The Unity of Being
Part I Section 3
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Section 3
Present Controversies on the Issues of Monism
1. The Persistence of Monism. The notable place of the monistic principle in philosophic thought is still illustrated in contemporary conditions. The most impressive realistic metaphysician of today is a thorough going monist —Professor Alexander. The thesis of monism is represented even in the realistic pluralism of the Orthodox Scholastics, from the time of Aquinas to the present. God is coextensive with being, and nothing could be if it were not present within the compass of the divine knowledge and life-giving power. Green, Royce, Bradley, Bosanquet, even Bergson, and such a careful student as Mackenzie in England or as Creighton in America, — these and many other names recall the vitality of the conception of Unity in terms of spirit and value as the foundation of a reasonable metaphysical view.
2. Pluralistic Objections. But the pluralistic protest is also vigorously alive, indeed with a vitality never shown before. The attempt of monism, says Mr. Russell, has broken down, and we have left only the piecemeal world of everyday experience. But the answer of the monist is that those competent to judge have not yet, with any decisive unanimity, been able to detect the failure of monism; that to be left with the piecemeal world that [25] is said to be given us is to be left with sensation and the special sciences perhaps, but not with that interpreted experience which philosophy set out at the beginning to achieve, and still in notable instances does achieve; and finally that the position of pluralism as such is still as much as ever infected with the inconsistency and irrationality which Parmenides and the vast majority of philosophic geniuses since Parmenides have detected in it, and that nothing in “modern logic” or anything else obviates but only at most ignores or dogmatically denies, these difficulties or contradictions.
3. The Value of Monism. As for the alleged refutations of Monism, they all proceed by prejudging the root-point. It is said first of all that it is no advantage to know that all things have being. For the nature of things remains unaltered by this fact. The bad things remain bad, the good things become no better. This contention is found in Professors Perry and Spaulding, and in pragmatists such as Schiller. It seems to us open to the following objections. (1) We cannot tell what difference Ultimate Being makes to the things that have being until we discover some clue to the nature of that Being. For the ultimate destiny of any individual obviously depends upon the nature of the One upon which it utterly depends. Now all monists, even Parmenides, have provided at least something of a clue of this sort. And even if the One proved to be a power not disposed to pre- [26] serve finite individuals, it has almost always appeared as of such a nature that we could regard our genuine interests, the real values of our life, as preserved in its eternal self-existence. At least it has appeared so to the philosopher in question himself.1 And, to repeat, the existence of a unitary Being is of a value which cannot be determined until we know the nature of this Being; but the pluralist must not simply assume that from the knowledge of its existence no inference as to its nature can take place. The entire history of philosophy indicates that it is only mind or spirit that unifies; and that history also provides, as we shall urge later, strong evidence for the conception of the unifying principle as not simply mind as bare thought or awareness (no such entity may exist) but as that identification of self with another in terms of value, which is suggested by such terms as sympathy, love, fellowship, or any term signifying a unity in respect of purpose and valuation.2 (2) In the second place, if Monism is true, whether or not it seems to offer any advantage that it should be [27] true, still if we are interested in the truth then such a comprehensive generalization, if it can be rationally supported, cannot be rejected as of no concern.
After all we want to know, not simply to view with favor or disfavor.
4. Does Monism Contradict Diversity? A second objection to monism is that it makes the variety of experienced things inconceivable. The answer to this is simply that to say all things share in one Life, is not at all to say all things are simply one. Why should not, for instance, all things be represented in the one Mirror or registering Ground in terms of their value to One all-valuing person? If the essence of ourselves is our self-realization or self-value, may it not be, indeed (we shall argue) must it not be, that the qualities which things have in and to our experience are to be viewed in terms of the contribution such things are capable of waking to our value — experience, or “self-enjoyment” as Alexander calls it? In other words things have quality or nature to us by being valuable to us.3 This does not imply subjectivism. My friend is to me, any man indeed, is to me, what I can by some degree (however partial and grudging) of sympathetic “putting of myself in his place,” make real to myself in terms of my imagined self-realization. To put the matter more [28] clearly, knowledge may be that process of taking another’s good or evil as so to oneself which is called love.
If so, then all qualities are nothing for knowledge except as kinds and degrees of good (and evil). Purpose, value, love, are the ultimate categories.
Now, if we interpret Monism to mean such a dependence of all that is upon the all-valuing love of an ultimate Being, can it be said that the existence of a variety of objects of such love is contradictory of the dependence of these objects upon the ultimate Valuation? Now it seems clear enough that the existence of a Perfect Love is not in conflict with the existence of objects of that love. Plato’s quaint statement4 of the sublime thought that God is by nature the very opposite of envious, but rather glad to endow finite beings with life and power similar in kind at least to his own, seems a reasonable solution of the problem of the existence of a many as well as a One, if we are able to view that One as divinely good, using the word goodness in a significant sense, to denote a mode of being and an attitude known in human life by that term. And finally it seems no less consistent to hold. that such a Principle of Good would not endow its creatures with a being apart from itself, but rather would wish to hold them within itself as in being dependent upon itself in order to be able to control their destiny to their own highest interest. Such control is only conceivable if the very meaning of the [29] existence of the creatures at any time involves as its inseparable aspect the sustaining Will of God.
