Spencer's sal Being. Common sense has a comparatively clear image connected with the term. It invariably suggests spacial discreteness and juxtaposition, a tridimensional aggregate of units of volume bounded by hard surfaces. And if this be matter, then evidently matter is not everything. So characteristic an arrangement suggests contrasts as well as analogies; if it provides for some things, like the planetary system or the molecular structure of gases, it leaves out other things, such as color, thought, or the ether. Hence the superiority of concepts like 'force' and 'energy.' For these have not only the specific meaning which they obtain from the formulas of mechanics; they have also the vague meaning which they have when construed in terms of the inner experience of activity or effort. Common sense recoils from the notion of a matter that shall not be hard, discrete, and extended; but it is prepared to hear anything of force or energy. And there is a second motive which tends to the substitution of these conceptions for matter. The indestructibility of matter is proved by the fact that matter changes its form without loss of weight. Empirically, in other words, it is the property of weight that remains constant. But weight is a manifestation of force; and matter may therefore be regarded as one of these manifestations. Or one may argue, as the philosophers Leibniz and Berkeley have argued long since, that matter is known only by its properties, by its "forms and motions"; and if these are varieties of force, why multiply substrata or essences needlessly? Instead of conceiving a matter that manifests itself in forms and motions, why not stop at force, and invest it with finality and universality? So the 'monism of force' replaces 'the monism of matter.' "As shown before," says Spencer, "we can not go on merging derivative truths in those wider truths from which they are derived, without reaching at least a widest truth which can be merged in no other, or derived from no other. And the relation in which it stands to the truths of science in general, shows that this truth transcending demonstration is the Persistence of Force. . . . But when we ask what this energy is, there is no answer save that it is the noumenal cause implied by the phenomenal effect. Hence the force of which we assert persistence is that Absolute Force we are obliged to postulate as the necessary correlate of the force we are conscious of. By the Persistence of Force, we really mean the persistence of some Cause which transcends our knowledge and conception. In asserting it we assert an Unconditioned Reality without beginning or end." The use of capitals in this paragraph is an expedient for ridding terms of that precision of meaning which is so fatal to the speculative interest. By 'force' one can only mean the por f of the formulas of mechanics; but by 'Force' one can mean this together with anything else that it may prove convenient to mean. The former is one thing among others; the latter may be equal to anything and everything. We are "obliged to postulate" it, to satisfy the speculative dogma; and we are enabled to satisfy that dogma, only by reducing a determinate concept to a name, and then construing its very emptiness as signifying unlimited potentiality. The monism of force, as has been said, derives a certain plausibility from the experience of activity or effort. It is significant that it is the vagueness of this experience that renders it useful in this connection. Were it a specific experience, like, e.g., that of the color blue, it would not so readily lend itself to unlimited generalization. As a matter of fact, the experience of activity may be construed in one of two ways: it may be taken in its initial or passing character as a fused experience, or it may be analyzed. In the first case, it possesses simplicity just in proportion as it is not an experience of anything; it signifies, not the sim 1 Spencer (1820-1903): First Principles (1862), sixth edition, pp. 175-176. Cf. below pp. 261-264, 279-283. plicity of the thing, but of the knowledge. It is, in short, a case of 'pseudo-simplicity.' In the second case, that is, when analyzed, it turns out to be a composite experience, containing specific elements in a specific configuration. Now activity in the latter sense is far too peculiar and rare to be construed as an all-general and all-sufficient principle. But activity in the former sense is indeterminate; and since the experience is familiar, it gives currency to a similarly indeterminate conception of force, which is amorphous and plastic enough to suit the speculative purpose. It is readily accepted as the principle which underlies and unites both the analyzed and determinate 'force' of physics, and the analyzed and determinate 'activity' of a strictly descriptive psychology. Haeckel's § 6. The monisms of matter and force are restated, brought up to date, and subsumed under a higher 'monism of substance," by Ernst Haeckel. This author's Riddle of the Universe is at present both the most widely