theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	112	null
book	elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions as the breaking of eggs at the large	null
book	or the small end will span the whole scope of possible human warfare,—still even in this shrunken and enfeebled generation, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto, what eagerness there will be! Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate ’s scale.	null
book	And is not its instinct right? Do not we here grasp the race- differences in the making, and	null
book	catch the only glimpse it is allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose differentiating action the race -gaps form but the stagnant sum? What strange inversion of	null
book	scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate resultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever its bulk, is elementary, I hold that the study of its conditions (be these never so ‘proximate’ )	null
book	is the highest of topics for the social philosopher. If individual variations determine its ups and downs and hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor of the average! On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and communing with their kindred spirits,—in imagining as strongly as possible what differences their individualities brought about in this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and what whilom feasibilities they made impossible, —each one of us	null
book	may best fortif y and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own soul.	null
book	49	null
book	This is the lasting justification of hero -worship, and the pooh-poohing of it by ‘sociologists’	null
book	is the ever -lasting excuse for popular indifference to their general laws and averages. The	null
book	difference between an America rescued by a Washington or by a ‘Jenkins’ may, as Mr. Allen says, be ‘ little, ’ but it is, in the words of my carpenter friend, ‘ important. ’ Some organizing	null
book	genius must in the nature of things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte? What animal, domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?	null
book	The preferences of sentient creatures are what create the importance of topics. They are the	null
book	absolute and ultimate law -giver here. And I for my part cannot but consider the talk of the	null
book	contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is it to be,—that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.	null
book	49 M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de l'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris,	null
book	Alcan, 1895), is the best possible commentary on this text, —'invention' on the one hand, and 'imitation' on the	null
book	other, being for this author the two sole factors of social change.	null
book	113	null
book	On Some Hegelisms	null
book		null
book	Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882. We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and American philosophy.	null
book	Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Ge rmany, and	null
book	whose older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher walks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement of reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly indulgent. Hegel’s philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become quasi- official,	null
book	make ready to defend itself as well as to attack others. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful disciple that there is another point of view in philosophy that I fire this skirmisher’s shot,	null
book	which may, I hope, soon be followed by somebody else’ s heavier musketry.	null
book	The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of philosophizing in general.	null
book	To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set down as the mainspring of	null
book	philosophic activity. The atomic and mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of view of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity. Where the parts of a conceptio n seem thus to belong together by inward	null
book	kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.	null
book	Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law. The parts seem, as Hegel	null
book	has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us. Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest, which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous—are the adjectives by which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do the	null
book	materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic manipulation, but	null
book	underlying their worst disjointedness are three great continua in which for each of us reason’ s	null
book	ideal is actually reached. I mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of space. In these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself, and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is not lost.	null
book	Consider, for example, space. It is a unit. No force can in any way break, wound, or tear it. It	null
book	has no joints between which you can pass your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split, Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it. To make a hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive through space except what is itself spatial?	null
book	114	null
book	But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its parts contains an infinite	null
book	variety, and the unity and the variety do not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each par t is one again, but only one	null
book	fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the space between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls. But the union and the division are not secundum idem : it divides them by keeping them out of the space between, it unites	null
book	them by keeping them out of the space beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency. Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust another from its po sition; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes in the framing, and cannot stay	null
book	to vex the mind.	null
book	50 Beyond the parts we see or think at any given time extend further parts;	null
book	but the beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law; so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space’ s womb.	null
book	Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the ego and of time. But if for simplicity’ s sake we ignore	null
book	them, we may truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.	null
book	51 Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the	null
book	margin of foreignness, be exorcised from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill? Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.	null
book	But the moment we turn to the material qualities of being, we find the continuity ruptured on	null
book	every side. A fearful jolting begins. Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its	null
book	mechanical bare poles, —atoms and their motions,—the discontinuity is bad enough. The	null
book	laws of clash, the effects of distan ce upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary	null
book	collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished discontinuity, we have only made it finer -grained. And to get even that degree of rationality	null
book	into the universe we have had to butcher a great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled ‘ subjective illusion, ’	null
book	still as such are facts, and must themselves be rationalized in some way.	null
book	But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of distinguishing between the ‘ reality ’ and its	null
book	appearances. Facts of thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are. Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can no longer speak of heat and light being	null
book	50 The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the fact that it is all finished and given and	null
book	there, can be got over in more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which distinguishes between	null
book	space as actual and space as potential. F or idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all actually	null
book	represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly representable spaces that are infinite.	null
book	51 Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of a rationalizing continuum. Space	null
book	determines the relations of the items that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more fixed	null
book	way than does the ego. By this last cla use I mean that if things are in space at all, they must conform to	null
book	geometry; while the being in an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner of	null
book	rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of unreason can lodge its elf as safely as any other	null
book	kind of content. One cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego- worship of some of our English- writing	null
book	Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot help fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as that o f the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a condition of the existence of a world of	null
book	organized experience at all, must notwithstanding take its own character from, not give the character to, the	null
book	separate empirical data over which its mantle is cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.	null
book	115	null
book	reconciled in any tertium quid like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and	null
book	heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their existence. Together with the	null
book	other attributes and things we conceive, they make up Plato’ s realm of immutable ideas.	null
book	Neither per se calls for the other, hatches it out, is its ‘truth,’ creates it, or has any sort of	null
book	inward community with it except that of being comparable in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling, as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost wholly discontinuous inter se . Each only says, “ I am that I am, ” and each says	null
book	it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The continuities of which they partake , in	null
book	Plato ’s phrase, the ego, space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they	null
book	possess.	null
book	It might seem as if in the mere ‘ partaking ’ there lay a contradiction of the discontinuity. If the	null
book	white must partake of space, the heat of time, and so forth,—do not whiteness and space, heat and time, mutually call for or help to create each other?	null
book	Yes; a few such à priori couplings must be admitted. They are the axioms: no feeling except	null
book	as occupying some space and time, or as a moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of an object; no time without a previous time,—and the like. But they are lim ited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad genera of concepts,	null
book	and leave quite undetermined what the specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill this time, what substance execute this motion, what qualities combine in this being,	null
book	are as much unanswered questions as if the metaphysical axioms never existed at all.	null
book	The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few vague enveloping laws, independent in all beside s.—such seems the truth.	null
book	In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far apart that their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it, to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be the ideal. But the real offers us thes e terms in the shape of mutually exclusive alternatives of	null
book	which only one can be true at once; so that we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is absolute: “ Either —or! ” Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on	null
book	an event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and impossibility in all its fulness for the other, —so the	null
book	bachelor joys are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible living in the sunshine, the ‘unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon benches in the afternoon,’ are stars that have set upon the path of him who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all their sudden completeness.	null
book	Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world mainly derived from the fact that the world is in space and time and ‘ partakes ’ of	null
book	them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived? Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening itself? Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come will have no strangeness? Is there no	null
book	116	null
book	substitute, in short, for life but the living itself in all its long -drawn weary length and breadth	null
book	and thickness?	null
book	In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense finds no difficulty in	null
book	acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the notion of ‘partaking’ has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another ’s personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time?	null
book	To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a particular ending has actually come, —so the parts actually known of the universe may	null

