CHAPTER XVIII.

THE TWO SYSTEMS OF NATURE AND OF PERSONALITY.

82. A Person's Knowledge of other Personal Beings. I. WHAT a person or spirit is, man finds in his knowledge of himself and in this only. Man finds the entire contents of the idea of personality in his consciousness of himself in his own mental operations.

It is a principle already established that in the entire contents of human knowledge there is no element which has not been first given in intuition, perceptive or rational. Every element of the idea of person or spirit is given in man's consciousness of himself as an individual persisting in identity and endowed with reason, free-will and rational sensibility. No other element can enter into his conception of a person or spirit, any more than a blind man can have a conception of color. This is all the truth there is in the common assertion that all that man knows is derived from experience. The elements of all objects of thought must have been known through presentative or rational intuition before they became objects of thought. And every essential element in my idea of a person or spirit I must first have found in my consciousness of myself in my own mental operations.

This sets aside much empty speculation as to the origin of the idea of the spirit in primeval man. Such, for example, are the fancies that man obtained his idea of spirit from seeing his own shadow, or from his own dreams, or from the wind which cannot be seen, or the stars which cannot be touched, or the sky which cannot be measured, or from the "great silence" of the forest. This kind of speculation has no support from observed facts. And why should we look so far for what is always obvious within? For in fact man has the spiritual always before him in his own consciousness of rational thought and sensibility and free determination. What, he asks, is swifter than thought? Every hour he is conscious of exercising energies which are invisible and of receiving pain and pleasure from invisible sources. And no outward thing could suggest the idea of spirit unless it had first arisen in the man's own conscious thinking, feeling and willing. It is often assumed that the idea of spirit is attained with difficulty and is late in making its appearance. It is not so. The idea appears in

the most savage tribes; it exists spontaneously without conscious reasoning. When it is once originated in man's self-consciousness he carries it beyond himself; he believes in invisible spirits superior to himself and attributes a soul or spirit even to inanimate things. Thus a savage thinks that a watch is alive, or that a letter which he is carrying knows what he does and tells of it. And when one dies the survivors supply him with food and weapons, believing that phantom food and weapons will follow the soul of the dead into the land of spirits. Tylor says: "When Democritus propounded the great problem of metaphysics, 'How do we perceive external things?' . . . he explained the fact of perception by declaring that things are always throwing off images (etowa) of themselves, which images, assimilating to themselves the surrounding air, enter a recipient soul and are thus perceived." . . . This is " This is "really the savage doctrine of object-souls, turned to a new purpose as a method of explaining the phenomena of thought."* Man's idea of spirit arises spontaneously in his own conscious mentality. What he slowly learns is that the things active around him do not always contain a conscious agent invisible like his own thoughts.

Fetichism exemplifies the same fact; for the fetichist believes that any material object may be a shrine for the divinity. And this is in fact a spontaneous and unconsciously intuitive turning of the mind in the direction of a fundamental reality; for fetichism is a blind animism, recognizing in nature a spiritual and invisible power. Berkeley cites Toricelli as likening matter to an enchanted vase of Circe serving as a receptacle of force, and declaring that power and impulse are such subtle abstracts and refined quintessences that they cannot be enclosed in any other vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids; he also cites Leibnitz as comparing active primitive power to souls or substantial form. To this day physical science does not profess to remove the mystery; it does not say what force is nor how it is related to matter; it only recognizes their observed concomitance. The most profound and satisfactory view is that which recognizes the absolute being as individuating its power in it, and in and through it progressively revealing itself in higher and higher forms.

Belief in spirit arises from man's knowledge of his own invisible energies, and is not of difficult attainment and late development; it appears to be spontaneous, constitutional, universal, and so tenacious as to be scarcely ever eradicated. It is worthy of note that when from any cause religious unbelief prevails among the learned, the belief in

† Berkeley: Concerning Motion; Works. Vol. II., p. 86.

spirits often breaks out in gross superstition and strange fanaticism among the people; as witness now the pilgrimages to Lourdes and elsewhere in France, and the belief in spirit-rappings.

