Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Common non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born. The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole basis on which Mr. McTaggart’s own certainty so solidly rests, settles down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel’s gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is “implicitly present.”
This indeed is Hegel’s vision, and Hegel thought that the details of his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely, in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel’s logic, and finally concludes that “all true philosophy must be mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,” which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end vision and faith must eke them out. But how abstract and thin is here the vision, to say nothing of the faith! The whole of reality, explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless be present in them all implicitly, although no one of us can ever see how—the bare word “implicit’ here bearing the whole pyramid of the monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joachim’s monistic system of truth rests on an even slenderer point.—I have never doubted,” he says, “that universal and timeless truth is a single content or significance, one and whole and complete,” and he candidly confesses the failure of rationalistic attempts “to raise this immediate certainty” to the level of reflective knowledge. There is, in short, no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all the little “lowercase” truths—and errors—which life presents. The psychological fact that he never has “doubted” is enough.
The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems to me to be a machtspruch, a product of will far more than one of reason. Unity is good, therefore things shall cohere; they shall be one; there shall be categories to make them one, no matter what empirical disjunctions may appear. In Hegel’s own writings, the shall-be temper is ubiquitous and towering; it overrides verbal and logical resistances alike. Hegel’s error, as Professor Royce so well says, “lay not in introducing logic into passion,” as some people charge, “but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic. … He is [thus] suggestive,” Royce says, “but never final. His system as a system has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains forever.”33
That vital comprehension we have already seen. It is that there is a sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, but may vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinary logic, since it denies this, must be overcome. Ordinary logic denies this because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts are their own bare selves and nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel’s “system” was Hegel’s attempt to make us believe that he was working by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all his results.
What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see in a later lecture. It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent, and threadbare appearance, the starving, schoolroom aspect, which the speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.
There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods concretely can do. If the “logical prius” of our mind were really the “implicit presence” of the whole “concrete universal,” the whole of reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked (for example) by the dialectical method, doesn’t it seem odd that in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in “science,” namely, the dialectical method should never once have been tried? Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs to my mind. Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to be thanked for all of science’s results.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his metaphysical conclusions about reality—but let me first rehearse a few of the facts about his life.
Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig, a typical gelehrter of the old-fashioned German stripe. His means were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He passed his medical examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical science. It was ten years before he was made professor of physics, although he soon was authorized to lecture. Meanwhile, he had to make both ends meet, and
