

This construction, or self-determination, is what Fichte called positing (setzen). According to him, the Ego posits first itself (thesis); secondly, the non-Ego, the other, opposite to itself (antithesis); and, thirdly, this non-Ego within itself (synthesis), so that all reality is in consciousness. But, he added, as the Ego is not conscious of this self-determining activity, but forgets itself, the non-Ego seems to be something independent, a foreign limit, a thing in itself, or per se. Hence it is the office of the theory of knowledge to show that the Ego posits the thing per se as only existing for itself, a noumenon in the sense of a product of its own thinking. Further, according to Fichte, on the one hand the Ego posits itself as determined through the non-Ego - no object, no subject; this is the principal fact about theoretical reason; on the other hand, the Ego posits itself as determining the non-Ego - no subject, no object; this is the principal fact about practical reason. Hence he united theoretical and practical reason, which Kant had separated, and both with will, which Kant had distinguished; for he held that the Ego, in positing the non-Ego, posits both its own limit and its own means to the end, duty, by its activity of thinking which requires will. The conclusion of his epistemology is that we start with ourselves positing subjective sensations - e.g. sweet, red - and refer them as accidents to matter in space, which, though mental, is objective, because its production is grounded on a law of all reason. The metaphysics resulting from this epistemology is that the socalled thing in itself is not a cause of our sensations, but a product of one's own thinking, a determination of the Ego, a thing known to the Ego which constructs it. Fichte thus transformed the transcendental idealism of Kant by identifying the thing with the object, and by interpreting noumenon, not in Kant's sense of something which speculative reason conceives and practical reason postulates to exist in accordance with the idea, but in the new meaning of a thought, a product of reason. This change led to another. Kant had said that the synthetic unity " I think " is in all consciousness one and the same, meaning that I am always present to all my ideas. Fichte transformed this unity of the conscious self into a unity of all conscious selves, or a common consciousness; and this change enabled him to explain the unity of anything produced by the Ego by contending that it is not the different objects of different thinkers, but the one object of a pure Ego or consciousness common to them all. According to Kant, the ob j ective is valid for all consciousnesses; according to Fichte it is valid for one consciousness. Here he was for the first time grappling with a fundamental difficulty in metaphysical idealism which is absent from realism, namely, the difficulty of explaining the identity of a thing, e.g. the sun. As long as even the meagre realism of the Kantian thing in itself is maintained, the account of there being one sun is simply that one thing causes different phenomena in different minds. But as soon as the thing in itself is converted into something mental, metaphysical idealists must either say that there are as many suns as minds, or that there is one mind and therefore one sun. The former was the alternative of Berkeley, the latter of Fichte.

Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego. Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.

God does not seem to find much place in the Wissenschaftslehre, where mankind is the absolute and nature mankind's product, and where God neither could be an absolute Ego which posits objects in the non-Ego to infinity without ever completing the process, nor could be even known to exist apart from the moral order which is man's destination. Hence in his Philosophical Journal in 1798 Fichte prefaced a sceptical essay of Forberg by an essay of his own, in which he used the famous words, " The living moral order is God; we need no other God, and can comprehend no other." Having, however, in consequence, lost his professorship at Jena, he gradually altered his views, until at length he decided that God is not mere moral order, but also reason and will, yet without consciousness and personality; that not mankind but God is the absolute; that we are only its direct manifestations, free but finite spirits destined by God to posit in ourselves Nature as the material of duty, but blessed when we relapse into the absolute; that Nature, therefore, is the direct manifestation of man, and only the indirect manifestation of God; and, finally, that being is the divine idea or life, which is the reality behind appearances. In this extension of metaphysical idealism he was influenced by his disciple, Schelling. Nevertheless, he refused to go as far as Schelling, and could not bring himself to identify either man or nature with Absolute God. He wanted to believe in the absolute without sacrificing personality and freedom. God determines man, and man determines Nature: this is the final outcome of Fichte's pure idealism.

Fichte completed the process from psychological and epistemological to metaphysical idealism, which it has been necessary to recall from its beginnings in France, England and Germany, in order to understand modern idealism. The assertion of absolute substance by Spinoza incited Schelling and Hegel. The analysis of bodies into immaterial elements by Leibnitz incited Lotze. The Spinozistic parallelism of extension and thought, and the Leibnitzian parallelism of bodily motion and mental action, incited Schelling and Fechner. Berkeley and Hume produced the English idealism of Mill and Spencer, with their successors, and occasioned the German idealism of Kant. Kant's a priori synthesis of sensations into experience lies at the root of all German idealism. But Fichte was the most fertile of all. He carried metaphysical idealism to its height, by not only resolving the bodily into the mental, but also elevating the action of mind into absolute mental construction; not inferring things in themselves beyond, but originating things from within, mind itself. By changing the meaning of "noumenon " from the thing apprehended (voouµevov) to the thought (vOnya), and in the hypothesis of a common consciousness, he started the view that a thing is not yours or my thought, but a common thought of all mankind, and led to the wider view of Schelling and Hegel that the world is an absolute thought of infinite mind. In making the essence of mind activity and construction, in destroying the separation of theoretical and practical reason, in asserting that mind thinks things as means to ends of the will, he prepared the way for Schopenhauer and other voluntarists. In making the essence of the Absolute not mere reason, but will, action and life, he anticipated Lotze. In reducing the thing in itself to a thought he projected the neo-Kantism of Lange and Cohen. In the doctrine - no object, no subject - no subject, no object - that is, in the utter identification of things with objects of subjects, he anticipated not only Schelling and Hegel, but also Schuppe and Wundt with their congeners. In expanding Kant's act of synthesis till it absorbed the inner sense and the innermost soul, he started the modern paradox that soul is not substance, but subject or activity, a paradox which has been gradually handed down from Schelling and Hegel to Fechner, and from Fechner to Paulsen and Wundt. Meanwhile, through holding with Kant that man is not God, but a free spirit, whose destiny it is to use his intelligence as a means to his duty, he is still the resort of many who vindicate man's independence, freedom, conscience, and power of using nature for his moral purposes, e.g. of Eucken and Miinsterberg (qq.v.). Kant and Fichte together became the most potent philosophic influences on European thought in the 19th century, because their emphasis was on man. They made man believe in himself and his mission. They fostered liberty and reform, and even radicalism. They almost avenged man on the astronomers, who had shown that the world is not made for earth, and therefore not for man. Kant half asserted, and Fichte wholly, that Nature is man's own construction. The Kritik and the Wissenschaftslehre belonged to the revolutionary epoch of the " Rights of Man," and produced as great a revolution in thought as the French Revolution did in fact. Instead of the old belief that God made the world for man, philosophers began to fall into the pleasing dream, I am everything, and everything is I - and even I am God.