Only if an act of that Will is an essential part of the mere being of a thing can it be meaningful to say that the latter is wholly under the control of the former.
5. God and Human Freedom. On the other hand there is only one good which can be imported to his creatures even by God. And that good is the possession of something of his own nature. This nature is of a freely or spontaneously exercised benevolence, involving in its conception the aspect of self-initiation or self-determination. Hence the One, although all-powerful must not determine each act of the creature. Have we here a contradiction between omnipotence and other-freedom? The only and a forceful answer lies in the perception that an omnipotence incapable of providing for itself the power of watching over the development of genuine and hence in some degree self-active individuals is a shorn and assuredly a contradictory all-powerfulness. While, on the contrary, a voluntary self-limitation of the Perfect Control over finite beings to some extent in order that those beings may not be entirely extinguished (since their identity as separate beings depends upon their reality as agents) as distinct entities, — such a self-limitation seems no genuine contradiction but rather a reasonable exercise of infinitely good Omnipotence. To Use a phrase employed earlier, [30] omnipotence is preserved in the fact that every finite act must carry with it the Divine Act, so that the extent to which the latter is thus influenced, and so the character of the finite act, never escapes the potential control of the Ultimate Act, The latter determines how far it shall allow itself to be born in a given direction, the only necessity being that it shall allow some finitely originated deflection if it desires to continue the finite agent in being at all.
But, finally, it might be asked, how can this situation of an insight capable of exercising control beyond any limit, and therefore exhaustively and instantaneously penetrative of the finite individual, be conceived — together with the inclusion of the finite in the Infinite as having its very being only there? How can the finite deflect the Infinite, when the act of the former is only real as decreed by the sustaining act of the latter. This sustaining act cannot come afterwards, as a ratification of the act sustained. Both must be simultaneous. How then can the self-determination of the relative being be a cause of the direction in which the absolute Being is “carried?” Must not cause precede effect? Now certainly the relation here must not be conceived as an ordinary cause-effect relation. The One is born along by the finite act in a relation which we cannot imagine, but which after all is not contradictory. For we simply maintain that the Self-[31] Determined One sustains the finite within its own life, as an element in that life and yet allows that element to exercise some control over its own nature. If such a relation could be imagined by finite beings, then finite beings would possess substantial equality of comprehension with the Infinite.5 Since we cannot experience absolute power as our own, we cannot picture concretely the nature of its operations. Nonetheless we can conceive in outline an utter dependence which allows the exercise of freedom. For in human relations, it is an empirical fact that our sense of reality is, in a genuine degree, a function of our knowledge of significance or value to others. The belief that all other beings are utterly indifferent toward us is — if it were realizable at all — identical with the belief that we are as nothing.6 Our reality as human being is, in part, so far as we are concerned, our value to other beings. Carry this principle to an ideal limit and we have the relation we are seeking. If we depend in part, as creatures conscious of our worth, upon the sympathy of others, may it not be that there is an Ultimate Valuation upon which our existence as possessors of value, is dependent? And if this Valuation is interpreted upon the social analogy of interest or love, it is also clear that such a Valuation — although that upon which the finite valued individuals [32] depend — must endow the latter with some circle of free-play.
Put once more, carry friendship to perfection and you have a case of a reality which is all that it is to another reality — and is wholly represented in terms of the consciousness of that other. Moreover, if the consciousness of being the object of friendship enters into and forms a part of the consciousness of our being as valuable, then conceivably the abiding sense of reality and value which seems in a measure independent of human relationships, may actually be a consciousness of value in terms of the ideal friendship we have suggested, which is constantly in relation to us, and for which we are, and at bottom feel ourselves to be, permanently significant. Finally such a friendship would no more deprive us of all independence than any other, for here would be a contradiction — a friendship which took away all power and individual reality or initiative from its object.7 For aside from a self-active or spontaneous agent we can find no sufficient definition of individuality. And certainly all that we mean by a social relation is destroyed if one party and that relation is to contribute all the activity or choice.
We claim, therefore that an all-powerful Being is con-[33]sistent with a plurality of beings, if the relationships involved be interpreted in terms of spiritual concepts — those concerned with the good as it is revealed in the profoundest human experiences of fellowship and interest in the nobler or social sense. And we find no remaining view which is possible for a moment if this possibility be rejected..
6. Absolutism. A passage from Mr. Bradley (Essays, p. 10, note 1.) is in point here: “There is no higher form of unity (than love), I can agree. But we do not know love as the complete union of individuals, such that we can predicate of it the entirety of what belongs to them. And, if we extend the sense of love and make it higher than what we experience, I do not see myself that we are sure of preserving that amount of self-existence which seems necessary for love.”
