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The Science of Universology appeared in 36 installments in the free religionist paper, The Index, between January 4, 1877 and June 19, 1879, following the conclusion of a debate between Andrews, Benjamin R. Tucker and William Batchelder Greene regarding Proudhon. It is essentially a third book-length examination of Andrews proposed universal science, following two volumes published in book form:
- The Primary Synopsis of Universology and Alwato: The New Scientific Universal Language (1871)
- The Basic Outline of Universology (1872)
(An early discussion of universology appeared in the Spiritual Telegraph in 1857.)
Andrews’ mature projects—Universology, the Pantarchy, the New Catholic Church, Alwato and Tikiwa, the Colloquium, etc.—are an often baffling manifestation of both his individual eccentricity and his ability to synthesize elements from so many of the social scientific projects around him. That results in some very interesting moments, like those here in which Andrews engages with Greene as a philosopher, rather than simply as an interpreter of Proudhon’s credit projects. It also results in a lot of prose where Andrews’ wide reading and his fascination with the supposed significance of minute details combine in daunting and dizzying fashion. In the end, it is hard to consider Andrews anything but a gloriously persistent crank, but one of the tasks still to really be accomplished in our examination of the origins of anarchism is to come to terms with the ways in which figures like Andrews so clearly spoke to something in the radical milieus, gaining considerable influence and shaping that early history in important ways.
The Science of Universology
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The Science of Universology
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No. XIII.
We were brought by the reasonings of the last article to the verge of a seeming necessity for excluding will-force and freedom from any part in the universal arrangement and administration of things. It was shown that inherent necessity or fixed fatality must be admitted to go for something in the universe. It now remains to inquire whether they must, therefore, be admitted to go for everything. This is no longer a mere question for the metaphysicians. Physical science is taking a strong hold upon it. In philosophy the question is identified with that of efficient or back-lying causes and final or front-lying and soliciting causes (teleology); the former being formal, mechanical, invariable, and so favored by the fatalists; the latter being plastic, vitalic, and spontaneous or self-originative, and be favored by the advocates of free-will and divine intervention. In natural science the question comes forward as between evolutionism, in the purely mechanical sense, as the sufficient and total explanation of all that occurs (materialism), and what we may call supra-materialism, which posits the necessity of other forces than the purely mechanical and external laws of being, to account, at least, for some of the occurrences of the universe. As the former of these views (materialism) reduces all eventuation to a single variety of causation, it is also denominated monism (from the Greek monos, single); and as the latter (idealistic) view, admitting a fixed order of external causes as operating in part, yet posits other forces, or some other force, as essential to the production of other classes of phenomena, it is called dualistic, as predicating a doubleness of method in the operation of universal things.
Dr. Ernst Haeckel, just now the leading sciento-philosopher of Germany, an earnest disciple of Darwin, but surpassing the master in the tendency to metaphysical discriminations, is one of those who has most fully discussed this subject, in the light of the natural sciences, and he may be cited as the most pronounced and representative monist. Agassiz, Richard Owen, and St. George Mivart may be mentioned among the ablest representatives of the opposite school. None of these last must be understood as opposing evolution for what it may prove to be worth; but as opposing the assumption that it (as merely external and mechanical, or what is the same thing, efficient-causative), covers the whole ground, and excludes the necessity of any other causation.
Haeckel characterizes these two schools of thought and theory,—the first as mechanical-causal, monistic, or unismal; the second as final-causal, teleological, double-faced, or duismal (I translate from Natürliche Schöpfungageschichte, Berlin edition, 1868, p. 16). He says rightly, in characterizing the duismalists (p. 17), “that it is entirely indifferent whether we adore this (interpolated) creative (or originative) power as a personal God, or whether we conceive it as a life-power (vis vitalis) or as telic purpose and cause (causa finalis).” “In each case,” he adds, “we betake ourselves to the marvellous, as a means of explanation”; and this resort, he holds, must be absolutely excluded from the beat of the natural sciences. He might have added to the ranks of the duismalists all those natural scientists who believe in type forms or organic types, and who are known as transcendental anatomists, of whom Goethe, Oken, and Carus were preeminent Instances, as contrasted with Cuvier, Buffon, and the ordinary school. It is on this ground that I class Richard Owen here, as he is perhaps the most eminent living defender of the theory of organic types.
It is a curious and valuable fact which Haeckel points out, that monism or unism is the triumphant doctrine throughout the abiological or inorganic range of the sciences; and that duism or dualism still prevails, lingers, as he would say, in biology (vegetology and zoology); that is to say, that the unismal theory prevails in the lower range, and the duismal theory in the higher range of these sciences; or, rather, that the latter statement was true until Darwin broke through the distinction; and that now the monistic or unismal doctrine is rapidly conquering in biology also, and, as he supposes, is destined absolutely to triumph in both spheres. That is to say, the supposition of the existence of any principle of spontaneity, not rigorously referable to the chain of antecedent and purely mechanical phenomena, is to be chased from the dominion of life, as absolutely as it is assumed to have been from the dominion of death.
The admission by naturalists of the occurrences of those seemingly abnormal forms called “sports” offers some difficulty to the certainty and simplicity of this theory; and other difficulties arise within the Immediate scope of the sciences in question, which, however, I do not propose to discuss; but to suggest, rather, some farther out considerations which stand related to the subject.
The idea of a spontaneity producing the new form independently of any efficient or back-lying causes, allies itself with that of final or front lying cause, soliciting or, as it were, drawing forth and on the exceptional occurrence; and this again with the supposition of a typical plan or programme to be enacted; and so with the notion of a will or wills, residing either in the thing itself, or elsewhere, and operating on it. Again, obedience to an efficient cause is compulsory, fatal, necessitarian; and obedience to a final cause is voluntary or attractive. The one operates à tergo, the other à fronte. We are thus brought to the simple consideration of the two forms of force which we call, in simple language, a push and a pull; and the denier of the existence of final causes is simply affirming that everything in the economy of universal things is accomplished upon the principle of push; and that nowhere is the principle of pull illustrated. When science substituted pressure for the older idea of suction, that was an argument in his favor; but that was in chief part in the inorganic realm, and even then we are still taught to regard gravitation as attraction; and are we at all prepared to discard the notion of attractive forces throughout the higher range of universal affairs?
Doubtless the disputants in this controversy who deny the existence of final causes, and so of any spontaneous and attractive domain anywhere, are not aware of the sweeping nature of their negative proposition. They are not aware, probably, that it is again the old question of fixed fate and free-will in a new arena, and under new conditions; that it is, at the other extreme, the question of mechanical traction and pulsion; that it is, on middle ground, the question of physical coercion and moral suasion in the control of the family, the school, and the State; that is the question of compulsory or slave labor and of “attractive industry” in every department of work, etc., etc. They do not know, that by denying final causes and spontaneity, they are affirming, virtually and analogically, that nothing anywhere either is or should be drawn or pulled, and that everything is and should be driven or pushed. The generalizations of universology are, however, like mathematical formulæ, by which numerous and remote classes of phenomena are drawn together by a common element of unity in the perception of the sameness of law which underlies them; and the question of teleology is thus bound up in the same fasciculus with these other related questions.
But in the usual order of development compulsory method comes earlier, and yields gradually to the presence of attractive method or charm; slavery first and freedom afterwards. It is in accordance with this order that efficient causes, only or mainly, should be recognized in inorganic nature, the lower and prior sphere of natural things, and that final causes should be recognized in greater measure, in the organic or living world; and the doubt must still be entertained whether Haeckel, and his compeers, even by the aid of Darwin, will be able to reduce all the happenings of the sphere of life to the dead mechanism of efficient causes.
Absolutely pure monism is indeed impossible. Haeckel founds himself, in asserting it, upon a quotation from Goethe, to this effect: “Matter can never exist and be actual without spirit, nor spirit without matter.” This is an unfortunate authority and an unfortunate quotation for his purpose. First, it discriminates force as living power, from dead corpuscular matter, or from matter looked at in that aspect; and secondly, it identifies force with spirit (Geist). This is ample warrant for the duism along-side of unism or pure and exclusive monism; and then for their unity, which makes Goethe to be, what preeminently he was, a trinismalist (in a naturismal way). It is altogether a secondary and incidental question whether matter and spirit can exist apart. The first and fundamental question is: Do they both exist? Is the discrimination between them one that has to be made, and so that the study of its significance is important? Probably none but an extreme theologian, or an extremist of the opposite school, say Mr. John Fiske, in his anxiety to put matter and spirit so far asunder as to preclude all possibility of reasoning from the one to the other, would insist on the point that spirit, if it exist at all, must exist, or in certain states exist, or be capable of existing, entirely divorced from matter. The contrary conception, that matter and spirit always co-exist, that they are inexpugnably married or united; and that they, in some perhaps unknown or undefined sense, accurately reflect each other, so that what is true of one is true in some way, to be discovered and defined by science, of the other,—this is far more the prevalent drift of modern thought on the subject; a drift which is as yet vague or indeterminate, but which universology renders definite and exact.
