METAPHYSICS.[55]

"Mother Eddy" and her flock "in Science" derive a considerable part of their income from a glib use of the word "Metaphysics." But what the "Church Scientist" has omitted to learn about the real import of that word would make a volume even larger than Science and Health.

As unreservedly admitted in our present essay, there is no trouble about a spiritual derivation of the universe. In the declaratory, religious form, the New Testament is a sufficient example of this doctrine. In the philosophical form the names of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom resolved all things into the principle of "Mind," summarized the subject for the ancient world. The modern world has now given three hundred years to the same theme, and, however well or ill aware of the fact, has reached the same end, but wholly without the assistance of any pushing, dodging adventuress, with a little set of abstract ideas and much screaming of "Science."

Leaving lighter themes for the moment, let us venture on a brief survey of this ground.

There are just two possible ways of analyzing things. One way is to set the world with its particulars before the eye, look at it, and accept what we see. Then we may go to work on phenomena, dissecting and generalizing. This is the way of physics—a road that never leads to meta-physics. It is the common turnpike of material science—of "positivism." In it travel all such men, say, as Dr. Ernst HÆckel: also all such men as the late Parson John Jasper, the colored preacher of Virginia, who, seeing the sun move round the earth, settled the fact in that way.

The one other way of dissecting the universe is to examine the means through which things are presented to us, and thus to ascertain what effect the means may have in the production and nature of the things. This method of investigation has ultimated in what has been summed up as "Scientific Idealism."

Scientific idealism is the knowledge which every one may get even from his first lessons in optics, that things of matter—the objects of our five senses—are constituted such through the structure and action of these senses themselves. That is to say, material things—whatever we see or feel, hear, taste or smell—while existent and real—while practically what every one takes them to be—are made so through relativity. Or, as Kant put it, every "phenomenon"—meaning every object or fact of sensation—is a "re-presentation"; that is, some lot of effects on our sensuous nature, bound together into a unity of them, the unity thus formed becoming an object of awareness, a "percept."

Scientific idealism does not question the given duality of the cosmos, which appears to us as what we call "mind and matter." Here are we; out there, indubitably apart from us, are other things, involving another source. But scientific idealism has found that this source is itself quite other than the things we connect with it, and can properly be described in this connection only as source of impact. It has nothing to do with matter, in the common acceptation. It enters into matter, being the ultimate non-ego, the objective background, of every phenomenon. But, in all material things, this background is transformed by contact with subjective sense (in us or other organisms), and "matter" is really the fusion, the compound, the third term, of these two elemental principles.

This momentous truth, though mystically reached in the old tenet of India that "matter is illusion," and though touched understandingly by Carneades in Greece, was first clearly seen, in the manner of modern science, by the remarkably solid Englishman, Thomas Hobbes.

"Qualities called sensible" [said Hobbes] "are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth our organs diversely.... Because the image in vision, consisting of color and shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that the same color and shape are the very qualities themselves."

But, concluded Hobbes:

"The subject wherein color and image are inherent is not the object or thing seen.... There is nothing without us (really) which we call an image or color.... The said image or color is but an apparition unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some internal substance of the head.... As in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their inference is not the object, but the sentient."

When John Locke began his great "Essay" on The Human Understanding, and posited mind in its first estate as a passive nonentity—a "blank tablet"—he had no vital conception of scientific idealism. But, in the patient thinking of twenty years, such a man could not fail to come upon the law, though he saw it only in part, and did not work it out. This work was carried a great way beyond him, by the acute and learned Bishop Berkeley, who showed from practical science, especially through his investigation of "vision," that nothing in the universe has any actual being, apart from a universal element, that, wherever it may be posited, can alone be called Mind.

Since Berkeley, no philosophical thinker, perhaps, of any significance, anywhere in the world, has questioned the "ideality" of "material things." Even Reid, as the philosopher of "common sense," declared that

"No man can conceive any sensation to resemble any known quality of bodies. Nor can any man show, by any good argument, that all our sensations might not have been as they are, though no body, nor quality of body, had ever existed."

Hume's comprehension of Scientific idealism was complete to his day, and was completely stated. He said:

"'Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind difficult to explain."The idealism of recent "materialistic" philosophers, such as Herbert Spencer and the school of "Positivists," has been most carefully expressed by John Stuart Mill, in his statement that "Matter is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation."

"If" [said Mr. Mill] "I am asked whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter; and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this I do not."

For an easy, popular view of the principle of scientific idealism, perhaps nothing has been better said than by Thomas Carlyle, in his review of Novalis.

"To a transcendentalist [says Carlyle] matter has an existence, but only as a phenomenon. Were we not there, neither would it be there: it is a mere relation, or rather the result of a relation between our living souls and the great First Cause; and depends for its apparent qualities on our bodily and mental organs; having itself no intrinsic qualities; being, in the common sense of the word, nothing. The tree is green and hard, not of its own natural virtue, but simply because my eye and my hand are fashioned so as to discern such and such appearances under such and such conditions. Nay, as an idealist might say, even on the most popular grounds, must it not be so? Bring a sentient being with eyes a little different, fingers ten times harder than mine, and to him that thing which I call tree shall be yellow and soft, as truly as to me it is green and hard. Form the nervous structure in all points the reverse of mine, and this same tree shall not be combustible and heat-producing, but dissoluble and cold-producing; not high and convex, but deep and concave; shall simply have all properties exactly the reverse of those attributed to it. There is no tree there; but only a manifestation of power from something which is not I. The same is true of material nature at large, of the whole visible universe, with all its movements, figures, accidents and qualities."

Scientific idealism, as far as we have gone with it, has now become one of the "exact" sciences—as much so as physics. It has been simply the result of continuous and innumerable experiments in natural philosophy, for three centuries. There is no need of going into these physical particulars, after they have been put into the school-books of children and explained in popular lectures. One more quotation must suffice. Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his Biographical History of Philosophy, tells us that

"The radical error of those who believe that we perceive things as they are, consists in mistaking a metaphor for a fact, and believing that the mind is a mirror in which external objects are reflected. But, as Bacon finely says, 'The human understanding is like an unequal mirror to the rays of things, which, mixing its own nature with the nature of things, distorts and perverts them.' We attribute heat to fire, and color to the flower, heat and color being states of our consciousness, occasioned by the fire and the flower under certain conditions. Perception is nothing more than a state of the percipient, a state of consciousness.... Of every change in our sensation we are conscious, and in time we learn to give definite names and forms to the causes of these changes. But in the fact of consciousness there is nothing beyond consciousness. In our perceptions we are conscious only of the changes which have taken place within us.... All we can do is to identify certain external appearances with certain internal changes.... We conclude, therefore, that the world per se in nowise resembles the world as it appears to us. Perception is an Effect; and its truth is not the truth of resemblance, but of relation.... Light, color, sound, taste, are all states of Consciousness; what they are beyond consciousness ... we cannot know, we cannot imagine, because we can only conceive them as we know them. Light, with its myriad forms and colors—Sound, with its thousand-fold life—make Nature what Nature appears to us. But they do not exist, as such, apart from our consciousness; they are investitures with which we clothe the world. Nature, in her insentient solitude is an eternal Darkness—an eternal Silence."