Here is the issue we are ultimately concerned with, stated with Mr. Bradley’s admirable clarity and directness. Can the unity of love be such that the entire being of one person so related should be included in the love of which it is the object. Mr. Bradley declares that we experience no such inter-penetration in human life; and that if we postulate a higher form of the same principle we must ask whether we can be sure that it must not, in order to supply the unity desired, abolish distinctions of individuality altogether.
[34] Now we certainly experience no human relation in which there is a complete inclusion of one person in the experience of another. If, however, the idea of friendship or love be carried to its ideal perfection, we certainly have the conception of a consciousness which should wholly comprehend its object in all its detail. Whatever the object of such a friendship might be, that it would certainly be to the friend. On the other hand it seems not only not necessary but unwarranted and even inconsistent with the hypothesis, to suppose that such a relation would destroy its object as such. Complete understanding and sympathy are precisely what we instinctively feel would contribute to our reality and not detract from it. In short, perfect love might not constitute the very being of its object, but it must certainly both reflect every aspect of its object in terms of the difference that aspect makes to it as exhaustively and with all understanding interested in the object, and on the other hand, it must respect the individuality of the latter. Perfect love implies both aspects, and there seems no inconsistency between them.
The question then appears primarily as to the possibility of supposing that such a comprehending Interest could stand in an absolutely essential and constitutive relation to its object. In a previous phrase, we observed that whatever the object of a perfect interest may [35] be, that the object must be to the interest. Nowhere we speak as if the object, on the one hand simply is something, and on the other is that something to the mind interested in it. The being of the object, and its being for the interested other appear as two, although the second being exactly reproduces the first.8 Can the relation justifiably be regarded as more intimate. We reply here merely in brief:—
(1) If we consider ourselves, we find that the question as to what exactly our reality is raises a puzzle. None of us knows completely. If we say we are what we are to ourselves, what we take ourselves to be, there are a host of criticisms to be advanced against such an answer. We feel we are more than we know or experience of ourselves. Some standard other than our being-for-self seems required.
(2) Considering ourselves fundamentally in terms of value, we perceive that after all our worth cannot be measured except in reference to an ideal standard of personal worth. Such a standard cannot successfully be conceived as impersonal; [36] or, in the end as other than a perfect personality, or an absolutely unselfish and all-comprehending interest.
Again, to be of worth is to be of worth to someone, and mere worth to oneself is insufficient to account for the reference to another involved. Our experience shows us that merely private value is in principle the denial of value. On the other hand we know that the ultimate dignity of the human person is not exhaustively described in terms of human relations. Robinson Crusoe may still retain in his solitude the sense of significance and even of duty. Once more we are led to infer a One to whom we are of significance at all times and in all cases, as opposed to the fluctuating and uncertain character of human associations.
(3) The conception of perfect Interest itself implies the dependence of the object of that interest upon the interest itself. For in no other way can the desire to assist which attends such a relation of love, reach the capability of expressing itself proportionate to the perfection of the Interest in question. Dependence of one being upon another is conceivable solely as an identity of being, so that a change of state in the one has, as its logically inevitable aspect, a change in the other; so that what one is to the other is the very essence of its reality, the relation of being to standing as fundamental to being as a mere an sich affair. For God to value us in a certain manner and for us to feel ourselves as possessed [37] of a certain value, become aspects of the same indivisible or uncompounded though differentiatable reality. Only if this is so can the love of God be capable of controlling our being, as well as creating it.
(4) Thus the idea of love, carried to its implied perfection, appears to imply the identity of being in One Foundational Reality which monism asserts, and to imply it in such a fashion as to involve no inconsistency between the type of unity and the type of plurality it contends for.
In this apparently sentimental view of ultimate facts, we seem to find the only possibility of consistency which all the explorations of human thought have discovered.
(5) In the experiences most properly called religious, there is in actual fact a sense of an all-embracing Interest upon which we do depend, and precisely that sense is the ground of all the specifically religious emotions and ideas. The joy, the humility, the confidence and trust, the gratitude, the all-epitomizing fact of prayer, — all are oriented toward just such a conception as is in question. And finite individuality is not (by most persons) felt to be removed or even threatened, but rather enhanced, by such an experience.
(6) We conclude therefore that a just comprehension of genuinely religious concepts supplies the sole possible basis for a consistent and all inclusive synthesis of ex-[38] perience, and that the difficulties of philosophy proceed among other causes from a greater or less degree of intellectual pride or of insufficient experiential acquaintance with those spiritual and religious factors which, whether detected there or not, stand at the center of life, and endow it with whatever of reality of every kind it may have.
If the universe be exclusively spiritual in the end, then it is quite to be supposed that unspiritualized, materialistic, neutral, or abstractly intellectual conceptions can never succeed in squaring themselves with it, or in giving a really plausible account of it.