read and influential defence of materialism, and also the most perfect illustration of that doctrine's characteristic motive and besetting sins. "Under the name of 'the law of substance,'" Haeckel embraces "two supreme laws of different origin and age the older is the chemical law of the 'conservation of matter,' and the younger is the physical law of the 'conservation of energy. "The sum of matter which fills infinite space,' and "the sum of force, which is at work in infinite space and produces all phenomena," are alike unchangeable. And just as all energies - heat, sound, light, electricity, and the rest, are only particular varieties of one universal energy, "dynamodes of a single primitive force," so the different forms of matter-chemically diverse, ponderable and imponderable, are only particular "condensations" of a "simple primitive substance, which fills the infinity of space in an unbroken continuity." But monism is not yet complete. "Matter (space-filling substance) and energy (moving force) are but two inseparable attributes" of a still more fundamental substance. And in this substance the dualism of body and mind is resolved as well. For energy and spirit are one. Spirit is at once the essence and the activity of substance; physical affinity and resistance are but rudimentary forms of inclination and aversion. "The irresistible passion that draws Edward to the sympathetic Ottilia, or Paris to Helen, and leaps over all bounds of reason and morality, is the same powerful 'unconscious' attractive force which impels the living spermatozoon to force an entrance into the ovum in the fertilization of the egg of the animal or plant — the same impetuous movement which unites two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen for the formation of a molecule of water." Thus Haeckel arrives at the animism and hylozoism with which human thought had set out some 2500 years before, the notion of an indeterminate matter, informed and animated by an indeterminate force a cosmic generalization, in other words, of the immediate feeling of desire and self-motion. And even this is not the last substance; for it is but "the knowable aspect of things," and is relative to our senses. "We are incompetent to penetrate into the innermost nature of this real world'the thing in itself." "1 Thus the principle of substance in the end conducts Haeckel, as it conducted Büchner and Spencer, to agnosticism. And his procedure is in all essential respects the same as theirs. He consistently assumes that a simple unity corresponding to the name or initial aspect, must underlie every analyzed and relational unity. For every correlation of elements, there must be a 'that which' pos-· sesses them. And this assumption is applied to the central concepts of physics. Weight, mass, force, and energy, 1 Haeckel: The Riddle of the Universe, trans. by J. McCabe, pp. 211213, 216, 218, 224, 292. The best reply to Haeckel is to be found in Sir Oliver Lodge, Life and Matter. Cf. also Fr. Paulsen: Philosophia Militans, p. 121, "Ernst Haeckel als Philosoph." 66 are properly, as we have seen, constant ratios of variables: mathematical proportions of the spacial, temporal, and qualitative properties of things, as these are directly observed. But with Haeckel, every such relational complex is regarded as expressing some simple essence or unique quality. Thus the Newtonian mechanics, he says, gives us only the "dead mathematical formula" the quantitative demonstration" of the theory of force; "it gives us no insight whatever into the qualitative nature of the phenomena." In other words, Haeckel is not satisfied with the qualitative diversity represented by the several terms into which a Newtonian formula may be analyzed. There must be a deeper and more essential quality corresponding to the formula itself. But such a quality is neither to be observed nor discovered by analysis. It is assumed; and once assumed, it is given a vague meaning either by reference to the subjective experience of effort, or by the lingering and confused reminiscence of its exact mechanical meaning. And it is the latter of these means on which this doctrine depends for its materialistic or anti-spiritualistic conclusions. If the qualitative essence of force and energy were interpreted in terms of psychical activity or appetency, the outcome would be a 'panpsychism,' in which it would be as reasonable to reduce mechanism to freedom as freedom to mechanism, or as reasonable to reduce matter to God as God to matter. Precisely this conclusion is reached by those who, like Bergson, approach the primeval activitysubstance from the philosophical and psychological side.3 But Haeckel's monism "definitely rules out the three central dogmas of metaphysics - God, freedom, and immortality." And that such appears to be the outcome is due entirely to the remnant of definite physical meaning that still attaches to 'force' and 'energy' in Haeckel's use of them. The underlying substance, or primitive 1 Op. cit., p. 217. See below, pp. 261-262. Cf. below, p. 315. |