4. - Noumenal Idealism In Germany Noumenal idealism is the metaphysics of those who suppose that all known things are indeed mental, but not all are phenomenal in the Kantian sense, because a noumenon is knowable so long as by a noumenon we mean some mental being or other which we somehow can discover beyond phenomena. The noumenal idealists of Germany assumed, like all psychological idealists, the unproved hypothesis that there is no sense of body, but there is a sense of sensations; and they usually accepted Kant's point, that to get from such sensations to knowledge there is a synthesis contributing mental elements beyond the mental data of sense. They saw also the logic of Kant's deduction, that all we can know from such mental data and mental categories must also be mental. This was the starting-point of their metaphysical idealism. But they disagreed with Kant, and agreed with Fichte about things in themselves or noumena, and contended that the mental things we know are not mere phenomena of sense, but noumena, precisely because noumena are as mental as phenomena, and therefore can be known from similar data: this was the central point of their noumenal idealism. They rightly revolted against the inconsistencies of Kant's third and fourth positions about the existence of unknown but postulated things in themselves, hidden from theoretical, but revealed to practical, reason. In a way they returned to the wider opinions of Aristotle, which had come down to Descartes and Locke, that reason in going beyond sense knows more things than phenomena; yet they would not hear of external bodies, or of bodies at all. No realists, they came nearer to Spinozistic pantheism and to Leibnitzian monadism, but only on their idealistic side; for they would not allow that extension and body are different from thinking and mind. Their real founder was Fichte, on account of his definite reduction of the noumenal to a mental world. This was indeed the very point - the knowability of a noumenal mental world. At the same time it soon appeared that they could not agree among themselves when they came to ask what it is, but in attempting to define it seem to have gone through the whole gamut of mind. Schelling and Hegel thought it was infinite reason; Schopenhauer, unconscious will; Hartmann, unconscious intelligence and will; Lotze, the activity or life of the divine spirit; Fechner, followed by Paulsen, a world of spiritual actualities comprised in the one spiritual actuality, God, in whom we live and move and have our being.

1. Of these noumenal idealisms the earliest in time and the nearest to Fichte's philosophy was the panlogism, begun by Schelling (1775-18J4), completed by his disciple Hegel (1770-1831), and then modified by the master himself. Starting from Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," Schelling accepted the whole process of mental construction, and the deduction that noumena are knowable products of universal reason, the Absolute Ego. But from the first he was bolder than Fichte, and had no doubt that the Absolute is God. God, as he thought, is universal reason, and Nature a product of universal reason, a direct manifestation, not of man, but of God. How is this Absolute known? According to Schelling it is known by intellectual intuition. Kant had attributed to God, in distinction from man's understanding, an intellectual intuition of things. Fichte had attributed to man an intellectual intuition of himself as the Absolute Ego. Schelling attributes to man an intellectual intuition of the Absolute God; and as there is, according to him, but one universal reason, the common intelligence of God and man, this intellectual intuition at once gives man an immediate knowledge of God, and identifies man with God himself.

On Schelling's idealistic pantheism, or the hypothesis that there is nothing but one absolute reason identifying the opposites of subjectivity and objectivity, Hegel based his panlogism. But, while he fully recognized his indebtedness to his master, he differed from him profoundly in one fundamental respect. He rightly objected that the system was wanting in logical proof. He rightly, therefore, rejected the supposed intellectual intuition of the Absolute. He rightly contended that, if we are to know anything beyond sense, we must know it by a process of logical reason. But, unfortunately, he did not mean the logical inferences described in the Organon and the Novum organum. He meant a new " speculative " method, dialectic, founded on an assumption which he had already learnt from Schelling, namely, that things which are different but similar can have the same attribute, and therefore be also the same. With this powerful instrument of dialectic in hand, he attempted to show how absolute reason differentiates itself into subjective and objective, ideal and real, and yet is the identity of both - an identity of opposites, as Schelling had said. By the same dialectic Hegel was able to justify the gradual transformation of transcendental into noumenal idealism by Fichte and Schelling. If things different but similar have the same attributes, and are thereby the same, then in the first place the Kantian categories, though thoughts of mental origin and therefore confined to mind, are nevertheless applicable to things, because things, though different from, are the same as, thoughts, and have the categories of thoughts; in the second place, the Fichtian Ego of mankind is not the Absolute Reason of God, and yet is the same Absolute Reason; in the third place, the Schellingian Nature is the "other " of Spirit, and yet, being a mere reflex of the Idea of Nature, is identical with Spirit; and as this Spirit is everywhere the same in God and men, Nature is also identical with our Spirit, or rather with the Infinite Spirit, or Absolute Reason, which alone exists. The crux of all metaphysical idealism is the difficulty of reconciling the unity of the object with the plurality of subjects. Hegel's assumption of identity in difference at once enabled him to deal with the whole difficulty by holding that different subjects are yet one subject, and any one object, e.g. the sun, is at once different from, and identical with, the one subject which is also many. By the rough magic of this modern Prospero the universe of being is not, and yet is, thought, idea, spirit, reason, God. So elastic a solution established a dominant Hegelian school, which is now practically extinct, in Germany, and from Germany spread Hegelianism to France, England, America, and, in fact, diffused it over the civilized world to such an extent that it is still a widespread fashion outside Germany to believe that the world of being is a world of thought.