(7) Is Monism Unempirical? Another complaint brought against the monist, — i.e., by James in The Pluralistic Universe is that experience does not give us unity, but ratter a higgledy piggledy variety. The terse answer here seems also a fair one — experience may give us variety, but only a variety in terms of the common element of experience. This simple, perfectly indubitable and unfabricated unity of actual awareness is precisely the aspect or element the monist is seeking to bring into clearer light. He is as empirical as the next man, with even a modest addition or two. What we know as most certain is precisely knowledge itself — which is a registering of a number of factors within a single unity of self-recording significance. We know that our awareness has its objects — but we [39] do not know that these objects are not created out of the very principle or life of awareness or mind itself. Let it be granted to the realists that an act of awareness cannot have only itself as object — and therefore, that in any such act or state there is something not that act or state, this implies necessarily a plurality, but the plurality may turn out to be one of a number of beings possessed, not simply of bare awareness (there not necessarily being any such thing) but of the concrete life in terms of feeling and valuation which every awareness involves. We therefore conclude that though plurality is given, a plurality of mind and not-mind is not indubitably given, but seems rather a contradiction of the fact from which we start, namely that all that we experience must inscribe itself as fact for us in terms of the self-significance of that experience from which we start and which gives rise, of its own voice, in its own terms and for its own purposes, to all the problems of philosophy. The indubitable data are not awareness or mind and things known, as two independent factors, but the one reality of elements-in-knowledge, forming a whole permeated throughout by a common principle of self-registering awareness.9
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(8) How Does Mind Unify? One or two further objections to monism as such in the current literature deserve consideration. There is the statement of Professor Perry, that the unifying activity of mind is something of which no account has ever been given, something ineffable which refuses to run the gauntlet of analysis, and is really accepted only on pain of the abandonment of logic for mere emotion and poetry. Now if mind be viewed as concerned wholly with value, and value as constituting the essence of things, then — as we have in some aspects already argued — it is not utterly impossible to furnish an account of the manner in which mind serves as the Unifier of things. For value is, by Professor Perry himself as well as by the great majority of thinkers, pluralists as well as monists, regarded as essentially relative to mind. Value is inherently value to an interested consciousness. Many values may be realized in one consciousness, and become thus in this sense embraced within it. By the unity of all in the One we mean the universality of the relation of significance to the One. And that this unity is not merely external to the things, but of the essence of their reality as significant we have already endeavored to show as a view not incapable of giving an account of itself.
Even mind as knowing is obviously an agency of unification in that it indubitably brings its objects within the scope of a single knowledge or state of awareness. But [41] the point of Professor Perry’s remark is the belief that this inclusion in one knowledge is purely external to the being of the objects. From the standpoint of value, however, it appears far less plausible that to be of value should contribute nothing to what is valued. If the realities in question be human individuals they as a fact cannot consider themselves in exactly the same light independently of what they take to be their significance to others. The relation here is internal, if anything is anything.
And if all reality falls within the sphere of personality then values are simply experiences of individuals with the proviso only — on our view — that the experiences are essentially shared. All the objects to be unified thus fall into the unity we have described.10
This defense against Professor Perry’s criticism depends obviously for its force upon the possibility of justifying and carrying out the program of the identification of quality and value, knowledge and valuation — depends thus upon the entire structure of our argument. It accordingly can not be further substantiated here. We are justified only in pointing out that the idea of unity as relative to the power of mind, is — so far from something of which we offer no analysis — precisely a conception which it is proposed to subject to a great variety of analyses, which indeed provide the sole significance of the Theory of Valuational Monism as an explanatory hypothesis.
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9. Alleged Abstractness of The Ultimate Universals. A common charge against Monism is that Being as the most general of all universals is also the most empty and void of content. Thus, in any case of higher and lower generality we find the higher to be the more abstract. “Blue” is more concrete, carries more significant content than “color.” And color is certainly more illuminating than quality, or finally than “entity.” Again “animal” tells us less than “dog,” and “thing” than either. And yet the matter is not so simple or clear as it seems. For to be blue is not really more than to be colored. We do not know what color is unless we know the whole color scale. The concept of color gets its meaning from a richer experience than the concept of blue, and it contains that experience implicitly. In order to be blue, a thing must so far reject green and red, but to possess color as such would be to possess all colors in such a way that the possession of one offers no bar to the possession of another.
Higher Universals, are clearly those which can manifest themselves in a variety of lower without losing their identity. Since they can thus be wrung into any shape, as it were, and still remain themselves, it is hence inferred that they are essentially or relatively shapeless and formless — indeterminate, in a word.
Now all depends on the meaning of form or determination. In the sense in which “square” is the form of a box, [43] “shape” is something without the form squareness. For what is square is not also in the same sense round. While if shape is square it is quite equally and without conflict round. Hence the “squareness of shape” becomes absurd.