Another important result of this dictum of Goethe, adopted by Haeckel, is the clear identification of force and spirit. This idea once accepted, there is no farther difficulty. Force and matter (hence spirit and matter) are clearly co-existent and inherently united, and measurable each in terms of the other; and yet, clearly distinguishable as the state and the dynamic manifestations of existence, respectively. And it is this complex idea which is really meant by the monism or unism of Haeckel; a complexity which is insisted on as being a pure simplicity. Those who are then called dualists differ from that view only in this: that they conceive that total concrete existence exhibits two spheres of being, in the lower and least developed of which matter, as such, predominates, with only those subordinate manifestations of spirit which are called mechanical forces or force; in the higher and more developed of which, spirit, as such, predominates, manifesting itself first as life, then as mind, and finally as that spontaneity or free-will, which seems, from time to time, to interfere with the steady and habitual course of the lower and more observable laws of Nature. It is even a fair question whether there be not a whole set of occult laws in universal Nature, which are set over against, and are constantly prone to counterwork, that set of the overt laws of Nature which our scientists are worthily investigating, only mistaking them for the whole, while in fact they are merely the half of the universal truth of things.
If then, spirit, the mind-side of things, and the occult constitute an equal half with overt matter (and its force); and if yet there is an identical framework of adjustment combining the two, and constituting them into the obverse and the reverse of the same general body of existence, the field of scientific investigation is simply enlarged thereby, while yet the method of attacking the whole problem is clearly indicated. If this be true—and it is certain that the universological analogies all concur in demonstrating it,—then thought and Ideas are entities, and not a mere resultant of force In matter; matter and force (mechanical, efficient causes) are only naturismally originative, while scientismally or logicismally, mind and spirit are so; and universal existence is the prolification from their joint action. In this point of view immortality is as probable, not to say certain, as mortality; perpetual life as true at least as perpetual death; and we have only to ascertain in what form this truth is manifested.
This special identification of matter with efficient causes or the universal push, and of spirit with final causes or the universal pull, simplifies the issue, and will lead to Important solutions; and, further on, this larger identification of numerous seemingly unrelated and remote conceptions, by virtue of a subtle sameness in their manner of standing related to numerous other things, illustrates the way In which it becomes possible to found the unity of knowledge. The most diverse aspects of thought and being and practical affairs are found to be colligated in the bonds of an all-embracing and systematic analogy, repetition, or echo of resemblances, which are traceable from a common fountain-head of unity in diversity, out into detail. That fountain-head is the fixity, the undeviatingness, the utter stillness, or the mechanical uniformity in movement, of things, on the one hand, which coincides with oneness; the change or deviation of parting, departing, etc., on the other hand, which coincides with twoness, and their coaction or combined unity In the production of whatsoever result. These, again, are the unism, duism, and trinism, which lie at the basis of the science of universal things; and which, when grasped and comprehended and rightly applied, will recast all human thinking, the whole sphere of education, and the life of the world; substituting definite knowledge for opinion, and substantially In all spheres.
Hundreds of other related ideas crowd into connection with those which have been designated. For example, in the matter of family, church, and political government, the efficient-causal, compulsory and purely mechanical fixed law method is mascuiold and paternal; the loving, solicitous, attractive, or final-causal method (ginger-bread in place of the rod) is feminoid and maternal. So remote a matter, therefore, as woman’s rights, stands Intimately related with the vindication of the doctrine of final causes.
In conclusion, let me call the attention of thoughtful readers to a series of profound investigations into the basis of induction, a thesis supported before the Faculty of Letters, in Paris, by J. Lachelies, translated from the French by Sarah A. Dorsey, and published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, St. Louis, during 1876 and 1877, and particularly to the treatment of the subject of final causes, in its issue of January, 1877.
XIV.
From the consideration of the God-mind or pivotal mind, as a within, and of the man-mind, or circumstantial mind-sphere, as a without, I passed to the consideration of mind collectively, as a within, and of matter as its without (the commencement by an act of anticipation of this total elaboration); and from that I passed again to the consideration of mind-and-matter, as entity at large, as a within, and of a net-work of fixed relationships, amounting to fatality or a system of immutable laws, and a world of things constituted on that determinate plan, as the without, or enclosing matrix of any and all special entity, whether mental or material, or whether as personality, consisting of both matter (or body) and mind. I, then, in the last preceding article, identified efficient causes with the fatal (and especially materialistic) theory, and final causes with spontaneity and freedom; and these again with push and pull, or with compulsory and attractional or attractive methods, universally.
There were, perhaps, reasons enough given and suggested why we must practically accept, as extant in the general economy of things, some portion of the principle of pull along with the seemingly very prevalent presence and activity of push; of spontaneity, freedom, and charm, along with necessity, compulsion, and force à tergo. But the purely metaphysical vindication of freedom, as a possibility, in the nature of things, in the face of the seemingly overwhelming argument in favor of an absolute necessity, is still a desideratum.
A defender of the doctrine of free-will is reported to have said: ”I am certain that I can do as I am of a mind to”; to which his contestant replied: “I am equally certain that you can’t do any otherwise”; and that seemed to settle the argument in favor of a backlying necessity, as the last word on the subject, and as covering the whole ground.
But are we still quite at the bottom of the subject? The speech is of an absolute necessity. What is meant by this term absolute? That, it will be agreed probably, which is self-causative, and so, free from interference or contingency; the opposite of relative. It has not perhaps been sufficiently reflected upon, that there are quite current in the world two absolutes, the precise opposites of each other. The absolute of the theologian is a will—the divine will, with him; but after what has now been said we may enlarge the idea to wills or minds at large, and to the monads which represent them, and call it the entical absolute. The absolute of the secular philosopher or logician is, on the other hand, the imposed fatal necessity, the abstract and necessary law which he finds at the basis of things, and which we may call the logical absolute. (These are the arbitrism and logiclsm, or the unism and duism of this sphere of things.) Entity and relation are thus contrasted with each other; and each contestant in this controversy posits the idea of the absolute in one or the other of these two senses, to the exclusion of the opposite.
Now, in so far as either of these ideas is concerned, we may have the hardihood to cut the knot by simply denying the existence of any absolute. There is no absolute in any such sense; nor otherwise than as partial conception and statement of a more complex reality. The absolute and the relative (taken now as contrasted with the absolute) are themselves, not things, but aspects or merely phases of universal things. They never exist, as our mode of speaking and thinking of them implies, apart from each other. In reality, they never exist at all; but only inhere as factors of existence. It is, I think, the commonest and the worst error of reasoning to elevate aspects, unconsciously, into spheres of being, and then to treat them as such.
Pure abstractions never exist, except in our thought. Whatever is real is complex; and is first compounded of absolute aspects, and then of a relative factor, aspect, or phase. Of the two absolutes hitherto brought into view, the entical absolute symbolizes freedom or spontaneity, and the logical absolute symbolizes necessity or the irresistible conditions of being. Hence we are presented, in these two opposite poles of absoluteness, a free-will side on the one hand, and a fixed-fate side on the other hand; hence a free-will side, and of a fixed-fate side, of being. If we abstract and think the free entical aspect by itself we have an entical absolute; if we abstract and think the fixed-fate side—become pure logicians which we may be, but which nature is not,—then we have the logical absolute,—neither of which is, in the nature of things, but only seems in the nature of us (while kept apart, but which are united and reconciled in the pure reason which lies between us and the object).
It must not be understood that I am denying the utility or rightfulness of pure abstraction. It is all-important and all-governing, as logic and science, that is to say, within its legitimate sphere; but it must not mistake itself for the whole of ontology, of which it is an aspect merely. We are now prepared for a statement of the third and only really true conception of the absolute. In this aspect, the absolute is the inherency of the double-faced unity of entity-and-relation. It is a hinge-wise-ness of these two; a trinism, a complexity, which it is hard for simplemindedness to seize upon; hence the difficulty of understanding Hegel, for this is the Hegelian absolute. ‘•Every notion,” as Hegel shows, “has in itself its own opposite or negation [its own antithet, that which is set over against it]; is one-sided, and pushes on into a second [something], which second, the opposite of the first, is as per se, equally one-sided with the first. In this way it is seen that both are only moments [factors or constituents] of a third notion which, the higher unity of its two predecessors, contains in itself both, but in a higher form that combines them into unity.”—Schwegler’s History of Philosophy, Sterling’s Translation, p. 317.
This higher unity of the two opposite factors of the compound notion is the true absolute or the rational absolute. The one factor without the other is nothing, and only becomes something by its inherency of unity with the other. Hence there must be two in order to the existence of the one; and these two unite into a higher kind of one, which then has a three-fold aspection, the simple one-ness (unism) of either factor; the duality of both (duism), of them both as two; and finally the hinge-wise unity of those two former aspects (one-ism and two-ism) in the trine (trinlsm). All of these collapse in the tri-nnity. This is the meaning of Schiller’s mystical dictum: “One is none, and two is three, and three is one.”