book

112

null

book

elysium of the Data of Ethics shall prevail, such questions as the breaking of eggs at the large

null

book

or the small end will span the whole scope of possible human warfare,—still even in this shrunken and enfeebled generation, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto, what eagerness there will be! Battles and defeats will occur, the victors will be glorified and the vanquished dishonored just as in the brave days of yore, the human heart still withdrawing itself from the much it has in safe possession, and concentrating all its passion upon those evanescent possibilities of fact which still quiver in fate ’s scale.

null

book

And is not its instinct right? Do not we here grasp the race- differences in the making, and

null

book

catch the only glimpse it is allotted to us to attain of the working units themselves, of whose differentiating action the race -gaps form but the stagnant sum? What strange inversion of

null

book

scientific procedure does Mr. Allen practise when he teaches us to neglect elements and attend only to aggregate resultants? On the contrary, simply because the active ring, whatever its bulk, is elementary, I hold that the study of its conditions (be these never so ‘proximate’ )

null

book

is the highest of topics for the social philosopher. If individual variations determine its ups and downs and hair-breadth escapes and twists and turns, as Mr. Allen and Mr. Fiske both admit, Heaven forbid us from tabooing the study of these in favor of the average! On the contrary, let us emphasize these, and the importance of these; and in picking out from history our heroes, and communing with their kindred spirits,—in imagining as strongly as possible what differences their individualities brought about in this world, while its surface was still plastic in their hands, and what whilom feasibilities they made impossible, —each one of us

null

book

may best fortif y and inspire what creative energy may lie in his own soul.

null

book

49

null

book

This is the lasting justification of hero -worship, and the pooh-poohing of it by ‘sociologists’

null

book

is the ever -lasting excuse for popular indifference to their general laws and averages. The

null

book

difference between an America rescued by a Washington or by a ‘Jenkins’ may, as Mr. Allen says, be ‘ little, ’ but it is, in the words of my carpenter friend, ‘ important. ’ Some organizing

null

book

genius must in the nature of things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte? What animal, domestic or wild, will call it a matter of no moment that scarce a word of sympathy with brutes should have survived from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?

null

book

The preferences of sentient creatures are what create the importance of topics. They are the

null

book

absolute and ultimate law -giver here. And I for my part cannot but consider the talk of the

null

book

contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is it to be,—that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide.

null

book

49 M. G. Tarde's book (itself a work of genius), Les Lois de l'Imitation, Étude Sociologique (2me Édition, Paris,

null

book

Alcan, 1895), is the best possible commentary on this text, —'invention' on the one hand, and 'imitation' on the

null

book

other, being for this author the two sole factors of social change.

null

book

113

null

book

On Some Hegelisms

null

book

null

book

Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882. We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and American philosophy.

null

book

Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Ge rmany, and

null

book

whose older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher walks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement of reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly indulgent. Hegel’s philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become quasi- official,

null

book

make ready to defend itself as well as to attack others. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful disciple that there is another point of view in philosophy that I fire this skirmisher’s shot,

null

book

which may, I hope, soon be followed by somebody else’ s heavier musketry.