Let us consider, however, the relation of such universals as “Color” or “shape” to the universal “experience.” If idealism is in any sense true (and in some sense our monism is idealistic) then experience is a reality which actually possesses colors and shapes and all other qualities, and is their sustaining life or creative principle. If, in the end, to be is to be experienced, to be a phase in the intercourse of minds, then “mind” or “experience” are universals of equal generality and concreteness. Mind does not possess either one color or another — but all colors. Hence it is richer in content than the apparently concrete “blue” or “green.”
If, finally, experience is essentially a realization of values, capable of no other operation, then value becomes a quality which accounts for all qualities. And in any case, value is not obviously less concrete than color, though on our view, it is far more general.
Our proposition is that the abstractness of general concepts is a matter of preponderance, in many of them, of an implicit or unanalyzed element of meaning by which their employment is guided, but which is not ordinarily brought into explicit apprehension. “Quality” is used, [44] in a discussion, with perfect propriety; but if we ask the user of this term what exactly he means by it, he will hesitate — and probably then use a synonym equally mysterious, such as character or nature. But if we are right in thinking that “to have quality” means solely to be something to mind, to fulfill some interest or stand as object to some valuation, then quality is really an implicitly concrete conception. Taken merely pragmatically, without regard to its ultimate meaning it is abstract, precisely because in so using it we are (to speak no paradox) adopting a subjective point of view, abstracting from what the quality of the thing is ultimately and considering only what we can do with it, by way of relating it to certain purposes, practical or theoretical. The abstractness comes from the omission of other more objective or disinterested valuations. “Red is a quality of the rose” is a thought which may primarily mean: to recognize a rose I must relate it to certain other objects as identical in respect to color. Or, in a philosophical argument, it means, perhaps: I can prove that without redness, rose is a mere abstraction, not a physical reality. In neither case may we be concerned to ask what we really say about a thing when we ascribe it a quality. What we actually do is to relate it to our interests, but it is not necessary to note this explicitly in order for the purpose in hand to get itself accomplished. In knowing that the rose is [45] red, I prepare myself to recognize that flower, to expect a pleasant odor, etc., More is implied, but this more is little attended to and far from adequately grasped. Hence the abstractness of the ordinary understanding of universals. It is all a matter of the predominant purpose in hand. “Person” as a legal concept is a highly abstract term, but personality in the end is the richest and most concrete of all ideas. “To be,” similarly is abstract as applied by the farmer who exclaimed of the giraffe at the zoo: “But there ain’t no such animal!” The difference between the plain man and the philosopher in such a matter is (or, we contend, ought to be) that the former is interested in the being of things more primarily than the latter in terms of the consequences in practical sensuous experience, actual or imagined, to himself. If giraffes are not ordinary features of the experience of himself and others, not a part of his everyday “world,” he suspects them of unreality. In short the real is what makes a difference in terms of the interests we have in hand. This is the aspect we ordinarily utilize in employing the word “is.” Yet, unless we are to frankly accept pragmatism, and admit that truth is the success of the purposes11 for which concepts are employed, and that alone, we must admit that “to be” is not adequately defined in terms of the practical and sensuous experience of man. The reality of things is more than their relation to us, as possible contents of our finite [46] experience. Yet this more is very little our usual concern, and if challenged to give its meaning we can see no ready answer.
But a meaning there must be, and to call it abstract is beside the point. When the largely undisinterested attitude of practical living, or of thought in a partial aspect (as in science where to be is still primarily to be humanly and sensuously perceivable)12 is transcended and the curiosity which is also reverence and love, in the philosophical, or the religious attitude, the genuine abstractness of instrumental qualifications should be transcended in a direct study of our fundamental principles of thought and life, in their full significance (i.e., relative not merely to our more or less external and sensuous interests and activities, but to our capacity for self-absorption in the truth, for our enjoyment of reality for its own sake — as one appreciates a friend or a sublime ideal. From this point of view the abstractness of “being” may be seen as but our own self-absorption and narrowness; since we may find that all that is by virtue of that fact as its essential meaning stands included in one all-comprehending scheme which is of the highest intrinsic worth and excellence, and eventually or as a whole itself is by virtue of the Principle of Divine Self-existence or Self- enjoyment) which, being immanent in us as in all else, is [47] the ultimate reference of the phrase, “there is.”13
In short, as Bosanquet says, “every abstract tends to return to its concrete,” is ultimately dependent upon an implicit element of meaning which is rooted in the last ground of things, even though before it reaches this ground it vanishes from our ordinary consciousness as self-understood. It is precisely the business of philosophy (as both Bergson and Mr. Bradley are perhaps equally concerned to point out) to detect this plunge or reference of meanings to a fully concrete reality, and to follow them there so far as it can.
On the other hand, arguments have been advanced to show that even if Being includes all things, it is a logical impossibility that it should have any concrete identifiable nature. Professor Spaulding’s discussion of this issue (The New Rationalism, pp. 354-356) contains a number of errors.
He thinks that the Concrete Universal of Monism must be a kind of which everything else is an instance, as everything is an instance of the genus “thing.” Then, if it is to be given any positive quality or character, this can only be done by providing it with the character of one of its subspecies. But this is impossible with a summum [48] genus.