Otherwise,—let either primitive and simple one thus be taken as subject and so as a within. The remaining one is then an object and a without relatively to it, hence called by Hegel its negation; and the higher unity in which they are conjoined is their between, and so betweenity or relation is the true absolute; the primal net-work of condition out of which all the aspects of being issue, and to which they reconverge infinitely. (In this supreme instance the complexity and difficulty of the conception is augmented by the fact that the relation here spoken of is that which intervenes between relation-at-large, and entity, or the things which are related.)
The betweenity, or the relation in question, this third aspect of the absolute, now brought forward, is, therefore, that which holds in its grasp entity and relation now taken conjointly; or it is the finer unity between them, in which they are combined, and which, I may say, is the punctum vitæ of existence. It is here that fixed-fate and free-will co-exist in their oppositeness, and exist only by virtue of their oppositeness. They two are thus also a double-faced unity, and in this they only concur, in their existence, with the universal type of being. The freedom is symbolized by the inner geometrical points of all the monads, which spontaneously out-ray their being; and the fixed-fate is symbolized by the net-work of relational geometrical lines between the points; the punctum vitæ in each conjunction occurring where the line touches and becomes one with the point.
But, how, the question recurs, is it possible that there can be anything more than a seeming freedom of the will. All mental determination, it is said, is effected or caused by the preponderance of motive, and hence we must resolve as we do. This is supposed to dispose of the whole matter. How easy it was for our forefathers to prove that every thing must settle towards the bottom, unless it were upheld by a foundation, and so that the earth must rest on a solid foundation underneath it; and yet we know that the earth swings clear in pure space balanced by its own and the circumambient forces.
The argument in question assumes that every act of the will is the effect of a cause, which, so to speak, pushes or compels it to be as it is. So be it; but it is alike true that every such act or determination is itself a cause of other and resulting actions. Now as between this cause and its effect, the mental determination appears and functionates as an act of freedom or spontaneity; as something purely original or self-caused. It is only when we go back of it, to the prior link in the chain of causation, that then it presents itself to us as something itself caused, constrained, or necessitated. The compound fact, therefore, is that every such act of the will presents itself to our conception alternately, and as a double-faced unity of free-cause and necessary effect. The force of the argument in question, never perhaps more strongly presented than by Mr. John Fiske, consists in abstracting and considering by itself one side only of each such act, that side which shows as mechanical, to the exclusion of that side which shows as spontaneous. While the abstraction is maintained the logic is perfect; but in the total, rational presentation of the subject, the dead-lock is at every instant resolved, and each aspect restored to its equal factorship in the concatenation of events. The aggregate number of the successive presentations of freedom and of fate through the whole series, amounts to a precise equation; or, in their varied dance, to a balanced vibration.
There is another more subtle fallacy in the argument for an exclusive fixed fate. The causative motive being put as backlying cause of the will’s determination, everything is of course derivative from the fixed fate, so long as we maintain exclusively that point of view; but when we change the point of view and put the will-determination as cause of the subsequent action, then everything is derived from the free act of the will; and so nothing is proved for either unless it is assumed that one or the other was first in the whole chain of succession; and, on account of that priority, truly originative. The theologian surreptitiously makes this assumption in behalf of the will-side, and so posits the volition of God as first cause; the logician unconsciously, but also surreptitiously, makes the same assumption on the fate-side, and so posits inherent law as first cause, the absolute and exclusive ruler of the whole series. Logic, no less than faith, makes fools of as, unless it is that supreme analogic which recognizes the double-faced unity which is the core of things. The supposed strength of the logic of fate lies In an unauthorized assumption that a historical beginning-point is somewhere attained to by going back far enough through the series of event-nation; whereas no other beginning-point Is attainable than in the absolute pure reason, and therein, in the double-faced unity of entity and relation both in thought and being, which must therefore be assumed as the origin of all.
The Calvlnistic unition of predestination with moral accountability grew out of an approximation to the true perception; but, failing of the complete solution, presents an abhorrent contradiction, as a religious mystery. The truth is this: that, looked at from one point of view, we see an unvarying certainty from an imposed necessity; looked at from another point of view, we see freedom and accountability; and the existence viewed is that which presents to us these two aspects, according to our point of view, and the mental faculty we employ at the time in considering it. Put for the whole truth, either aspect is false; put for an aspect merely, addressed to an observer at that point of view, it is true. The complex real truth is the combined existence which throws off these opposite presentations; and the chief mystery is that we are able to abstract and consider apart from each other aspects of the truth which, in their root or inmost fibre, or in their real nature, are so united as to be essentially one. We are then left to reunite our opposite abstractions as we best may, by discovering this intimate and unresolvable complexity as the universal nature of things.
The pure fate-logic taken alone is that summum jus summa injuria, which Mr. Wasson has so well expounded in the first number of the Radical Review (p. 54); and it is because this is only an element or factor of real truth, that the approval of imperfection is compatible with divine justice (p. 57).
There remains still another argument much relied on in behalf of a strictly mechanical, fixed, and invariable scheme of things in the universe, excluding all spontaneity and freedom of the will. What other security, it is virtually asked, that things will not set hopelessly out of order? If there is freedom of the will, or of wills, how provide against the constant liability to disturbance in the on-going of universal affairs? The objection is specious, but unsound. Wills which are free may be as certain to act in a given way, as wills that are constrained. Freedom does not mean an impossible and inconceivable emancipation from one’s own natnre and constitution, but freedom, on the other hand, to conform to it, uninterfered with. Suppose the case of an absolute monarch: the courtiers, who should carefully enough have studied his character, would come to as definite an understanding, upon many a point, of how he would act, as if he were bound by all the constitutions and laws in the universe. Freedom no more than fate implies capriciousness. Fixed law itself, broken up into a thousand refractions of application, may seem to be capricious. The only intelligible meaning of the question of freedom and fate is as to whether conduct is self-determined or determined aliunde. If self-determined, then if it were possible to be absolutely acquainted with the self-hood or self-hoods involved, the conduct might be as certainly foretold a9 if the law were imposed from without. Freedom is, at bottom, then, only another kind of fixed law; a fixed law or line of conduct derived from the intrinsic nature of the given entity or entities, instead of being derived from conditions. The results of freedom are as susceptible of calculation, if we could be possessed of all the data, as the results of fate. It is only that extrinsic are more easily observed than intrinsic occurrences. Freedom has its fixed sequences of phenomena, as really as constraint; and it is not to be said, that because fixed, they are, therefore not free, since it is the freedom itself which fixes the sequent order of eventuation. If it be said that this intrinsic event-nation is, then, itself determined by backlying causes, that is true, from one point of view; but it is alike true that it is essentially causative, from the opposite point of view; and we are thus carried back to the solution of the relation between efficient and final causes, as expounded in the last preceding article.
XV.
We are brought, at length, by the train of our explorations, to the grand basic philosophic discrimination between the Absolute and the Relative. Let us endeavor to ascertain, with something more than ordinary precision, what this discrimination really means. 1 have pointed out the fact, slinking usually behind the vagueness of generality, that we have three absolutes, or three kinds of the absolute; the first two differing, toto cœlo, from each other, and the third one reconciliative. There is first the theological absolute, the God-will, as first cause and rational fundamentum of all things (more largely the entical absolute). There is then the fixed inherency in the nature of things, the fate back of Jove, the self-existent necessity that things should be as they are, and not otherwise,—the logical absolute: and thirdly, there is the Schellingian and Hegelian, or what we may call the pure rational or cardinary absolute, which is the hinging nexus of difference in unity, and unity in difference, as between arbitrism and logicism; and so as between the first two elements (the prime elements), factors, or momenta, out of which the nature of things is constituted, in whatsoever aspect It may be viewed.
Having distinguished these three kinds of the genus absolute, we fall back again upon the generality, calling them all collectively The Absolute, and proceed to contrast it, collectively, with its own appropriate antithet, The Relative; combining them, subsequently, in a trine which may be called The Existential.
Absolute means, etymologically, free from; that is to say, free from contingency, surrounding impediments, or surroundings. Hence it is self-centring or centring generally, or at-centreness. Relative (re-latus) means, per contra, folded-back upon-the-side-of, or at-sideness. Pursuing, as part of our philosophic method, the habit of carrying back philosophic discriminations to their simple etymological and ideological fountain-heads,—as, for example, abstract and concrete to the simple, common words and ideas, thin and thick; so here we trace back the obscure and otherwise undefinable, but yet current and indispensable terms, absolute and relative, to the seemingly childish difference between centre and side. The absolute means, then, merely the at-centreness aspect, and the relative the at-sideness aspect of universal things. We perceive, therefore, how fundamental and necessary, and yet how vague and intangible, and oftentimes even reversible, such a discrimination is and must be.
We now know the earth to be a globular body floating in space. Let us take it as type or analogue of the universe or world; as popularly we call such a body a world. Viewed or considered with reference to its own centre, four thousand miles away from the surface, we have the counterpart of the ding-an-sich (the thing-in-itself) of German transcendental philosophy; which is also, in a general sense, the absolute. But this is not the way in which we, individually and actually, stand connected with the earth. Each of us, for himself, occupies a point at the surface; that is to say, upon the side of the planet, and four thousand miles away from the centre, of which we have no real knowledge: nothing, on the contrary, but a mental inference. It is in a manner exactly analogical with this, that we, individually and actually, come experientially in contact with the universe, which it is the object of philosophy to explain. The absolute is then the at-centreness of our philosophic world, known to us only as an inference; and the relative is the at-sideness of that same world, a point in and about which the individual knows actually or experientially for himself, and the various points of which are occupied by the collective humanity.