II. A man has knowledge of personal beings other than himself. 1. The objection that man in his self-consciousness is shut up within his own subjectivity and unable to know other beings as personal, involves agnosticism. It is, however, a common objection, urged by persons who are not agnostics. For example, Prof. Newcomb says: "Should we see in visible masses of matter the same kind of motion which we know must take place among the molecules of matter as they arrange themselves into the complex attitudes necessary to form the leaf of a plant, we should at once conclude that they were under the direction of a living being who was superintending the execution of these arrangements. But our knowledge of will as agent is so absolutely limited to the study of our own wills that we cannot pronounce any generalization respecting it." If a man has knowledge

an

of personality in himself, he of course can recognize the characteristics of personality when they appear in another. The objection, therefore, must assume that man has no knowledge of himself as a person. necessarily issues in the universal skepticism of Hume.

It

2. The philosophy of Kant gives a basis for knowledge of personal beings so far as it allows knowledge of anything. Kant's intuition of sense is not intuition in its proper significance. Like Hume's, it is a mere receptivity of impressions. But he insists that the mind is also something more than that, and is so constituted as to give further knowledge. The impressions of sense cannot be grasped in the unity of intuition except as the mind gives the forms of time and space, and thus makes it possible to unite them. The mind also proceeds from individuals to generals. Knowledge is expressed in general propositions; and the mere reception of impressions cannot give such knowledge. Therefore again in order to knowledge, elements must be supplied from the mind itself; these are the categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality. We cannot stop with disconnected and unrelated impressions. We do not know merely disconnected impressions, but we know them also as defined in time and space, and also existing as substance and quality, cause and effect, in unity, plurality, totality and other categories. Knowledge implies also an element of necessity or universality, as in the axioms of mathematics and the judgments of causality and identity. Thus it contains elements which are not impressions of sense and cannot be resolved into those impressions. And thus Hume's theory of knowledge is refuted as inadequate. Consequently Hume's inference that knowledge is limited within the subjectivity of the subject of the sensations is no more valid;

Se Movete kdy of knowledge is demonstrated in the sense in wood Acto los De phrase, namely, the equal validity of the facts

x 7" do 20 myself. It follows that my knowledge of an

aamigosoa beited within my, on subjectivity, but is

is no argument against the reality of his knowledge of personal beings; for just so scientists sometimes mistake the action of one natural object for that of another. The savage does not mistake his fellow-men for brutes or stones. But on account of his limited knowledge the horizon which divides himself and his tribesmen from the supernatural is very near; and he thinks he sees the supernatural in what he afterwards discovers to belong to nature only. The horizon widens and widens till in his higher development he comes to know the one Supreme God. But this does not prove that the spiritual and supernatural are unreal. It reveals the fact that, in every stage of his development, man finds the supernatural and spiritual in himself, and expects to find the same in other beings; and, however high he rises in development, he always finds the supernatural and spiritual, not only with him in his fellow-men, but beyond and above him in a God.

6. It is objected that man's conception of God and of all supernatural and spiritual beings is anthropomorphic and therefore false. This, however, is only a pictorial way of representing to the imagination the objection already considered in its abstract form, that all knowledge is unreal, because relative to our faculties; or, knowledge is impossible because there is a mind that knows. If any being is endowed with intelligence and rationality, intelligence and rationality in every being must be essentially the same; otherwise the so-called intelligence in one, being contradictory to the intelligence of another, would not be real knowledge; and the so-called rationality, being contradictory to another rationality, would be irrational. If, then, man is endowed with reason, all knowledge which is in accordance with reason is in accordance with the reason of man; and in this sense all real knowledge must be anthropomorphic, for if it were not it would be contrary to reason. There is as much anthropomorphism in physical science as there is in theology. Prof. Fiske admits that belief in spirit is scarcely more anthropomorphic than belief in power.* The affirmation that the sun attracts the earth is as really anthropomorphic as the affirmation that "nature abhors a vacuum." Since the principles and laws of science discovered by the human mind are found to be true of stars in the remotest space within the range of the telescope, and in the remotest discoverable distances of past time, and in the utmost sphere of microscopic vision, it is reasonable to conclude that man's reason and intelligence accord with the reason and intelligence which are universal and eternal.

* Cosmic Philosophy. Vol. II., pp. 449, 450.