Thus “entity” loses its generality if defined as “spiritua1 entity” — since the latter is obviously a sub-class of entities. The principle which conflicts with the Monistic position; on the basis of the “Old Logic” is the following: “a characteristic which differentiates one species of a genus from another species cannot also be a characteristic of that genus.”
Spaulding’s employment of this principle against monism depends upon the assumption that any quality ascribed to the One will be one which some of the many possess but others are wholly without. As a fact, the Monist is concerned with a quality which is not in its presence or absence the differentia of any species (save that of the One itself) but only in the degree and manner of its presence. It is in no sub-species fully realized, and in none is it wholly lacking. Thus if we take Life as the Ultimate Category, on the Monistic View all is alive, but there is only one Perfect Life — i.e., one all aspects of which depend intimately upon its own power. The various species of lives or living beings are none of them differentiated by some characteristic which belongs to the One, but by the fullness of their realization or possession of the One Life. The differentia are in terms of degrees. We conceive the nature of the One not by attaching to it any such finite degree, but by drawing the immanent Standard of degree we are throughout employing, from the region of implicit and [49] instrumental apprehension to that of conscious enjoyment or explicit knowledge. In knowing any species we are already knowing it through the Highest Nature.
But, in the second place, Spaulding’s discussion assumes that the One must include the many as a class includes all its members. “The genus includes in its connotation only that which is common to the several species (the Monist admits that spirituality is common to everything in its degree) while the species are differentiated from each other by characteristics which the genus cannot have in its function of including them, and of denoting all the individuals that the species denotes.”
We have here an almost pathetic irrelevance of argument. One can only say that no one ever imagined that the terms God, or The Supreme Being, or the Absolute Mind, have been used to denote all individuals as instances of the class or kind of Divinity, or of Absoluteness. The One is not a class of members, but a Reality with contents or included elements. And the character of that Reality is not known through a selection of one of its elements as typifying it, but is known directly through that immediate approach indicated by the words of Tolstoy:
“While there is life, there is enjoyment of the self-consciousness of the Deity.” (War and Peace) On the other hand the contents of the One Life are characterized in terms of the relative richness with which they reproduce their [50] Prototype and author.
Finally the Ultimate or Perfect Being includes the finite beings, not as instances of the class Perfection or Ultimateness, as “animal” includes dog and horse, but includes them by owning them, by their entering into Its Life and being of value there.
Such arguments as Professor Spaulding’s thus seem to have no just bearing at all upon the problem. The same may be said of the view that the absolute cannot be characterized because all form is limitation or — as Spinoza said — negation. But if the form of the One is essentially a self-sustained quality of life, a process essentially spontaneous and free, it is consistent with infinitude in any sense not itself a pure negation. “Independence” is equivalent to self-mastery or it becomes negative and empty. Nor is there any reason why the Ultimate Being should be such a negation or an emptiness, inasmuch as positive Perfection and Infinity are conceivable, and as we hope to show, in the end demonstrable.
Finally, we may point out that if we endeavor to discover conceptions revealing the nature of life, experience, and being, in their ultimate essence, this is not as if we chose one among many merely disparate concepts — equating the whole of mind to a part. It is to beg the question to suppose that concepts do not involve in greater or less degrees the One Principle which gives meaning to all, and which is present in every concept as an implicit meaning, [51] but in some with a far higher degree of explicitness.
In short we are always aware of the Meaning of meanings, but not always to the fullest advantage. No concept, however explicit its meaning, can perhaps give us explicitly the full riches of the Ultimate Meaning, indeed this is impossible to the finite mind. Yet, if we use a concept like mind, or interest, or love, not as one idea among others simply, but as one with manifest intrinsic relations to others (as interest and value are obviously related) by analyzing these relations we derive the maximum amount of inter-connection and mutual illumination between ideas, we behold them as a living system, a functioning whole, and we make thus real to ourselves in the highest degree attainable by man, the principle which animates the whole and forms the law of the system. Without an at least unselfconscious or intuitive dependence upon that principle we could not think at all; the degree of explicit apprehension of it we attain depends upon the possibility of developing a concept in which the remaining conceptions find their own explicit meanings contained with as much clearness as possible. We believe that experience on its higher religious and spiritual levels provides us with concepts which do in significant degree bring into explicitness the place of the lower ideas in the meaning-whole they intend. To say the One is an entity is true, but leaves all in nearly utter darkness. To say it is a Force brings out its inclusion of change and vaguely [52] suggests intention or Will.