The compositeness of the at-centreness and the at-sideness, and what they imply as uniting and conjoining them, is then the existential. The absolute, the relative, and the existential are thus the grand tri-grade scale, the three-step ladder, of this class of philosophical discriminations. It is the usual habit and fault of philosophers, in such cases, to overlook and omit the third term or step, which is the end that crowns the work; and it is this omission and failure which prevents them from being Integralists. At-centreness is unismal; at-sideness (or at-surfaceness) is duismal (variant); and their compositeness is trinismal.
Existence, or the existential, is still, however, merely static or at rest. It fills space, but it has no connection, as yet, with time and motion. It is the Seyn as contrasted with the Werden of Hegel; omitting the finer discriminations of being and existence, properly or narrowly so-called. But before passing to the tempic and motic aspects of existence or being, let us observe, that in confining ourselves to the analogies of the earth-ball merely, as representing the universe, we have excluded certain broader exhibitions of Nature which the material heavens present to our observation. The heavens contain the sun, moon, earth, planets, and stars. Conspicuous among these objects are the sun and the earth, and their copulative connection, as typical of other similar conjunctions abroad. Where, now, in this more complex presentation, are we to look for the at- centreness and the at-sideness of things generally? The matter grows intricate; and no wonder that philosophers, starting out in their respective systems with a good show of explicitness and clearness, soon get themselves involved in inextricable confusion. The world of thought is just as complex as the world of matter; and it is the theorem of universology that one of these Complexities is exactly adjusted in every detail and particular to the other Complexity. If this be so, then we have, in the analogies of the outer world, an exact and scientific guidance in philosophy; a canon of criticism upon all our thinking, and a one consistent body of all possible human knowledge. And if it be not so, philosophizing may as well be abandoned; its intricacy being too great to be threaded without the aid of an objective clew of this order.
We must introduce here still other subdivisions of the absolute, one of which has been already glanced at. There may be recognized two entical absolutes: one coincident with the earth-centre—geocentric; and the other coincident with the sun-centre—heliocentric. Numerous minor discriminations are here involved; as, for instance, whether we shall compare the sun and earth as they pre known to us inferentially and astronomically, or as they really present themselves or appear. We may dismiss for the present the more scientific but more remote aspect of the subject, and confine our attention to the sun-domain —including the sun as it shows itself, together with the dome of air and light over our heads—and the earth-domain beneath our feet. If, then, we at-centre ourselves with the sun, air, and light above, we posit ourselves analogically, in philosophy, at the spiritual pole of entity, and stand upon the spirito-entical absolute (theologico spiritual). We are, in other words, idealists and Spiritualists. Swedenborg makes God to be the spiritual sun, whence emanate all spiritual heat and light, the heat of love and the light of intelligence. Air and breath are also everywhere the analogues of spirit. The coincidence is perfect, and scientifically absolute. If, on the other hand, we at-centre ourselves with the earth-centre and the solid framework beneath our feet, we posit ourselves analogically, in philosophy, at the material pole of entity or reality, and stand upon the matero-entical absolute (materialistic, secular, so-called scientific). In other phrase, we are materialists.
Over against both of these combined, or the whole of the entical or real sphere of being, is the mathesis of the cosmos; the logical, mathematical, and mechanical outlay of the heavens and “the host of them,”—instance the three laws of Kepler. That theory of the cosmos which makes the at-centreness of things to reside in this plexus of necessary laws is, then, the analogue of the conception of the logical absolute, of the exactifying or logical method in philosophy, and of “the scientific method” much talked of in our day,—when the meaning of that phrase is carried high enough to do justice to its pretensions. (This is the reversal of the position previously glanced at, that entity is the within, and the network of relationships the without, of existence.)
The standing-point for observation of the perpendiculars and levels of exact science is nevertheless wheresoever the individual observer is; and this position we have seen is the at-sideness of his planet. At-centreness and at-sideness are, therefore, thus curiously at length brought to coincide with each other, the absolute and the relative to unite in the observant point of life which is the individual human mind. This same cognizing point is also the centre of contact between the spiritual hemisphere above and the material hemisphere beneath. It thus distinguishes, while it conjoins, and therefore hinge-wise-ing-ly exhibits the entical and the logical (or logical-mathematical-mechanical) absolutes; and also treats in the same manner the two hemispheres of the entical or real world. It is therefore itself illustrative of a new absolute; the third form of the absolute, the Schellingian-Hegelian absolute, the trinismal absolute; of which the entical is the unismal and the logical the duismal constituent or factor.
The difference between faith in freedom and faith in fixed law, as ruling the universe, is not a mere matter of metaphysical subtlety, nor of theological dogma, nor of both combined. It lies profoundly embedded in the structure of individual and of national character, and affects every matter of theory and practice; the divergence among men growing out of it clamoring for the discovery and recognition of a third absolute, some sort of double-faced unity which can reconcile the diversity. Without it no stable social synthesis is possible; no decent degree of mutual respect, even, among men sundered by so fundamental and radical a difference in mental constitution. I have previously assumed that the freedom-side (arbitrary) is orientalism, and that the fixed fate side (law) is occidentalism, in philosophy and character; but I have seen no clearer contrast sketched as between these two, than will be found in a recent short article by S. S. Hehberd on “The Orientalism of Plato,” in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, for April, 1877; and this writer makes fatality to be oriental, and freedom occidental; as by the common estimate. The solution of this reversal is that both orient and Occident have both freedom and fate in their doctrines and characters, but exhibited in contrasted ways. The fatality of the oriental is intuited as revealed subjectively as part of his personality, and so of his transcendental freedom as one with Nature and God; and hence it goes back to and rests ultimately upon an absolute will, and so is transcendentally on the freedom side (arbitrary). The freedom of the Greek was, on the other hand, the modern scientific spirit in embryo; the freedom to discover for himself the fixed laws or fate inherent in Nature, transcending any will; and to conform to them. His freedom rested therefore, transcendentally upon law.
The following extracts from Mr. Hebberd’s article will be found interesting in this connection: “There are always certain great thinkers who are not to he regarded so much as representatives of the civilization surrounding them, as protestants against it. They oppose the ruling tendency of their- race or age; they invert its thought; they swim, as it were, against that special current which sweeps the national life resistlessly onward.” “To exemplify all this we shall take the single case of Plato. We shall endeavor to show the real relation which the great philosopher held towards the surrounding civilization. We shall present him as a protestant against the ruling spirit of his race,—as one drawing his inspiration from a different source, and steadfastly opposing those special impulses which constitute the very essence of Grecian life. To do so, it is necessary, first of all, to understand what those special and ruling impulses really were.”
“The root of pure Hellenism is its steadfast, unconquerable determination to glorify the human. Even its theology is based upon that idea. The chief Olympian divinities are not, as those of the orient are, mere personifications of the forces of Nature. They are not incarnations or emanations of abstract being, clothed for a moment in the illusory forms of earth; they are a race of immortal and invisible heroes endowed with every essential characteristic of human nature. They are even characterized,—so determined was the Greek to make his gods like himself; by human finiteness. They all have finite attributes; they are not omniscient, but know much; they are not almighty, although they have great power; they are not omnipresent, but can move from place to place with an almost inconceivable rapidity. Their moral finiteness is still more clearly marked: they are sensual, jealous, meddlesome, even untruthful and malignant. Every essential element, good or bad, in human nature, finds its prototype in the Greek Olympus.”
“Human nature, then, is divine. Closely connected with this proud conception was an invincible faith in human freedom. The oriental, glorifying Nature and despising humanity, is necessarily a fatalist; to him man is but an insignificant atom in the all-pervading system, bound by the same conditions, and subject to the same necessity which is imposed upon all created life. The Greek, on the other hand reverencing himself more than the universe, did not believe that he was thus bound.” “These, then, constitute the three essential tendencies of Hellenic life: a proud reverence for humanity, as opposed to the oriental worship of Nature [and Nature’s God]; belief in moral freedom as opposed to oriental freedom and slavery; a materialistic clinging to the present as opposed to oriental spiritualism and engrossment with futurity. Together, these three tendencies constitute the current on which the national life of Greece floated to its inevitable end. It remains to show how clearly Plato stands as a protestant against this movement, as one striving not merely to reform, but to revolutionize and transform the genius of his race.”
It is thus that the ideas of freedom and fate and the different kinds of the absolute go over from the metaphysical and theological to the ethical and sociological domains.
XVI.
The absolute and the relative were the burden of the preceding article. These stand correlate with matter and form; more properly with substance and form. The substance of things is absolutoid; the form of things is relatoid. Substance repeats the absolute; form repeats the relative. Substance and the absolute are unismal; form and the relative are duismal. Again, substance and the absolute accord with homogeneity, which is also unismal (all-of-onesort-of); form and the relative accord with heterogeneity, which is also duismal (of-other-sort-of); hence of iwo-or-more-sorts).