null

book

The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of philosophizing in general.

null

book

To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set down as the mainspring of

null

book

philosophic activity. The atomic and mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of view of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity. Where the parts of a conceptio n seem thus to belong together by inward

null

book

kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.

null

book

Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law. The parts seem, as Hegel

null

book

has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us. Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest, which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous—are the adjectives by which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do the

null

book

materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic manipulation, but

null

book

underlying their worst disjointedness are three great continua in which for each of us reason’ s

null

book

ideal is actually reached. I mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of space. In these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself, and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is not lost.

null

book

Consider, for example, space. It is a unit. No force can in any way break, wound, or tear it. It

null

book

has no joints between which you can pass your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split, Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it. To make a hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive through space except what is itself spatial?

null

book

114

null

book

But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its parts contains an infinite

null

book

variety, and the unity and the variety do not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each par t is one again, but only one

null

book

fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the space between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls. But the union and the division are not secundum idem : it divides them by keeping them out of the space between, it unites

null

book

them by keeping them out of the space beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency. Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust another from its po sition; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes in the framing, and cannot stay

null

book

to vex the mind.

null

book

50 Beyond the parts we see or think at any given time extend further parts;

null

book

but the beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law; so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space’ s womb.

null

book

Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the ego and of time. But if for simplicity’ s sake we ignore

null

book

them, we may truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.

null

book

51 Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the

null

book

margin of foreignness, be exorcised from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill? Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.

null

book

But the moment we turn to the material qualities of being, we find the continuity ruptured on

null

book

every side. A fearful jolting begins. Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its

null

book

mechanical bare poles, —atoms and their motions,—the discontinuity is bad enough. The

null

book

laws of clash, the effects of distan ce upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary

null

book

collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished discontinuity, we have only made it finer -grained. And to get even that degree of rationality

null

book

into the universe we have had to butcher a great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled ‘ subjective illusion, ’

null

book

still as such are facts, and must themselves be rationalized in some way.

null

book

But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of distinguishing between the ‘ reality ’ and its

null

book

appearances. Facts of thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are. Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can no longer speak of heat and light being

null

book

50 The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the fact that it is all finished and given and

null

book

there, can be got over in more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which distinguishes between

null

book

space as actual and space as potential. F or idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all actually

null

book

represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly representable spaces that are infinite.

null

book

51 Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of a rationalizing continuum. Space

null

book

determines the relations of the items that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more fixed

null

book

way than does the ego. By this last cla use I mean that if things are in space at all, they must conform to

null

book

geometry; while the being in an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner of

null

book

rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of unreason can lodge its elf as safely as any other

null

book

kind of content. One cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego- worship of some of our English- writing

null

book

Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot help fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as that o f the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a condition of the existence of a world of

null

book

organized experience at all, must notwithstanding take its own character from, not give the character to, the

null

book

separate empirical data over which its mantle is cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.

null

book

115

null

book

reconciled in any tertium quid like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and

null

book

heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their existence. Together with the

null

book

other attributes and things we conceive, they make up Plato’ s realm of immutable ideas.

null

book

Neither per se calls for the other, hatches it out, is its ‘truth,’ creates it, or has any sort of

null

book

inward community with it except that of being comparable in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling, as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost wholly discontinuous inter se . Each only says, “ I am that I am, ” and each says

null

book

it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The continuities of which they partake , in

null

book

Plato ’s phrase, the ego, space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they

null

book

possess.

null

book

It might seem as if in the mere ‘ partaking ’ there lay a contradiction of the discontinuity. If the

null

book

white must partake of space, the heat of time, and so forth,—do not whiteness and space, heat and time, mutually call for or help to create each other?

null

book

Yes; a few such à priori couplings must be admitted. They are the axioms: no feeling except

null

book

as occupying some space and time, or as a moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of an object; no time without a previous time,—and the like. But they are lim ited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad genera of concepts,

null

book

and leave quite undetermined what the specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill this time, what substance execute this motion, what qualities combine in this being,

null

book

are as much unanswered questions as if the metaphysical axioms never existed at all.

null

book

The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few vague enveloping laws, independent in all beside s.—such seems the truth.

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In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far apart that their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it, to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be the ideal. But the real offers us thes e terms in the shape of mutually exclusive alternatives of

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which only one can be true at once; so that we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is absolute: “ Either —or! ” Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on

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an event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and impossibility in all its fulness for the other, —so the

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bachelor joys are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible living in the sunshine, the ‘unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon benches in the afternoon,’ are stars that have set upon the path of him who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all their sudden completeness.

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Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world mainly derived from the fact that the world is in space and time and ‘ partakes ’ of

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them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived? Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening itself? Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come will have no strangeness? Is there no

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substitute, in short, for life but the living itself in all its long -drawn weary length and breadth

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and thickness?

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In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense finds no difficulty in

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acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the notion of ‘partaking’ has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another ’s personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time?

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To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a particular ending has actually come, —so the parts actually known of the universe may

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