The plain answer is to contest the whole assumption. Different things, however similar, have only similar attributes, and therefore are never the same. God created man in His own Criticism of image, and the world in the image of the Divine Idea; Panlogism. b ut I am not God, and the transitory sun is not the same as God's eternal idea of it. The creatures, however like, are not the same as the Creator and His thoughts. Each is a distinct thing, as Aristotle said. Reality is not Reason. It is strange that the underlying assumption of panlogism was not at once contested in this plain way. Nevertheless, objection was soon taken to the unsatisfactoriness of the system reared upon it. Schelling himself, as soon as he saw his own formulae exposed in the logic or rather dialectic of his disciple, began to reconsider his philosophy of identity, and brought some powerful objections against both the conclusions and the method of Hegel. Schelling perceived that Hegel, in reducing everything to infinite mind, absorbed man's free but finite personality in God, and, in declaring that everything real is rational, failed to explain evil and sin: indeed, the English reader of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics can see how awkward is the Hegelian transition from " one spiritual principle" to different men's individual freedom of choice between good and evil. Again, Schelling urged that besides the rational element there must be something else; that there is in nature, as natures naturans, a blind impulse, a will without intelligence, which belongs to the existent; and that even God Himself as the Absolute cannot be pure thought, because in order to think He must have an existence which cannot be merely His thought of it, and therefore pure being is the prior condition of thought and spirit. Hence Schelling objected to the Hegelian dialectic on the ground that, although reason by itself can apprehend notions or essences, and even that of God, it cannot deduce a priori the existence either of God or of Nature, for the apprehension of which experience is required. He now distinguished two philosophies: negative philosophy starting from notions, and positive philosophy starting from being; the former a philosophy of conditions, the latter of causes, i.e. of existence. Hegel, he said, had only supplied the logic of negative philosophy; and it must be confessed that the most which could be extracted from the Hegelian dialectic would be some connexion of thoughts without proving any existence of corresponding things. Schelling was right; but he had too much affinity with Hegelian assumptions, e.g. the panlogistic confusion of the essences of things with the notions of reason, to construct a positive philosophy without falling into fresh mysticism, which failed to exorcise the effect of his earlier philosophy of identity in the growing materialism of the age.

2. Meanwhile, by the side of panlogism arose the panthelism of Schopenhauer (1788-1860). This new noumenal idealism began, like the preceding, by combining psycho l0 ical idealism with the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte. In Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung Schopenhauer accepted Kant's position that the world as phenomenal is idea (Vorstellung); but he added that the world as noumenal is will (Wille). He got the hint of a noumenal will from Kant; but in regarding the noumenal as knowable, because mental, as well as in the emphasis he laid on the activity of will, he resembled Fichte. His theory of the nature of will was his own, and arrived at from a voluntaristic psychology leading to a voluntaristic metaphysics of his own. His psychological starting-point was the unproved assumption that the only force of which we are immediately aware is will; his metaphysical goal was the consistent conclusion that in that case the only force we can know, as the noumenal essence of which all else is phenomenal appearance, is will. But by this noumenal will he did not mean a divine will similar to our rational desire, a will in which an inference and desire of a desirable end and means produces our rational action. He meant an unintelligent, unconscious, restless, endless will. In considering the force of instinct in animals he was obliged to divest will of reason. When he found himself confronted with the blind forces of Nature he was obliged to divest irrational will of feeling. As he resolved one force after another into lower and lower grades of will he was obliged to divest will of all consciousness. In short, his metaphysics was founded on a misnomer, and simply consisted in calling unconscious force by the name of unconscious will (Unbewusster Wille). This abuse of language brought him back to Leibnitz. But, whereas Leibnitz imputed unconscious perception as well as unconscious appetition to monads, Schopenhauer supposed unconscious will to arise without perception, without feeling, without ideas, and to be the cause of ideas only in us. Hence he rejected the infinite intelligence supposed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel against whom he urged that blind will produces intelligence, and only becomes conscious in us by using intelligence as a means to ends. He also rejected the optimism of Leibnitz and Hegel, and placed the most irrational of wills at the base of the worst possible of worlds (see further Schopenhauer). This pessimistic panthelism gradually won its way, and procured exponents such as J. Frauenstadt, J. Bahnsen, and, more recently, P. Deussen. The accident of its pessimism attracted F. W. Nietzsche, who afterwards, passing from the philosophy of will to the theory of evolution, ended by imagining that the struggle of the will to live produces the survival of the fittest, that is, the right of the strongest and the will to exercise power, which by means of selection may hereafter issue in a new species of superior man - the Uebermensch. Finally, Schopenhauer's voluntarism has had a profound effect on psychology inside and outside Germany, and to a less degree produced attempts to deduce from voluntaristic psychology new systems of voluntaristic metaphysics, such as those of Paulsen and Wundt.

3. The first to modify the pure voluntarism of Schopenhauer was E. von Hartmann, who (Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869, 1st ed.), advanced the view that the world as noumenal is both unconscious intelligence and unconscious will, thus founding a panpneumatism which forms a sort of reconciliation of the panlogism of Hegel and the panthelism of Schopenhauer. In his tract entitled Schelling's positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel and Schopenhauer (1869) he further showed that, in his later philosophy, Schelling had already combined reason and will in the Absolute. Indeed, Fichte had previously characterized the life of the Absolute by reason and will without consciousness; and, before Fichte, Leibnitz had asserted that the elements of Nature are monads with unconscious perception and appetition. Hartmann has an affinity with all these predecessors, and with Spinoza, with whom he agrees that there is but one substance unaltered by the plurality of individuals which are only its modifications. Following, however, in the footsteps of Schelling, he idealizes the one extended and thinking substance into one mental being; but he thinks that its essence consists in unconscious intelligence and will, of which all individual intelligent wills are only activities. The merit of this fresh noumenal idealism consists in its correction of the one-sidedness of Schopenhauer: intelligence is necessary to will. But Hartmann's criticism does not go far enough. He ends by outdoing the paradox of Schopenhauer, concluding that Nature in itself is intelligent will, but unconscious, a sort of immanent unconscious God.