Spencer establishes the fact that evolution proceeds along a line of progression from a state of indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a state of definite, coherent heterogeneity. Let us see if these several specifications cannot be reduced to a broader, and, in fine, to an all-inclusive generalization. Homogeneity is the unity, or rather the spirlt of the unity, of the substance: not of the form, of things. Indefiniteness— the absence of limits—is the unity or unism of the form; and not of the substance of things; and incoherence is the unismal state of either or both the substance and the form of things, considered or held separately or apart. So, again, heterogeneity is the duism (or diversity-element) of the substance, not of the form of things. Definiteness is the duism (or diversity-element) of the form, not of the Bubstance of things; and, in fine, coherency is the duism in unism, the trinism, or higher and compound unism, of the substance-and-the-form, in a combined harmony, inseparable in nature, while yet distinguishable as two.
There is, in addition to all these, the phase of triunism; which is the combination (unismal) and the differentiation (duismal) of all the three preceding phases, the unity in variety, or the variety in unity, which is the final and integrative aspect of all beings, of all particular spheres of being, and of all objects, things, thoughts, or ideas, whatsoever.
It results from this analysis that Spencer’s complicated definition of evolution (First Principles, p. 216) is resolvable into this simple formula: a progressive change from unism (the spirit of unity or oneness) to duism (the spirit of duality, twoness, and higher diversity), and thence to trinism (the spirit of three as uniting the one and the two) and so to tri-unism, as recombining all the prior aspects in a complex but intrigated unity—(integralism). To restate this revised definition of the law of evolution, omitting parenthetical inserts, it is as follows: Evolution is the natural and orderly procession from a unismal to a duismal state of existence; and thence by combination, to a trinismal state; and thence again, by reversion and subsumption, to a tri-unismal state or stage which is final or ultimate.
It is a great point in the progression of scientophilosophy, as Mr. Spencer has himself shown, when we can enlarge and thereby simplify our generalizations; and it is an immense simplification when his formidable definition of evolution can be referred to the simple progression of the numerical series, through its first stadium, from one to three, lapping back upon one, and subsuming the two. We have, indeed, not merely enlarged the generalization, and simplified the definition, but we have extended the definition itself, and the view of evolution so given, two degrees higher than the point to which it is carried by Mr. Spencer. He goes only from one to two,—from unism to duism; whereas, we now go forward to the trinism (only faintly embraced in his term coherency), and thence to tri-unism, as the complicated and integrative final aspect of things. But we have done still more: when, by referring these first principles to the first, principal, or head numbers of the numerical series, we discover the source from which principles emanate, and, at the same time, procure a canon of criticism upon the whole current of our reasoning on the subject.
This recurrence to numerical considerations, as the origins of truth, may excite suspicion in some minds of a theological animus; and the skittish Unitarian theologian may reluct to concede so much to Trinitarianism as that the trinity and the tri-unity of Orthodox theology, should turn out after all to be legitimate and fundamental technicalities of the philosophy of science. Radical philosophy, tending ultimately to universal reconciliation, must at times trench upon existing prejudices; and while Unitarian theology must concede this point, the surrender will be more than compensated by the demand on Orthodoxy to concede that the doctrine of the Trinity was no original theological dogma at all, but was borrowed by the Church from the metaphysicians. The earliest abstract thinkers, it cannot be doubted, had their attention focused on inceptive mathematical conceptions with an intensity which has had no parallel In the subsequent ages. When mathematics as a science began to be developed, the thoughtful attention of the world swung away from the consideration of the fountain to follow the stream; and it is only now, and from the universological point of view, that we are recurring to the mental posture of the earliest thinkers. Recall the fact, now almost never reflected upon, that for many generations the best thinking faculty of mankind must have been concentrated on elaborating so much of mathematics as would furnish an incipient multiplication table, say three times three, and upon establishing the distinct idea of a cube and a triangle. Indeed, to reach the construction of a multiplication table, even in its simplest form, was a finality of achievement, and not by any means a beginning-point in this earliest scientific curriculum. Think then how much more closely the primal numbers of the series of numbers one, two, and three must have been studied by those ancient students than they ever are by us. Think how naturally they would find in them something more than mere numbers; how certain’ the head numbers would be to become eminent symbols, the sources of principles and laws, in the distribution of all other things and ideas. When, subsequently, mathematical science took on an enlarged growth, and these primitive speculations were left behind, so far as the purposes of science were concerned, the ideas had of them remained, traditionally, as the basis of metaphysics; and falling Into the common mind, and only partially understood, they first became antique mysteries; and, finally, were absorbed into theology as sacred dogmas. Thence they have come down to our day, to make the staple of Church doctrine, and of the disquisitions of the’ saints; in all which, however, the Church has been doing excellent service in preserving the seeds of a larger truth than that with which the mere scientific career was concerning itself.
The discussion between Trinitarians and Unitarians reduces itself under this analysis, to the simple primitive question which must have arisen among the earliest thinkers as to whether the first three numbers (one, two, three,) are the collective head of all number or count, or whether the single number, one, is the true head of the whole series; and we may fancy a very lively conflict of opinion on this then governing question of the hour among those primitive scientists of the olden world. On the one hand, one being the head of the odd numbers must have seemed in some sense unfitted, by this special destination, to serve as the total head; and two being the head of the even numbers, and three the head of the joint series, the one-two-and-three advocates had a strong case. On the other hand, the demand in the human mind, which is very strong, for simplicity and simple unity, favored the champions of the number one.
We are the inheritors of that old controversy in its theological and later form; and in this simple reversion to its origin is the solution and the reconciliatlve finality of the contest between Trinitarians and Unitarians. Each contestant is right, from a given point of view; and each is wrong in so far as denying the rightfulness of the other. Indeed, as the general basis of reconciliation, in controversy at large, we may assume it to be safe to affirm the affirmations and to negate the negations of each party in the discussion; for, usually, wherever any human eye, material or mental, sees an object or a truth, there there is an object or a truth to be seen; whereas, the failure to see what another sees is no certain indication of its non-existence.
The evolution of the doctrine of the Trinity was doubtless this: the number one, as a universal symbol, could not maintain itself without breaking into two; any more than the absolute can maintain itself (Spinoza like) without breaking into the relative. One (after this revolt and fall from the primitive heaven) then remaining (so bereft) became the symbol merely of what was deemed good and true, whole (or holy), and hence, divine; while two, signifying revolt, trans-gression, in-fraction, and opposition, became the symbol of what was bad, un-holy, partial, un-divine. In other words, one (ro ‘ev) was, thereafter, the symbol of God and his goodness and two, of their Satan or opposite (fiend or enemy), and his badness or evil,—“the devil and his works.” In the old Persian theology, these two were recognized as equal and eternal counter-operating principles In the nature of things,—as they are shown to be, universologically; except that each is in turn shown to functionate in the rôle of good-and-evil. Later, the unity was redistributed, not now into two but into three aspects or parts, omitting the element of evil; one being Cod the Father; two, God the Son (proceeding); three, that which proceeded from, enveloped, and united the other two,—the Holy Spirit.
We may now note that these discriminations, purely metaphysical and related to numbers or the origins of mathematics, reveal another and higher source of metaphysical reasoning than that which we find in our Histories of Philosophy,—a prehistoric exposition of philosophy, only or chiefly preserved to us through theology. The later and historical origin of philosophy was not a metaphysics of number or mathematics, but a metaphysics of material Nature. We are all familiar with Thales and his water-origin of things; with Aneximenes with his air-origin, etc., —the Ionic school. “They sought for the universal essence of concrete being; they found this essence in a material substance or substratum; and they gave some intimation respecting the derivation of the elements from this original matter.” Pythagoras alone stands out, mystical, uncomprehended, as doubtless a reversion to the older and higher form of philosophy of his day, traditionally descended, asserting that the origins of all things are to be sought for and found In number, or the principles of number.
When, five hundred or a thousand years later, the fathers of the Christian Church found themselves confronted by the necessity of forming some theory of the relations of the Christ of their theology to God the universal Father, this old, original and traditional strain of philosophy touching the relations of the one, the two, and the three, came fittingly to their relief. The natural proclivity of religious speculation for what is ancient, mystical, and obscure also favored the adoption of this more antique and less hackneyed form of philosophy; and so the body of Christian theology was gradually elaborated by the smelting of the Jewish and older Persian systems which rested on the primal difference of one and two (God and devil), with the later Gnosticism which rested on the larger difference of the one, two, and three. The two cosmical principles already received, viz., the world-soul and the world-reason, were distributed to God the Father and God the Son (the logos), and a third was added by the new Platonists, which was assigned to the Holy Spirit.
To recur to Mr. Spencer’s definition of evolution, we may now say that homogeneity and heterogeneity are the unism and duism of substance; that indefiniteness and definiteness are the unism and duism of form; and that incoherency and coherency are the unism and duism of embodiment, as compounded of substance and form.