To employ the word Power is more vividly suggestive in the same direction. If we go on to Life or Will, we understand how purpose and value gets into reality, but are in some doubt as to what Will is to strive against or — if there are many wills, how they are related to the One. Moreover Will does not explain the social aspect of values — the essential communicativeness and interpenetration of the self-realization of beings. Transcending Will we conceive of Love or Benevolent Interest; related to will or purpose as revealing the essential loyalty or trans-identification of purposes with respect to one another; related to pleasure or joy inasmuch as to love is to rejoice in the joy of another; related to sorrow inasmuch as to love is to sorrow in the sorrow of another, and even in the loss or lack of a greater joy in the life of another — or in the mere absence of improvement (love is insatiable by ought but perfection); related to the ideal good inasmuch as the latter is at any rate14 an altogether comprehending and benevolent love, a rejoicing in all joy and a sorrowing in all sorrow; related to nature as the Good Will which sustains life in an orderly fashion and fills its experience with an endless variety of values of all kinds, including those of vague glimpses of kindred beings whose life is mainly hid from us — as in flowers, or perhaps the inorganic systems.
[53] Or at any rate of some sort of spiritual well-being revealed in the flaming heavens of sunset or in the glowing sun or other heavenly bodies themselves, and in all colors; related to evil and tragedy in virtue of the earnestness and self-sacrifice inherent in love, at its best; related to the problems of unity and plurality, of knower and object in virtue of the principle it involves as of a complete reproduction (in a perfect realization of the principle) of the being of one in terms of the comprehending interest of another and the fact that such inclusion is what love desires and counts as its very being.
Such a principle is no mere abstraction — no “intellectualist” formula — but that living realization of Living Unity and Ground of Things which as we believe, man’s social and religious experience has gradually enabled him to attain.
10. The Self-Differentiation of Value. A final question may be how a single principle can generate differences which are real as such only in terms of that one identical principle itself.15
In conceiving this situation, we fall almost inevitably into a fallacy. The One differentiates itself — [54] but this is nothing to be conceived from without the One — in sheer externality to it.
We are once and for all within reality or the One Experience. To say “difference” is to think with and by means of the One’s self-differentiation. We cannot begin with the One as undifferentiated — for the One lives and is only as distinguishing aspects of its being. The Supreme, Interest is essentially and eternally creative of objects of its regard and there is no other way to conceive it on our view.16
But we are met by Professor Perry’s criticism that even if the good, say, be defined as the fulfillment of human nature, the latter then is defined in terms other than the good. But we employ no such definition of value in neutral or objective terms. For us all terms are fully grasped only as denoting value — the self-enjoying mind is the first and last principle of all its concepts. Every thing is good, but in varying degrees and manners. To determine the meaning of value we need not go outside value-concepts. If we did we should get no light upon the problem. The only way to know value is to enjoy it.17
[55] And the only ray to achieve the fullest possible understanding of value is to penetrate beneath the surface significance and utility of things to their ultimate worth in terms of the Standard Valuation; making this worth our own not by a supposedly neutral description of it, but by the most explicitly evaluational, i.e., the most fully self-conscious value-conceptions (all meanings for us are values) we can attain. Knowledge of value and consciousness are one, there is no need for the self to transcend its essential life of enjoyment to discover the nature of value in “other” or “objective” terms. And if this is so, we do not readily see the need for an extrinsic principle to differentiate values from each other. Differences of value depend upon being valued as different — and difference is itself a function of valuation. Love or sympathy relates itself to another, and it is essentially at least such a self-relation.
If a difference in value be put in neutral terms, these terms must be translated back again in order to allow for their comparison as values. If the difference between value and a certain kind of neutrally describable situation be merely that value happens to be the name of this purely objective complex, then “value” becomes but of verbal significance (or value) and life is worthless or not according as we choose to talk in detail or in conventional shorthand18 [56] (cf. Sections 12 and 13). On any other view of value only value itself can differentiate itself.
Finally, on a non-valuational view of reality, as we shall see, no barest hint can be offered. as to how two colors, (colors, not invisible quota or wave-lengths) for example can differ from each other, nor, again how space-magnitudes can be compared (Section 10), or, in many philosophies, how “being” is in its essential meaning, different from anything else. Aside from the idea of value, it is impossible to explain how “quality” can take a variety of forms. The new-realist entities we shall argue are really undifferentiated in the end, cannot have a variety of natures, because they are nothing with respect to any common standard. While Monists and Valuationalists are accused of deriving all differences from one Principle, the pluralists must derive them by a comparison of each thing with — nothing. Nothing must measure how the thing differs from nothing — where being is purely private or unmediated.19 If value-differences are ineffable and uninte1ligible, they at least are implied by the idea of value we employ; while the idea of logical simples or of any ultimate pluralism contradicts the very idea of comparison, because things are relative to no common standard of quality.
In contrast to [57] this, a Monism of the Good, implies a standard or universal Ideal of value, and a plurality of valued beings, the distinguishing of which as different in terms of value, is an indissoluble and inherent aspect of their being value. Love is the supreme “principle of individuation,” for it alone cares entirely for the unique as such, and not merely as a member of a class.
