But I ask you whether giving the name of “one” to the former “many” makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any better. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility and substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by which real things that are one can and do change at all. In point of fact abstract oneness as such doesn’t change, neither has it parts—any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But then neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence exists; only concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total nature. To construe any one of their abstract names as making their total nature impossible is a misuse of the function of naming. The real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness to the case. Don’t take your “independence” simpliciter, as Lotze does, take it secundum quid. Only when we know what the process of interaction literally and concretely consists in can we tell whether beings independent in definite respects, distinct, for example, in origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or cannot interact.
The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include, is what I call “vicious intellectualism.” Later I shall have more to say about this intellectualism, but that Lotze’s argument is tainted by it I hardly think we can deny. As well might you contend (to use an instance from Sigwart) that a person whom you have once called an “equestrian” is thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet.
I almost feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtle arguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But le vin est versé, il faut le boire, and I must cite a couple more instances before I stop.
If we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes, we believe that beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence, and then secondarily become known to one another. But philosophers of the absolute tell us that such independence of being from being known would, if once admitted, disintegrate the universe beyond all hope of mending. The argument is one of Professor Royce’s proofs that the only alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things or their complete union in the absolute One.
Take, for instance, the proverb “a cat may look at a king” and adopt the realistic view that the king’s being is independent of the cat’s witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even be annihilated, and the king remain unchanged—this assumption, I say, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd practical consequence that the two beings can never later acquire any possible linkages or connections, but must remain eternally as if in different worlds. For suppose any connection whatever to ensue, this connection would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links before it could connect them, and so on ad infinitum, the argument, you see, being the same as Lotze’s about how A’s influence does its influencing when it influences B.
In Royce’s own words, if the king can be without the cat knowing him, then king and cat “can have no common features, no ties, no true relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely impassable chasms. They can never come to get either ties or community of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor in the same natural or spiritual order.”11 They form in short two unrelated universes—which is the reductio ad absurdum required.
To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revoke the original hypothesis. The king and the cat are not indifferent to each other in the way supposed. But if not in that way, then in no way, for connection in that way carries connection in other ways; so that, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with the absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist. Cat and king are co-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never have been absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicated with all the other facts of which the universe consists.
Professor Royce’s proof that whoso admits the cat’s witnessing the king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly put as follows:—
First, to know the king, the cat must intend that king, must somehow pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically. The cat’s idea, in short, must transcend the cat’s own separate mind and somehow include the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent of the cat, the cat’s pure other, the beast’s