But as between the substance, the form, and the embodiment of things, as in part already shown, it is the substance which is unismal, the form which is duismal, and the embodiment which is trinismal. It is especially the difference between substance and form to which I wish now to direct attention. These, we have seen, are repeated by the subdivisions of substance into homogeneity and heterogeneity. This discrimination is much insisted on by Spencer; but he has founded nothing upon it in the region of classification. Elsberg has supplied this deficiency. Spencer makes the fundamental difference between the sciences to be that which separates the abstract from the concrete sciences. Elsberg, recognizing and insisting on this difference, also as very fundamental, goes back of it, and discriminates between what he calls the “aspectual” and the departmental sciences; aspectual science relating to the substance of things (and to form and force treated as substances), while departmental science relates to those regional divisions of being, which are form in situ, and which are therefore morphological in a higher and more definite sense,—the realm of limitation as definitely affecting particular objects or spheres.
This difference between the aspectual and the departmental is, therefore, virtually the difference between matter (ingrediency or substance) and form, and is thus again allied with that between homogeneity and heterogeneity; so that, in the order of evolution, aspectual considerations are unismal and prior, and departmental considerations are duismal and second, or later in order. The further application of these discriminations to the classification of the sciences will be made in next following article.
XVII.
The last article brought us up to the verge of the consideration of the most important of practical subjects, alike for the scientist and the philosopher; namely, the classification of the sciences. The classifiers are a branch of scientists, standing apart; and when successful in furnishing any new key to the interrelations of the sciences themselves, they are entitled to take the highest rank among scientists. Specialty must always stand in a certain subordination of rank to generality, since the true generalizer must have a comprehensive understanding of numerous specialties. The classification of the sciences rests on the underlying philosophy of the sciences; and is, therefore, intimately allied with sciento-philosophy, and is, indeed, a great part of what is meant by that term. The number of men, who have attempted even, to arrange the whole field of science is not large. Aristotle, and after him, Bacon, rank first in the order of time; and, of course, their efforts are inferior, viewed from the vantage of the increased intelligence of our day. In our day, Comte, a Frenchman, Spencer, an Englishman, and Haeckel, a German, are the great names. It is they who have established a valid basis upon which all future classification must in a sense rest; although universology supplies a wholly new factor which will disturb and readjust even the foundation itself.
But, apart from this last consideration, the leading classifications of Comte and Spencer are becoming already, not, indeed, antiquated or superseded, but so improved upon, enlarged, and modified by the labors of more recent investigators, that no student can be considered as up with the current of learning in this department of it, who is acquainted with their systems alone. Of these more recent classifiers the three most conspicuous, and whose work in this sphere is most elaborate, are all Americans. They are Prof. P. H. Vander Weyde, Prof. Louis Elsberg, and Thaddeus B. Wakeman. Unfortunately, Prof. Vander Weyde’s work on this subject, though much advanced, has remained uncompleted, and is nowhere accessible in book form. All of these writers have been readers, and, to some extent, students, of The Basic Outline of Universology. Prof. Elsberg’s classification, which for depth of insight into fundamental principles on the one hand, and for extent of detailed elaboration in a given direction on the other hand, surpasses any other, bears an impress of universological influence which he would probably not decline to avow, which, however, does not in the least detract from his own essential originality. Mr. Wakeman has, on the other hand, followed in the main the lead of Comte, greatly modified by Spencer, and, as I shall have occasion to show, by a leaning towards the distinctive feature of universology, and the new factor of classification contributed by it; namely, scientific analogy. He, however, does not avow this latter tendency, is probably not really aware of it, as affecting him, and has made a somewhat valiant warfare against it. Wakeman, also, has exhibited an exuberant wealth of originality, in this lofty realm of scientific achievement. The little pamphlet expositions—they are hardly more than that—of these men showing the relations of the sciences, place them, by my scale of relative values and method of assigning rank, among the magnates of the scientific world. They are, in other words, sciento-philosophers, and not merely scientists.
Every distinct science covers a distinct domain of the universe. To classify the sciences rightly is, therefore, rightly to distribute the universe. Every classifier of the sciences is of necessity, in a sense, a uuiversologist. The question whether he is that technically and precisely, rests upon the question whether he has the true key to classification. Wakeman quotes John Fiske to the effect that: All knowledge is classification. A fortiori, all science is classification; and, inversely, all classification is science, and universal classification is universal science; which is, again, universology. Universology is nothing other than the science of classification in universal and particulars, whence it is both the science of the sciences, and of all the details and particulars within the sciences.
A point, indeed the point, in which I accord a deeper universological value to Elsberg’s classification than to that of Comte or Spencer or Wakeman, is one already alluded to, in that he practically recognizes the existence of different planes from which the lines of classification take their departure; as when he discriminates the aspectual (or ingrediential sciences) from the departmental sciences, the comparative from the descriptive, etc. Universology demonstrates that we naturally and necessarily conceive the universe as having a definite shape or form; that that form is globular; and that then, our first natural divisions of that great globe of existence (the bases of special classes) accord with the cut up of a globe, by the three geometrical planes, cutting each other at right angles at the centre. To aid this conception, cut an apple through the centre, in three different ways, so as to produce eight equal parts. Each cut-through of the knife will represent one of these three planes; and, in a modified sense, the face presented by each hemisphere of the apple after the first cut (for example) is also a plane. (Two faces are revealed by each of the two subsequent cuts; but to realize them properly we must neglect in thought the prior cuts.) The Latin word for face is species (what one looks at, from specto, spect-are, whence English spectacle). From this word species we derive special; and it is just here, from the physical act of cutting through the centre of an object (our supposed apple, for instance) and revealing planes or faces, before hidden, but now capable of being looked at or seen (compare scene and scenery in this sense), that we have, analogically, the origin of the distribution of the special sciences. Apart from the corruptions of language they would be called the face sciences, and we should be continually reminded to inquire what they are faces of, or how they came to bear that name; and we should have been forced back to the original answer, now forgotten, which is that they name hemispheres of knowledge, in the first instance, and afterwards minor cuts and facings of the great globe of general or universal conception.
Mr. Spencer has, at a single point, shown that he has arrived also at this fundamental aperçu of the origin and guide to all true scientific classification, how obscurely or how clearly we cannot know, as he has not in the least elaborated the idea. Upon the twenty-sixth page of his pamphlet entitled The Classification of the Sciences, to which are added reasons for dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte, by Herbert Spencer, D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1804 (I am thus particular, as but few, so far as I have observed, of the students of Spencer are acquainted with this work), the distinguished author says: “I will only further remark, that the relations of the sciences as thus represented [referring to his own tabular exhibits] are still but imperfectly represented; their relations cannot be truly shown on a plane [the level page] but only in space of three dimensions [that is to say, upon three planes, cutting each other at right angles.] The three groups cannot be rightly put in linear order as they have been [by Comte, and now by Wakeman and others].” ,
Spencer is here down at hard pan, in finding the true basis for all classification; but he is in error in the use, as yet the only use, which he makes of it. He is contesting the possibility of a correct single-line scale, ascending and descending, for the arrangement of the sciences, such as Comte and Wakeman employ. In this he is wrong, and they are right. Both methods are true, and each has its scientific justification, when all the analogies are understood; and each its special superiority, as from the theoretical and the practical point of view, respectively. The three-plane distribution gives the philosophy of the subject; bases classification scientifically; is the scientism of things, as “harmony,” “thorough-base,” or “counterpoint” in music are so. The one-line or cord-like distribution, like the musical scale or gamut, is the simple abstract from, or epitome of, all the resultants of the three plane distribution. This is the secret of the musical scale which Fourier rightly says is the measure of all harmonies. The globe cut by its three planes yields eight solid parts or domains; hence the octave, as the measuring number. Let it be a cube which is cut into eight cubules, and the illustration will be clearer (the globe is naturismal, the cube is, per se, scientismal). Of the eight cubules, one is occulted or hid from sight, in whatsoever way the segmented cube is inspected. The octave is therefore in a sense reduced to seven, while in a sense it remains eight. This half-seven, half-eight “octave” is the riddle of the gods; or, less poetically speaking, it is the toggle-joint of the universe. All music, all skilled performance, all operatic exertion or effort at high harmony, in the whole sphere of the labors of Nature, or of man is the continuous, ever-repeated endeavor to resolve this inherent contradiction between the merely sensible and practical view of things and the underlying analytical exactitude; between the practical and the theoretical; between naturism and scientism. The proximate solution of the inexpugnable dissidiency between Nature in its crudity and Science in its precision is Artism or Art; and it breaks into the shimmer of those millions of tunes which are the répertoire of the world-full of music.
In the next following article I will show more fully why and how the one-line system of the classification of the sciences is after all practically preferable.
XVIII.