As with his master, his reasons for this view are derived, not from a direct proof that unconscious Nature has the mental attributes supposed, but from human psychology and epistemology. Like Leibnitz, he proceeds from the fact that our perceptions are sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, to the inconsequent conclusion, that there are beings with nothing but unconscious perceptions; and by a similar non sequitur, because there is the idea of an end in will, he argues that there must be an unconscious idea of an end in instinctive, in reflex, in all action. Again, in his Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie (1889) he uses without proof the hypothesis of psychological idealism, that we perceive psychical effects, to infer with merely hypothetical consistency the conclusion of noumenal metaphysical idealism that all we can thereby know is psychical causes, or something transcendent, beyond phenomena indeed, yet not beyond mind. But, according to him, this transcendent is the unconscious (Kraftvolles unbewusst ideales Geschehen). He calls this epistemology " transcendent realism "; it is really " transcendent idealism." On these foundations he builds the details of his idealistic metaphysics. (a) He identifies matter with mind by identifying atomic force with the striving of unconscious will after objects conceived by unconscious intelligence, and by defining causality as logical necessity receiving actuality through will. (b) He contends that, when matter ascends to the evolution of organic life, the unconscious has a power, over and above its atomic volitions, of introducing a new element, and that in consequence the facts of variation, selection and inheritance, pointed out by Darwin, are merely means which the unconscious uses for its own ends in morphological development. (c) He explains the rise of consciousness by supposing that, while it requires brain as a condition, it consists in the emancipation of intelligence from will at the moment when in sensation the individual mind finds itself with an idea without will. Here follows his pessimism, like to, but differing from, that of his master. In his view consciousness begins with want, and pain preponderates over pleasure in every individual life, with no hope for the future, while the final end is not consciousness, but the painlessness of the unconscious (see PEss1M1sM). But why exaggerate? The truth of Nature is force; the truth of will is rational desire; the truth of life is neither the optimism of Leibnitz and Hegel, nor the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, but the moderatism of Aristotle. Life is sweet, and most men have more pleasures than pains in their lives.

4. Lotze (1817-1881) elaborated a very different noumenal idealism, which perhaps we may express by the name " Pan. teleologism," to express its conclusion that the known Lotze world beyond phenomena is neither absolute thought nor unconscious will, nor the unconscious at all, but the activity of God; causing in us the system of phenomenal appearances, which we call Nature, or bodies moving in time and space; but being in itself the system of the universal reciprocal actions of God's infinite spirit, animated by the design of the supreme good. The Metaphysik of Lotze in its latest form (1879) begins with a great truth: metaphysics must be the foundation of psychology. He saw that the theories of the origin of knowledge in idealistic epistemology are unsound. Like Aristotle, then, he proposed anew the question, What is being? Nevertheless he was too much a child of his age to keep things known steadily before him; having asked the metaphysical question he proceeded to find a psychological answer in a theory of sensation, which asserted the mere hypothesis that the being which we ascribe to things on the evidence of sensation consists in their being felt. He really accepted, like Kant, the hypothesis of a sense of sensations which led to the Kantian conclusion that the Nature we know in time and space is mere sensible appearances in us. Further, from an early period in his Medicinische Psychologie (1852) he reinforced the transcendental idealism of Kant by a general hypothesis of " local signs," containing the subordinate hypotheses, that we cannot directly perceive extension either within ourselves or without; that spatial bodies outside could not cause in us spatial images either in sight or in touch; but that besides the obvious data of sense, e.g. pressure, heat and colour, there must be other qualitative different excitations of different nerve-fibres, by means of which, as non-local signs of localities, the soul constructs in itself an image of extended space containing different places. This hypothesis of an acquired perception of a space mentally constructed by " local signs " supplied Lotze and many succeeding idealists, including Wundt, with a new argument for metaphysical idealism. Lotze concluded that we have no more reason for supposing an external space like space constructed out of our perceptions, than we have for supposing an external colour like perceived colour. Agreeing, then, with Kant that primary qualities are as mental as secondary, he agreed also with Kant that all the Nature we know as a system of bodies moving in time and space is sensible phenomena. But while he was in fundamental agreement with the first two positions of Kant, he differed from the third; he did not believe that the causes of sensible phenomena can be unknown things in themselves. What then are they? In answering this question Lotze regarded Leibnitz as his guide. He accepted the Leibnitzian fallacy that unity is indivisibility, which led to the Leibnitzian analysis of material bodies into immaterial monads, indivisible and therefore unextended, and to the theory of monadic souls and entelechies. Indeed, from the time of Leibnitz such attempts either to analyse or to construct matter had become a fashion. Lotze agreed with Leibnitz that the things which cause phenomena are immaterial elements, but added that they are not simple substances, self-acting, as Leibnitz thought, or preserving themselves against disturbance, as Herbart thought, but are interacting modifications of the one substance of God.

