CHAPTER I

THE NATURE OF THOUGHT

Section I. The Fundamental Principle

THE principle upon which I seek to found a new philosophy is this: The sole, essential function of all thinking, as contrasted with feeling, is to discriminate between cause and effect.

It is a simple thesis; but it will not be disparaged on that account by any one who knows the history of inductive science. Such an one will remember that the greatest discoveries have always borne this stamp of simplicity. The secrets of Nature always seem open and evident when once we have found them out. But it is not so easy to find them out and verify them. It is far easier to plod along in the old ruts of tradition and error; or to revolve, like one lost in the woods, in circles of verbiage and ambiguity.

But your thesis, it may be said, is nothing new. It is but a revamping of Schopenhauer's reduction of all the Kantian categories to that of causality. But such an objection would be both shallow and false. Some of the Pythagoreans anticipated dimly the Copernican discovery, but they never verified their vague conjectures; and the contrast between my doctrine and Schopenhauer's is much wider and deeper than that. (a) For he confined his view to processes of the understanding, which for him-as also for

Kant, Hegel and the rest—was but a part of the intellect; and a very inferior, rudimentary part, the source of all error and deception. (b) Nor did Schopenhauer even attempt to prove the reality of causation; he never questioned Kant's view of it as but a logical necessity, an arbitrary compulsion forced upon us by the deceptive understanding. (c) Above all, he did not see that this universal scope of the causal concept could be converted into a proof that it was no mere figment of the mind; to him it was merely "subjective." In fine, Schopenhauer simply carried the Kantian philosophy one stage farther on-into that pessimism which, as the history of India so painfully shows, is the inevitable outcome of every fully developed theory of Maya or illusion.

My doctrine is the exact opposite of all this. For its main design is to find an ultimate, universal criterion of truth, and thus overcome the skepticism lurking in both the materialistic and idealistic modes of modern thought.

Section 2. Hume's Problem

Modern philosophy is tormented by one very grievous malady. Its criticism has destroyed the old criteria of truth, but has never been able to put anything else in their place; it has torn down, but knows not how to rebuild. Even through all the storm and stress of the eighteenth century, the primary convictions of mankind were conserved, at least for the majority, by the doctrine of innate ideas or intuitions.

But Kant completely wrecked the intuitional method of defending truth. The very fact that all men were somehow mysteriously compelled to accept, without any proof, certain convictions concerning time, space, substance, cause, etc., was made a ground for discrediting these convictions. His criticism has never been adequately answered. And for more than a century now, our most elementary convictions, moral as well as religious, have been hanging in cloud-land, true castles in the air. Thus modern philosophy, having no firm foundation, has become a chaos of dispute, paradox and vain subtleties.

My contention is that philosophy can be rescued from its evident state of decadence and chaos only by finding some way of solving Hume's famous problem of causality. In the failure of Kant and all his successors down to the present day to solve that problem has been the main source of trouble. Thinkers have naturally tended to ignore, to shove aside a principle that seemed to mock at all their efforts to solve or understand it. Many of them seem to have nourished a spite against it. Thus Royce says solemnly: "The unhappy slavery of metaphysicians of the past to the conception of causation has been responsible for some of the most fatal misfortunes of religion and of humanity.'

Not having any fear of such a slavery, I propose in this volume to prove inductively that the sole essential function of all thinking is to discriminate between cause and effect; in other words, that there 'The World and the Individual, I. p. 444.

is no known form of thought which is not ultimately reducible into an assertion of cause and effect. If I succeed, then plainly to cancel causality is to efface all distinction between truth and falsehood, and thus to render all thinking logically impossible. The argument is in fact a reductio ad absurdum in the completest form imaginable. The geometer proves his theorem by showing that its denial would logically lead to the denial of some universally accepted principle, and would therefore be absurd; I prove my theorem by showing that its denial would invalidate all principles, efface all distinctions, in fine would involve the utter extinction of thought.

Thus we shall reach the solution of Hume's problem, which, according to Höffding,1 "Kant failed to solve and is indeed insoluble." Hume argued that causation was only the more or less uniform succession of phenomena in space and time. But I shall prove that each word in this definition is in its essence a declaration of causality. The relations severally indicated by each of the words used-more, less, uniform, succession, phenomena, space, time, of, in, and—all rest primarily upon causal relations; and if the latter were eliminated, the words would lose all their meaning. Thus in the very act of denying causality, Hume is compelled to affirm it over and over again.

Section 3. The Law of Knowledge

My fundamental theorem carries with it a very 'History of Modern Philosophy, II. p. 58.

obvious corollary. If all thinking is essentially a relating of cause and effect, it manifestly follows that a cause cannot be known except through its effects, nor an effect apart from its cause.

Simple and self-evident as this corollary appears, it is of the utmost value for the unraveling of those entanglements in which speculation is perpetually involving itself. As we proceed in our exposition we shall see how many far-famed conceptions in philosophy are but half thoughts, mutilated and worthless because they are attempts to conceive a cause apart from its effects or an effect apart from its cause. Many a dispute has lasted for ages, because one party was stubbornly clinging to a half-thought and the other party to the complementary half, one emphasizing the cause and the other the effect. Take, for example, the most famous and persistent of all these controversies, that between the Eleatic and the Heracleitean school, the former claiming that Being was one, indivisible, immutable, while all appearance of change or motion was due to the deceptiveness of the senses; the latter maintaining that everything is in constant flux, forever transforming itself, its nature a consuming fire. In fine, one school sees the uniformity of cause or causal processes, the other sees only the effects or changes. And yet this dispute outlasted ancient philosophy. Plato was puzzled by it, as his Parmenides plainly shows. And in the Aristotlean theory of knowledge it is again apparent as "a contradiction of which the results run through the entire system of Aristotle."