11. The Limits of Philosophy. We end here our discussion of current criticisms of the Monistic idea as such. Hereafter we shall be concerned primarily with the argument for that conception, rather than with an attempt to anticipate every counter-attack. The issues of philosophy can never be put under lock and key. Objections can always be found and every answer is open to its own self-suggested attacks The gain in consistency and reality achieved in the development of any system may be perceived and enjoyed; but it can also always meet with an all-inclusive rejection, upon the basis of some manner of formulating an objection which seems not specifically and finally to have been met. Philosophy is thus an eternal or never-ending quest. It sails, we may say, by a compass which can never be permanently “boxed,” for good or for ill, and upon seas which can never be exhaustively charted. Nonetheless may the voyager behold above the breaking storm, the Eternal Sunshine, and carry ever and enrich in his mind and spirit that home of conscious unity with the supreme Goodness and Wisdom which [58] alone, as he may believe, called him forth upon the adventurous and never-ending voyage of discovery.
Some such faith, at any rate, has from the beginning appealed to the philosophic minds to whom our philosophy is largely due, and appealed to them not only on the concrete and emotional side — ethical, religious, or aesthetic — but equally on the intellectual and rational: as the sole possible direction of escape from the contradictions inherent in the partial abstractions (taken as the full experienced or knowable truth) of the ordinary understanding, operating as it does within the unity of mind and its objects, (and of mind and mind), assumed as a constant and therefore not analyzed or grasped in its full meaning for both mind and objects, or for the universe. It is above all the direction of escape that may be detected, not the final haven or refuge, the movement away from propositions which taken together radically contradict and destroy one another and toward those which, while we may not be able to know that we have them perfectly adjusted to each other, yet are manifestly proclamations of meanings which in their main intent reinforce and assist one another, contributing to a resultant in which a real place is clearly provided for all the large aspects of truth with which experience and its analysis supplies us. It is upon this principle of relative truth (itself requiring a guarded or qualified formulation20) that we rest [59] our case, not upon a claim to complete and unexceptionable demonstration or utter and indubitable consistency.
The Individual variation, in some degree at least ineradicable, in the meanings of words — at least of those which, on our view, are sufficiently concrete to essentially comprehend and illuminate reality — is but one of the causes which render such a claim, even in the mouth of a Hegel, in principle idle and pretentious. And certainly another cause is the finiteness of the human mind, in whatever degree the individual formulator may possess that limitation.
In summary we may say that, learning from Plato once more, the philosopher must ask consideration ultimately not for the possibility that what he says, but that “something like” what he is able to say, may or must be the truth.21
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Endnotes
1. As certainly to Spinoza.
2. In regard to religious values all mystics (practically speaking) at least have found Monism in conformity with religion. Also it seems clear, did St. Paul (who however was a mystic) Anselm and in our day such leading students of religion as Mr. C.C.J. Webb (Problems in The Relations of God and Man, p. 159), or Professor Hocking (The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Ch. XIV, “The Need of an Absolute”). The matter will be further discussed in Section 12.
3. Positively or negatively, as good or evil.
4. The Timaeus.
5. Cf. Section 3 — “The Limits of Philosophy.”
6. This statement is capable of a vast deal and variety of support drawn from both literary and scientific psychology.
7. We assume here that individuality implies a degree of freedom (cf. Varisco: The Great Problems, p [[no page number legible]] An effort to justify this assumption will be found in Section II.
8. In so far as Mr. Bradley regards Reality as utterly “above” relations, in the sense of standing itself for instance in no relations, of course we can give no answer to his argument; except to accuse it of resting upon an unprovable because inconsistent or absurd assumption. Whatever the Absolute may do with its appearances, or they have to do with it, it must, one would say, be related to them.
9. Cf. Webb, loc. cit: “Thus our consciousness of self, the Cartesian bed-rock of certainty, when reflected upon, resolves itself into a consciousness of self, of not-self, and of the unity in which self and not-self are related to each other” (italics mine)
10. See Section 12.
11. In their given narrowness or selfishness, as the case may be.
12. Or, formulatable in terms of mathematics.
13. So that, in raising the question of the being of the One Perfect Being, we are really asking whether the principle of “reality” or “is,” which is the ultimate meaning of those words, is possessed of perfection, and is immanent in our minds as the standard and ground of all our meanings.
14. We admit that no concept is adequate to the One Good since no one capable of conceiving it adequately by any means, can exist among men. But some concepts carry us about as far as we can go — and vastly further than others.
15. Cf. in Section 2, the discussion of Being in Plato, an the Definition of Monism in Section 1.
16. The One Interest takes its objects as different in virtue of this very taking of them as different. Their uniqueness is their unique value in terms of the differentiation of the Perfect Interest which is an ultimate aspect of what we mean by that Interest. If it be said that the latter hence is complex we reply that since a self as a whole is in all its interests, the unity is preserved.
17. Classifying a happy experience under a universal — such as “happiness,” is not the essential aspect of understanding what its being of value to us means.
18. The worthlessness and the explicitness of detail being correlated!
19. To say the thing itself measures the difference repeats the problem — as to what, in comparison with other things, the thing is.
20. Cf. Section 4.
21. Cf. The next Section.