In the first place, he resolved the doubt of Leibnitz about bodies by deciding entirely against his realistic alternative that an organic body is a substantia realizans phaenomena, and for his idealistic alternative that every body is a phenomenon and not a substance at all. Secondly, he accepted the Leibnitzian hypothesis of immaterial elements without accepting their self-action. He believed in reciprocal action; and the very essence of his metaphysics consists in sublimating the interaction of bodies into the interaction of immaterial elements, which produce effects on one another and on the soul as one of them. According to the mechanics of Newton, when two bodies collide each body makes the other move equally and oppositely; but it has become a convenient habit to express this concrete fact in abstract language by calling it the conservation of momentum, by talking of one body communicating its motion to the other; as if bodies exchanged motion as men do money. Now Lotze took this abstract language literally, and had no difficulty in showing that, as an attribute is not separated from its substance, this supposed communication of motion does not really take place: nothing passes. But instead of returning to the concrete fact of the equivalence of momentum, by which each body moving makes the other move oppositely, he denied that bodies do reciprocally act on one another, and even that bodies as mutually resisting substances press one another apart in collision. Having thus rejected all bodily mechanism, he had to suppose that reciprocal action somehow takes place between immaterial elements. This brought him to another difference from Leibnitz as well as from Newton. According to Leibnitz, while each immaterial element is a monadic substance and self-acting secondary cause, God is the primary cause of all. According to Lotze, the connexion required by reciprocity requires also that the whole of every reciprocal action should take place within one substance; the immaterial elements act on one another merely, as the modifications of that substance interacting within itself; and that one substance is God, who thus becomes not merely the primary but the sole cause, in scholastic language a causa immanens, or agent of acts remaining within the agent's being. At this point, having rejected both the Newtonian mechanism of bodily substances and the Leibnitzian automatism of monadic substances, he flew to the Spinozistic unity of substance; except that, according to him, the one substance, God, is not extended at all, and is not merely thinking, but is a thinking, willing and acting spirit.

Lotze's metaphysics is thus distinguished from the theism of Newton and Leibnitz by its pantheism, and from the pantheism of Spinoza by its idealism. It is an idealistic pantheism, which is a denial of all bodily mechanism, a reduction of everything bodily to phenomena, and an assertion that all real action is the activity of God. At the same time it is a curious attempt to restore mechanism and reconcile it with teleology by using the word " mechanism " in a new meaning, according to which God performs His own reciprocal actions within Himself by uniform laws, which are also means to divine ends. It is also an attempt to reconcile this divine mechanism with freedom. In his Metaphysik (1879), as in his earlier Mikrokosmus (1856-1864), Lotze vindicated the contingency of freedom by assigning to God a miraculous power of unconditional commencement, whereby not only at the very beginning but in the course of nature there may be new beginnings, which are not effects of previous causes, though once started they produce effects according to law. Thus his pantheistic is also a teleological idealism, which in its emphasis on free activity and moral order recalls Leibnitz and Fichte, but in its emphasis on the infinity of God has more affinity to Spinoza, Schelling and Hegel. Hence his philosophy, like the Hegelian, continually torments one with the difficulty that its sacrifice of the distinct being of xvili. 8 a all individual substances to the universality of God entails the sacrifice of the individual personality of men. Our bodies were reduced by Lotze to the general ruck of phenomenal appearances. Our souls he tried his best to endow with a quasiexistence, arguing that the unity of consciousness requires an indivisible subject, which is distinct from the plurality of the body but interacting with it, is in a way a centre of independent activities, and is so far a substance, or rather able to produce the appearance of a substance. But at the end of his Metaphysik, from the conclusion that everything beyond phenomena is divine interaction, he drew the consistent corollary that individual souls are simply actions of the one genuine being. His final view was that certain actions of the divine substance are during consciousness gifted with knowledge of themselves as active centres, but during unconsciousness are non-existent. If so, we are not persons with a permanent being of our own distinct from that of God. But in a philosophy which reduces everything to phenomenal appearance except the self-interacting substance of God, there is no room for either the bodies or the souls of finite substances or human persons.

5. Fechner (1801-1887) affords a conspicuous instance of the idealistic tendency to mysterize nature in his Panpsychism, or that form of noumenal idealism which holds that the universe is a vast communion of spirits, souls of men, of animals, of plants, of earth and other planets, of the sun, all embraced as different members in the soul of the world, the highest spirit - God, in whom we live and move and have our being; that the bodily and the spiritual, or the physical and the psychical, are everywhere parallel processes which never meet to interact; but that the difference between them is only a difference between the outer and inner aspects of one identical psychophysical process; and yet that both sides are not equally real, because while psychical and physical are identical, the psychical is what a thing really is as seen from within, the physical is what it appears to be to a spectator outside; or spirit is the self-appearance of matter, matter the appearance of one spirit to another. Fechner's panpsychism has a certain affinity both to Stahl's animism and to the hylozoism of materialists such as Haeckel. But, while it differs from both in denying the reality of body, it differs from the former in extending conscious soul not only to plants, as Stahl did, but to all Nature; and it differs from the latter in the different consequences drawn by materialism and idealism from this universal animism. According to Haeckel, matter is the universal substance, spirit its universal attribute. According to Fechner, spirit is the universal reality, matter the universal appearance of spirit to spirit; and they are identical because spirit is the reality which appears. Hence Fechner describes himself as a twig fallen from Schelling's stem. Schelling's adherent Oken by his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie conveyed to his mind the life-long impression that God is the universe and Nature God's appearance. At the same time, while accepting the Schellingian parallelistic identity of all things in God, Fechner was restrained by his accurate knowledge of physics from the extravagant construction of Nature, which had failed in the hands of Schelling and Hegel. Besides, he was deeply impressed by the fact of man's personality and by the problem of his personal immortality, which brought him back through Schelling to Leibnitz, whose Monadologie throughout maintains the plurality of monadic souls and the omnipresence of perception, sketches in a few sections (§§ 23, 78-81) a panpsychic parallelism, though without identity, between bodily motions and psychic perceptions, and, what is most remarkable, already uses the conservation of energy to argue that physical energy pursues its course in bodies without interacting with souls ., and that motions produce motions, perceptions produce perceptions. Leibnitz thus influenced Fechner, as in other ways he influenced Lotze. Both, however, used this influence freely; and, whereas Lotze used the Leibnitzian argument from indivisibility to deduce indivisible elements and souls, Fechner used the Leibnitzian hypotheses of universal perception and parallelism of motions and perceptions, in the light of the .Schellingian identification of physical and psychical, to evolve a world-view (Weltansicht) containing something which was neither Leibnitz nor Schelling.