The segmentation of the cube into eight cubules furnishing, as was shown in the preceding article, the logical basis of the musical octave (falling down practically to seven, and these repleted, by intercalation, to twelve), it follows from the fact of segmentation, that the cubules (taken to represent, analogically, domains of science) fall apart, become disengaged or free, and may now be arranged in a linear scale or tingle file. Indeed, this linear order, this gamut or scale, as the ultimate and practical arrangement, is already symbolically foreshadowed within the primitive cube by that diagonalism which is always and everywhere the type of practical nature. Let an ideal cord be stretched from a given corner of a cube through the body of the cube to the remotest and opposite corner, and we have the analogue and origin of the scalar arrangement or musicoid register along which the separate cubules come to be arranged, by some crowding-and-accommodation. This necessity for crowding-and-accommodation, inherently unavoidable (in all actuality or concreteness), is the reason why the musical intervals are unevenly distributed, and can never be adjusted otherwise than by a certain tempering,—analogue of that inexhaustible good temper, upon which the social adjustments and harmonies of society must ultimately rest, after all the exactitudes of scientific social solution. Because, however, Nature perpetually escapes from the trammels of scientific exactitude and bursts into the freedom of art, that is no sufficient reason why the exactitudes of scientism should be discarded or recklessly overleaped. Because musical execution rises again into spontaneity, after a thorough training in “harmony,” that is no reason why the laws of “harmony” should never be studied. The primitive and untrained spontaneity in music is the naturism of music (singing and playing by ear). This gives way, in the true course of the evolution of musical education, to the study of the laws of “harmony.” That is the scientism of music. After this basis of pure knowledge is laid in, which at first trammels and hinders the naturismal exercitation, the spontaneity is again let in and accustomed to move within the limits and mathematical conditionings so furnished; and then we rise into the domain of true art. We have then a trained and rationalized spontaneity in the place of the unregulated exuberance of mere Nature. All art which ignores, dodges, or overslaughs the middle step, the abstract and pure scientism, is pseud-art; whether we are talking of music, of the classification of the sciences, or of whatsoever; for everything whatsoever percurs these three degrees— naturism, scientism, artism—if it fulfils its normal destiny. Otherwise, it is aborted. Still, pseud-art may very closely proximate true art, as in Blind Tom; and provisionally, it is practically availably as a matrix of true art; a necessary basis or ground, and even as an indispensable early substitute.
Pseud-art and true art, or high art, concur in the fact that they are both practical, as contrasted with mere scientism or pure theory. They are the low practical and the high practical; but still both practical; and as the whole of life and of being itself culminates in uses, practicality is a great matter. We can subsist, after a manner, upon mere naturism or the Low Practical; we starve on mere Scientism (there is no real music in the mere mathematics of music); but we only truly live in the High Practical, where the natural spontaneity is based on and guided by scientism.
It is in this sense, as the Low Practical, but still the Practical, that I accord the practical superiority to Wakeman’s system of classification (A Complete and Positive Classification of the Sciences—For the use of the New York Liberal Club) over any other system as yet published. By this I mean Comte and Wakeman, as Wakeman has absorbed the labors of Comte on this subject. On the other hand, Elsberg, absorbing Spencer and Haeckel in a similar way, stands representative, incipiently, for the scientism of classification. His fundamental discriminations are for thinkers; for the men of science as such, and do not pertain to the familiar hand-book of this classification for the practical initiation of the people at large into a curriculum of scientific education which is the leading and greatly-to-be-commended purpose of Mr. Wakeman and the positivists. For this grand popular educational purpose, the school of positivism and “the church of humanity” are to be congratulated upon the possession of such a treasure as this new positivistic tabulation of the sciences by Wakeman really is; and scientific men at large cannot afford to be ignorant of it.
The high practical, and in its connection, the integral or all-embracing and every-way aspected system of the classification of the sciences, is, in fine, universological, and will be evolved by the further elaboration of universology itself. What has now been said justifies, in a sense, the position taken by J. Stuart Mill, that there are many possible methods of classifying the sciences, one preferable for one purpose, and another for another. But it by no means justifies his licentious indifference on the subject. It is not true that there are many systems equally good. There is but one system which is truly best for the given purpose, and there are but the two or three great leading purposes. There is no more legitimate choice in the order in which the sciences shall be placed, in ascending scale, than there is in the order in which the musical notes shall be placed in the muslcatrgamut. The instinct of the positivists is perfectly right on this subject; and Spencer is wrong. It is the nniversological theorem, that whatsoever in the universe, that is orderly, is arranged in gamuts and octaves and registers after the type of music; and that all this, together with music itself, rests on and is derived from the regular or axiated segmentation of the globe and cube, as the two governing geometrical forms. With this perception, classification has a meaning; without it, it remains a chaotic agglomeration of chance observations only more or less proximately true.
One of Elsberg’s divisions of the sciences is into the (1) General and (2) Special sciences, a discrimination which all tacitly adopt, but which other classifiers have treated as so obvious that it needed no mention. We shall see why it is so obvious if we understand that Generality relates to the total rotundity, as, for example, to the whole apple, and such minor divisions as can be made without destroying the rotundity, as when we pare the apple; as Speciality relates to the apple cut through the centre, divided into halves, quarters, and eighths, and presenting plane faces or facets, in place of rotundoid or general divisions. We find, in this difference, the origin of the thoughts which are consigned to the two words genera, allied with general, and species, allied with special, the two catch-words and heads, respectively, of the whole dominion of classification. Gen-us being total-ist or whole-like, gen-erates, or contains, and produces from its partition, or parturition, the species or face-presence, which is minor, and derivative from it. (Cf. Latin species, face.)
Another of Elsberg’s divisions is into (1) Descriptive, and (2) Comparative. His descriptive is what I have called monospheric (of the single sphere); so that here we are in the difference to which I have given the names: Monospherology and Comparalogy. This is as when we consider the cut-up of the one apple, in whatsoever ways, on the one hand, and the cut-up of two or more apples, that of the one repeating, with some modification, that of the other on the other hand. In the case of comparalogy (comparative science), therefore, it is more specifically the schema of the cut-up itself which is under consideration, rather than either apple; and so we become transcendental, or pass into the science of classification, as such, and beyond the proper science of the things classified. Neither Comte, nor Spencer, nor Wakeman makes any provision for comparative science, which traverses all other science or sciences, finding identity of principles and laws (the substance or subject-matter of, science) in different spheres, as the mathematician finds the same formula applicable to wholly different groups of phenomena.
The third of Elsberg’s preliminary divisions distributes the sciences, as we have previously noticed, into (1) Aspectual, for which I have more recently adopted the term Ingrediential sciences, and (2) Departmental. Chemistry and psychology, for example, deal in a special and predominant degree with matter, substance, stuff, or material, and less with considerations of form; while astronomy, anatomy, and the like, are peculiarly morphological and departmental.
The full significance and importance of these several preliminary divisions of the sciences does not appear at once, nor until we enter upon the higher phases of the science of classification, properly so-called. It may be observed that the aspectual or Ingrediential view of science conducts quite directly to comparalogy, or makes the true basis of comparative science by the traverse thus instituted of the diverse departments of science. The sameness of substance in different departments of being introduces, in other words, a new ground of unity, and so a cross distribution, in the nature of comparison.
Recurring to the question of gamut or scale in the distribution of the sciences. Spencer wrote his essay on “The Genesis of Science” expressly, among other things, to show that “the sciences cannot be rationally arranged in serial order,” and for contesting the propriety of Comte’s assumption of this order. In this I have said that Spencer was wrong. I am not unmindful of the trenchant force of his criticism upon Comte’s assumption that we proceed, in the development of the sciences from the general to the special. I agree with him (Spencer) that “it might contrariwise be asserted, that commencing with the complex and the special, mankind have progressed step by step to a knowledge of greater simplicity and wider generality.” And especially I agree with him, that Comte’s doctrine in this matter “is only a half-truth”; and “that neither proposition is correct by itself,” and that “the actuality is expressed only by putting the two together” and that “the progress of science is duplex; it is at once from the special to the general, and from the general to the special; it is analytical and synthetical at the same time.” But all of this does not authorize the denial that this evolution proceeds, on the whole, along a given line or track: any more than the fact that we put one foot before the other, and then the other before it, countervails the fact, that by this very alternation, we do walk; and do so, along a seriated pathway, and in a given direction. Neither does Mr. Spencer’s other view, true and important as it is, of the tri-dimensionality of the primitive ideal outlay, countervail the fact that the general progression is along a jagged diagonal, as has been expounded above.
And, on the whole, I have numerous reasons which cannot be adduced here, for accepting Comte’s instinct of the true order, as better than his reasons, like the judge who often decides right and reasons badly. The plain common-sense of mankind will perceive that the idea of constituting a science of society arose far later in human history than arithmetic for example. And so, Wakeman’s revised and enlarged scale (upon that of Comte) will, I believe, in the main, stand the test of working experiment, despite the adverse criticism of Spencer, upon the rationality of “any serial order” in the arrangement of the sciences. I am not, however, to be understood as adopting it in all its details, as finality, but generally as the best extant epitome of the departmental sciences.
XIX.