Fechner's first point was his panpsychism. Emphasizing the many real analogies between physical and mental agency, but underrating the much stronger evidences that all the mental operations of men and animals require a nervous system, he flew to the paradox that soul is not limited to men and animals, but extends to plants, to the earth and other planets, to the sun, to the world itself, of which, according to him, God P y is the world-soul. In this doctrine of universal animation he was like Leibnitz, yet very different. Whereas Leibnitz confined a large area of the world to wholly unconscious perceptions, and therefore preferred to call the souls of inorganic beings " Entelechies," Fechner extended consciousness to the whole world; and accordingly, whereas Leibnitz believed in a supramundane Creator, " au dessus du Monde " and " dans le Monde," Fechner, in the spirit of Schelling, identified God with the soul of the world. Fechner's second point was that, throughout the animated universe, physical processes accompany psychical processes without interaction. In this panpsychistic parallelism he was again like Leibnitz, and he developed his predecessor's view, that the conservation of energy prevents interaction, into the supposition that alongside the physical there is a parallel psychical conservation of energy. Here, again, he went much further than Leibnitz, but along with Schelling, in identifying the physical and the psychical as outer and inner sides of the same process, in which the inner is the real and the outer the apparent. Fechner's third point carried him beyond all his predecessors, containing as it does the true originality of his " world-view." He advanced the ingenious suggestion that, as body is in body and all ultimately in the world-body, so soul is in soul and all ultimately in the world-soul. By this means he explained immortality and vindicated personality. His fourth point was connected with this inclusion of personal spirits in higher spirits and in the highest. It is his so-called "synechological view " of the soul. Herbart and Lotze, both deeply affected by the Leibnitzian hypothesis of indivisible monads, supposed that man's soul is seated at a central point in the brain; and Lotze supposed that this supposition is necessary to explain the unity of consciousness. Fechner's supposition was that the unity of consciousness belongs to the unity of the whole body; that the seat of the soul is the living body; that the soul changes its place as in different parts a process rises above the " threshold of consciousness "; and that soul is not substance but the single psychical life which has its physical manifestation in the single bodily life. Applying this " synechological view " to the supposed inclusion of soul in soul, he deduced the conclusion that, as here the nature of one's soul is to unite one's little body, so hereafter its essence will be to unite a greater body, while God's spirit unites the whole world by His omnipresence; and he pertinently asked, in opposition to the " punctual " view, whether God's soul is centred in a point. Lastly, the whole of this " world-view " was developed by Fechner in early life, under the influence of his religious training, and out of a pious desire to understand those main truths of Christianity which teach us that we are children of God, that this natural body will become a spiritual body, and that, though we are different individual members, we live and move and are in God: " in Deo vivimus, movemus, et sumus." It is important to notice that Fechner maintained this " world-view " in a little book, Das Biichlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, which he originally published in 1836 under the pseudonym of Dr Mises, but which he afterwards republished in his own name in 1866, and again in 1887, as a sketch of his Weltansicht. Afterwards in Nanna (1848) he discussed the supposed souls of plants, and in Zendavesta (1851) the supposed souls of the earth and the rest of the world. Then in 1855 he published his Atomenlehre, partly founded on his physics, but mainly on his metaphysics. Under the influence of Leibnitz, Boscovich, Kant and Herbart, he supposed that bodies are divisible into punctual atoms, which are not bodies, but centres of forces of attraction and repulsion; that impenetrability is a result of repulsive force; and that force itself is only law - taking as an instance that Newtonian force of attraction whose process we do not understand, and neglecting that Newtonian force of pressure and impact whose process we do understand from the collision of bodies already extended and resisting. But, in thus adapting to his own purposes the Leibnitzian analysis of material into immaterial, he drew his own conclusions according to his own metaphysics, which required that the supposed centres of force are not Leibnitzian " monads," nor Herbartian " reals," nor divine modifications such as Lotze afterwards supposed, but are elements of a system which in outer aspect is bodily and in inner aspect is spiritual, and obeying laws of spirit. At the same time his synechological view prevented him from saying that every atom has a soul, because according to him a soul always corresponds to a unity of a physical manifold. Thus his metaphysics is Leibnitzian, like that of Lotze, and yet is opposed to the most characteristic feature of monadology - the percipient indivisible monad.

In 1860 appeared Fechner's Elemente der Psychophysik, a work which deeply affected subsequent psychology, and almost revolutionized metaphysics of body and soul, and of physical and psychical relations generally. It becomes necessary, therefore, to determine how far Fechner derived his psychophysics from experience, how far from fallacies of inference, from his romantic imagination and from his theosophic metaphysics, which indeed coloured his whole book on psychophysics. At the very outset he started with his previous metaphysical hypothesis of parallelistic identity without interaction. He now compared the spiritual and bodily sides of a man to the concave and convex sides of a circle, as inner and outer sides of the same process, which is psychical as viewed from within and physical as viewed from without. He also maintained throughout the book that physical and psychical energy do not interfere, but that the psychical is, like a mathematical quantity, a function of the physical, depending upon it, and vice versa, only in the sense that a constant relation according to law exists, such that we may conclude from one to the other, but without one ever being cause of the other. By his psychophysics he meant the exact doctrine of the relations of dependency between physical and psychical. The name was new, but not the doctrine. From antiquity men had applied themselves to determine the relations between the physical stimuli and the socalled " quality " of sensations. But what was new was the application of this doctrine to the relations between the stimuli and the socalled " intensity " of sensations. He generalized Weber's law in the form that sensation generally increases in intensity as the stimulus increases by a constant function of the previous stimulus; or increases in an arithmetical progression as the stimulus increases in a geometrical ratio; or increases by addition of the same amount as the stimulus increases by the same multiple; or increases as the logarithm of the stimulus. There are then, at least within the limits of moderate sensations, concomitant variations between stimuli and sensations, not only in " quality," as in the intervals of sounds, which were understood long ago, but also in " intensity "; and the discovery of the latter is the importance of Weber's and Fechner's law. By the rules of induction from concomitant variations, we are logically bound to infer the realistic conclusion that outer physical stimuli cause inner sensations of sensible effects. But, unfortunately for Fechner, the very opposite conclusion followed from the presuppositions of his parallelistic metaphysics, and from the Leibnitzian view of the conservation of energy, which he was the first in our time to use in order to argue that a physical cause cannot produce a psychical effect, on the ground that physical energy must be exactly replaced by physical energy.

Having satisfied himself in what he called " outer psychophysics," that the stimulus causes only the nervous process and not sensation, he passed to what he called " inner psychophysics," or the theory of the relation between nervous and psychical processes. He rightly argued against the old theory that the continuity of nervous processes in the brain is interrupted by mental processes of thought and will: there is a nervous process for every mental process. But two questions then arose. What is the relation between nervous process and sensation? What causes sensation? The first question he answered from his imagination by supposing that, while the external world is stimulus of the nervous process, the nervous process is the immediate stimulus of the sensation, and that the sensation increases by a constant fraction of the previous stimulus in the nervous system, when Weber's law proves only that it increases by a constant fraction of the previous stimulus in the external world. The second question he answered from his parallelistic metaphysics by deducing that even within the organism there is only a constant dependency of sensation on nervous process without causation, because the nervous process is physical but the sensation psychical. This answer supposed that the whole physical process from the action of the external stimulus on the nervous system to the reaction of the organism on the external world is one series, while the conscious process beginning with sensation is only parallel and as it were left high and dry. What then is the cause of the sensation ? Huxley, it will be remembered, in similar circumstances, answered this question by degrading consciousness to an epiphenomenon, or bye-product of the physical process. Fechner was saved from this absurdity, but only to fall into the greater absurdity of his own panpsychism. Having long assumed that the whole world is animated throughout, and that there are always two parallel series, physical and psychical, he concluded that, while a physical stimulus is causing a physical nervous process, a psychical accompaniment of the stimulus is causing the sensation, which, according to him, is the psychical accompaniment of the nervous process; and that, as the whole physical and the whole psychical series are the same, differing only as outer and inner, this identity holds both of stimulus and its psychical accompaniment and of nervous process and its accompanying sensation. Accordingly, he calls these and all other processes " psychophysical "; and as he recognized two parallel energies, physical and psychical, differing only as outer and inner aspects of the same energy, he called this " psychophysical energy." In such a philosophy all reality is " psychophysical." At the same time Fechner would not have us suppose that the two sides are equal; according to him, the psychical, being the psychophysical as viewed from within, is real, the physical, being the psychophysical viewed from without, is apparent; so in oneself, though nervous process and psychical process are the same, it is the psychical which is the reality of which the nervous is mere appearance; and so everywhere, spirit is the reality, body the appearance of spirit to spirit. Finally, he supposed that one spirit is in another, and all in the highest spirit, God. By this means also he explained unconsciousness. In point of fact, many stimuli are beneath the " threshold " of a man's consciousness. Leibnitz, in the Nouveaux Essais, ii. 1 1, had also said that we have many " petites perceptions," of which we are unconscious, and had further suggested that a perception of which we are, is composed of a quantity of " petites perceptions " of which we are not, conscious. Proceeding on this suggestion, and misled by the mathematical expression which he had given to Weber's law, Fechner held that a conscious sensation, like its stimulus, consists of units, or elements, by summation and increments of which conscious sensations and their differences are produced; so that consciousness, according to this unnecessary assumption, emerges from an integration of unconscious shocks or tremors. But by the hypothesis of the inclusion of spirit in spirit, he was further able to hold that what is unconscious in one spirit is conscious in a higher spirit, while everything whatever is in the consciousness of the highest spirit of God, who is the whole of reality of which the spirits are parts, while the so-called physical world is merely outer appearance of one spirit to another.

Fechner first confused physics and metaphysics in psychophysics, and next proceeded to confuse them again in his work on evolution (Einige Ideen zur SchOpfungs and Entwicklungs-geschichte der Organismen, 1873). He perceived that Darwinism attributed too much to accident, and was also powerless to explain the origin of life and of consciousness. But his substitute was his own hypothesis of panpsychism, from which he deduced a "cosmorganic " evolution from a " cosmorganic " or original condition of the world as a living organism into the inorganic, by the principle of tendency to stability. The world, as he thought, on its physical side, always was a living body; and on its psychical side God always was its conscious spirit; and, so far from life arising from the lifeless, and consciousness from unconsciousness, the life and consciousness of the whole world are the origin of the lifeless and the unconscious in parts of it, by a kind of secondary automatism, while we ourselves are developed from our own mother-earth by differentiation. By thus supposing a psychical basis to evolution, Fechner, anticipating Wundt, substituted a psychical development of organs for Darwinian accidental variation. The difficulty of such speculations is to prove that things apparently dead and mindless are living souls. Their interest to the metaphysician is their opposition to physics on the one hand and to theism on the other. Shall we resign our traditional belief that the greater part of the world is mere body, but that its general adaptability to conscious organisms proves its creation and government by God, and take to the new hypothesis, which, by a transfer of design from God to Nature, supposes that everything physical is alive, and conducts its life by psychical impulses of its own? Fechner himself went even further, and together with design transferred God Himself to Nature. This is the subject of his last metaphysical work, Die Tagesansicht gegeniiber der Nachtansicht (1879). The " day-view " (Fechner's) is the view that God is the psychophysical all-embracing being, the law and consciousness of the world. It resembles the views of Hegel and Lotze in its pantheistic tendency. But it does not, like theirs, sacrifice our personality; because, according to Fechner, the one divine consciousness includes us as a larger circle includes smaller circles. By this ingenious suggestion of the membership of one spirit in another, Fechner's " day-view " also puts Nature in a different position; neither with Hegel sublimating it to the thought of God's mind, nor with Lotze degrading it to the phenomena of our human minds, but identifying it with the outer appearance of one spirit to another spirit in the highest of spirits.

We have dwelt on this curious metaphysics of Fechner because it contains the master-key to the philosophy of the present moment. When the later reaction to Kant arose against both Hegelianism and materialism, the nearly contemporary appearance of Fechner's Psychophysics began to attract experimental psychologists by its real as well as its apparent exactness, and both psychologists and metaphysicians by its novel way of putting the relations between the physical and the psychical in man and in the world. Fechner saw psychology deriving advantage from the methods, as well as the results, of his experiments, and in 1879 the first psychological laboratory was erected by Wundt at Leipzig. But he had also to endure countless objections to his mathematical statement of Weber's law, to his unnecessary assumption of units of sensation, and to his unjustifiable transfer of the law from physical to physiological stimuli of sensations, involving in his opinion his parallelistic view of body and mind. Among psychologists Helmholtz, Mach, Brentano, Hering, Delboeuf, were all more or less against him. Sigwart in his Logic has also opposed the parallelistic view itself; and James has criticized it from the point of view that the soul selects out of the possibilities of the brain means to its own ends. Nevertheless, largely under the influence of the exaggeration of the conservation of energy, many psychologists - Wundt, Paulsen, Riehl, Jodl, Ebbinghaus, Miinsterberg, and in England Lewes, Clifford, Romanes, Stout - have accepted Fechner's psychophysical parallelism, as far at least as men and animals are concerned. Most stop here, but some go with Fechner to the full length of his metaphysical parallelism of the physical and psychical, as psychophysical, throughout the whole world. This influence extended from Germany to Denmark, where it was embraced by Hoff ding, and to England, where it was accepted by Romanes, and in a more qualified manner as " a working hypothesis " by Stout. But the most thorough and most eloquent of Fechner's metaphysical disciples was F. Paulsen q.v.), who spread panpsychism far and wide in his Einleitung in die Philosophie. Here reappear all the characteristic points of Fechner's " worldview " - the panpsychism, the universal parallelism with the identi. fication of physical and psychical, the inclusion of spirit i n sp i r i t, the synechological view of spirit, and the final " day-view " that all reality is spirit, and body the appearance of spirit to spirit. But Paulsen tries to supply something wanting in Fechner. The originality of Paulsen consists in trying to supply an epistemological ecplanation of the metaphysics of Fechner, by reconciling him with Kant and Schopenhauer. He borrows from Kant's "rationalism " the hypothesis of a spontaneous activity of the subject with the deduction that knowledge begins from sense, but arises from understanding; and he accepts from Kant's metaphysical idealism the consequence that everything we perceive, experience and know about physical nature, and the bodies of which it consists, is phenomena, and not bodily things in themselves. But he has a different theory of human nature and soul, and so does not accept the Kantian conclusion that things in themselves, in the sense of things beyond phenomena, are all unknowable. On the contrary, his contention is that of Fechner - that all knowable things are inner psychical realities beneath outer physical appearances - the invisible symbolized by the visible. Kant, however, had no epistemology for such a contention, because according to him both outer and inner senses give mere appearance, from which we could not know either body in itself, or soul in itself. Parting, then, from Kant, Paulsen resorts to a paradox which he shares with Fechner and Wundt. He admits, indeed, Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious only of mental states, but he contends that this very consciousness is a knowledge of a thing in itself. He agrees with Fechner and Wundt that there is no substantial soul, and that soul is nothing but the mental states, or rather their unity--thus identifying it with Kant's synthetic unity. On this assumption he deduces that in being conscious of our mental states we are conscious of soul not merely as it appears, but as it is in itself, and therefore can infer similar souls, other psychical unities, which are also things in themselves.

But what is the essence of this psychical reality which we thus immediately and mediately know? Here he appeals to Schopenhauer's doctrine that will of some sort is the fundamental fact of mental life. Taking, then, will to be the essential thing in itself of which we are conscious, he deduces that we can infer that the psychical things in themselves beyond ourselves are also essentially " wills." Combining with this the central dogma of Fechner that spirit extends throughout the world of bodily appearance, he concludes that the realities of the world are " wills," that bodies are mere appearances of " wills," and that there is one universal and all-embracing spirit which is " will." His ultimate metaphysics, then, is this: Everything is spirit, and spirit is " will." Lastly, by " ` will " he does not mean " rational desire," which is its proper meaning, but inapplicable to Nature; nor unconscious irrational will, which is Schopenhauer's forced meaning; nor unconscious intelligent will, which is Hartmann's more correct meaning, though inapplicable to Nature. His " will " is instinct, impulsive feeling, a " will to live," not indeed unconscious, but often subconscious, without idea, without reasoning about ends and means, yet pursuing ends - in short, what he calls, after K. E. von Baer, Zielstrebigkeit. How persistent is ancient animism! Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle; Telesio, Bruno and Campanella; Leibnitz; the idealists, Schopenhauer and Hartmann, Fechner and Paulsen; and the materialist, Haeckel - all have agreed in according some sort of appetition to Nature. So prone are men to exaggerate adaptation into aim! So prone are they to transfer to Nature the part played by the providence of God ! (see Bacon, De augmentis, iii. 4, sub fin.). Noumenal idealism is not dead in Germany. It died down for a time in the decline of Hegelianism and the rise of materialism. It has since revived. The pure idealism of Fichte is at the bottom of it all. The panlogism of Schelling and Hegel survives in its influence. So still more does the pantheism of Schopenhauer. The three most vital idealisms of this kind at the moment are the panpneumatism of Hartmann, combining Hegel with Schopenhauer; the panteleologism of Lotze, reviving Leibnitz; and the panpsychism of Paulsen, continuing Fechner, but with the addition of an epistemology combining Kant with Schopenhauer. All these systems of metaphysics, differ as they may, agree that things are known to exist beyond sensible phenomena, but yet are mental realities of some kind. Meanwhile, the