In the review of Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, by Thaddeus B. Wakeman (republished in The Index of July 12, 1876), we have from Mr. Wakeman an epitome of scientific classification, from his latest and present point of view. There is in it, mere epitome as it is, an important advance upon anything contained in his larger work, Extension and Enlargement of the Positive Classification of the Sciences; and this we may take as the latest bulletin from the grand corps of scientific advance, on this subject of classification. It is introduced incidentally, to found an objection to Mr. Spencer’s treatment of the doctrine of evolution, and the whole passage containing the epitome in question is as follows:—
“1. The point of the first objection appears from glance at the common or positive classification of the sciences, which may be condensed as follows:—
| 1. The Mineral Kingdom. | Astronomy, 8.
Physics, 7. Chemistry, 6. |
| 2. The Vegetable Kingdom. | (Protistology,)
Vegetal Physioloirj, 5. (Botany.) |
| 3. The Animal Kingdom. | Animal Physiology, 4.
(Zoology.) |
| 4. The Human Kingdom. | Sociology, 3.
Morality, (Ethics) 2. Psychology (Education) l. |
“Now, it is claimed that the great laws of gravity, correlation, and chemical combination make the synthesis of the mineral, i. e., the material kingdom and its special sciences, and that evolution has no place there; that “stones do not grow,” and thit fluids and gases are like them in that respect; that the crystals and vapors are formed, but never evoluted from each other; that the attempt to apply this law to inanimate matter, is an attempt to biologize the cosmos, just as materialism is the reverse error of applying the laws and properties of matter to vital and mental phenomena.”
What Mr. Wakeman here calls the common or positive classification means Comte’s classification as expounded and improved upon by himself (Wakeman); and the point that I refer to, as advance, is this reference of the grand divisions or groupings of the sciences, to the three (or four) kingdoms of Nature. Of course this relates only to the natural or concrete sciences, omitting the abstract sciences (logic and mathematics); but within this range it has the advantage of great simplicity and naturalness. Just this salient point of common knowledge, the division of Nature into three kingdoms, familiarly known by the whole world, is the most available point of departure, in the practical education of the world into higher scientific discriminations; and it is a stroke of genius with Wakeman to have brought back all the more high sounding, more profound, or more specific distributions of science, to this simple and practical starting-point But it is not this alone, nor even mainly, for which I would commend it The point of still greater importance is, that it virtually plants the whole business of classification upon the secure and appropriate basis of scientific analogy. The showing of this tendency or fact will be deferred for a more special treatment, to another article. At present, and as preliminary, I wish to call attention to the two very different orders of mind which are dealing with science, and with this subject of classification, and to the results which come from that difference.
The two classes of thinkers referred to may be called the simple-minded and the figurative-minded people. The simple-minded, among scientists and thinkers, will take naturally to departmental, descriptive, and general science; the figurative-minded to “aspectual,” comparative, and special science (with a new and transcendental generalization growing out of the minutest special and particular). The simpleminded people, whether in common life or in science, are far the more numerous. They are the commoners.
“The primrose, by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
The figurative-minded are those who span the distance between one simple observation or one department and another, and trace resemblances in the midst of differences, and so trace out and delight in likenesses and analogies. They are comparatively few in number, and are called transcendental and incomprehensible. This term, transcendental, is not confined to philosophy, but is invading science also. Comparative anatomy is called, also, Transcendental Anatomy. Hickok speaks freely and frequently of transcendental science. The simple-minded or departmental scientists are apt to suspect the figurativeminded and comparological of being visionary and unsafe; the latter to despise the former as narrowminded and commonplace. Cuvier stands representative of common or descriptive science in the department of natural history; Oken of comparological or transcendental science in the same sphere. Cuvier has led the great army of natural history investigators, and Oken has fallen into neglect; and yet, Oken had a far deeper insight into Nature than Cuvier. It is said that for a little time Cuvier became the disciple of Oken, but the analogical atmosphere was too attenuated for him to breathe long, and he sank back to the more commonplace range of observation and thought,—better fitted for the earlier stage of the development of any science. Oken was before his time, and did not fully understand himself. Scientific analogy was intuited rather than discovered by him; but his fundamental thought was the larger truth, and through universology it will be reproduced and precisionized. Agassiz said, speaking of Oken, that his thought dominated Germany for thirty years, but that analogy is not (was not) yet sufficiently understood to be made the basis of classification. He always believed that it would be so understood in the future. Richard Owen and St. George Mivart may be mentioned as living representatives of the transcendental school in science, the subdominant school of to-day, but destined to be the dominant school of a later stage of scientific development.
There remains to be mentioned a still smaller school of scientists, hardly yet distinctly defined to the popular apprehension, but paramount in rank to all others—Integralists, those who are equally at home upon the common plane of science, and upon the transcendental plane; who know and clearly discriminate the difference between them, but who accept and aid to develop both, and out of their conjunction and inter-relationship and inter-action, to evolve the total fabric, and to construct the completed temple of the sciences. Integralism is still more largely, if not more closely, allied with universological methods than comparology, and cannot be adequately attained to by any other method. Aimed at by the omission of scientific analogy, and so of universal comparology or transcendental science, the result can only be, at the best, pseud-integralismj analogous with the best music which can be acquired and exhibited without the knowledge of “harmony.”
Scientific classification, to be complete, must, it is clear then, cover the whole ground. A classification of mere departmental and descriptive science is only a basis, foundation (platform or pedestal) for transcendental science, as the main elevation; and then for integral science, first as the dome and then as the entirety of the completed temple. Departmental and descriptive science give the mere facts and classifying laws of science; comparative or transcendental science gives the meaning of the facts and the rationale of the laws; or the soul of the facts and the reason of the order of their correlations. And, in fine, integralism colligates and makes entire the whole structure; or adds that element of unity, which in art, is so much insisted on. It is this which furnishes the philosophy of the sciences; or, in a word, sciento-philosophy.
Observe, in the next place, that departmental-anddescriptlve science deals, in predominance, with the qualitative properties of things; weight, color, sound, taste, smell, form, etc., those aspects of being which a child would first observe and distinguish (with the addition of mere count); and that comparological-and-transcendental science (as developed universologically) deals, in preponderance, with the quantitative properties of things,—taking its departure wholly from unism, duism, and trinism, the qualitative extracts of the primal quantities, one, two, and three. Now it is Spencer who has clearly pointed out the fact (exceedingly important, though as yet hardly put to any use) that science progresses, and that its development is characterized by its transition from the predominance of qualitative to the predominance of quantitative considerations.
It may now be said, in universological technicality, that qualitism is the naturismus of science (and unismal); that quantitism is the scientismus of science (and duismal), and that qnallta-quantitism (or the conjunction, inter-relationship, and inter-action or mutual modulation of qualitism and quantitism) is the artismus of science (and trinismal).
It must not be understood that because Spencer has discovered and emphasized the higher grade and rank, in science, of quantitative considerations, that he has, therefore, discovered or distinctly perceived that new and grander and totally distinct development of science (comparological and transcendental) which Is wholly derived from the essential attributes of quantity (embodied representatively in the first three numbers one, two, and three.) On the contrary, he has wholly failed to seize the spirit even of Oken’s elaboration, which is a John the Baptist of this ultimate transcendental comparology. The quantity which Spencer appreciates is still mere quantity; the naturism of quantity; the analogue of mere count, within the naturismus of science, as above specified— not the qualitative extract or spirit of quantity—universologial—which is the scientism of quantity.
Rigorously speaking, neither Comte nor Spencer nor Wakeman gives any place to comparology. By inexpugnability and overlapping, comparative science, in a lower sense (never in the higher or transcendental sense as here defined), crops out, with all of them; but they must rank, as classifiers, by what they clearly are, by explication; not by what they may chance to seem to be, by implication.
XX.
I have said that Wakeman illustrates the literalminded order of thought,—“the simple primrose” type; and I take him to represent the prevalent school of scientists and sciento-philosophers. Those who perceive and trace out analogies are of the figurative mental type. But he (Wakeman) is not incorrigible. In his Extension and Enlargement of the Positive Classification of the Sciences, he manifests the probably unconscious influence of his universological studies. He quits the bald descriptive affirmations of Comte, and takes to diagrams, scales, gamuts, and tabulations, with analogies cautiously and tentatively exhibited, as mere illustrations—which is wise, with any one who is not planted on a radical and exhaustive discovery of the law of scientific analogy. In this new tabulation (see this series, No. XIX.), he advances a step farther, and a most significant and important step, in the right direction. In this he makes the existence of the three (or four) kingdoms of Nature—the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human—to be the basis of classification; as of departmental classification, empirically approached; and for educational purposes; it certainly is. And this he can no longer adduce as mere illustration. The relation between physics in the major sense (ablology) and the mineral kingdom, for example, is something far too intimate and binding to be illustration merely; and if not illustration what is it? True, our author cannot literally bring the ocean and the atmosphere in among minerals, but they are most directly allied with the mineral kingdom; as its adjuncts; and so the whole group is representatively characterized by the mineral kingdom, or by the mere mineral, as a thing, or a term. In other words, the mineral; a mineral, any mineral; is a type and analogue of that whole realm of affairs. In like manner, sociology is typified and represented by man; although the science covers customs and laws, and many other things which are not, literally, man.
This new basis of classification is, then, strictly and truly, analogy, a valid scientific connection of ideas; and not mere poetry or fanciful metaphor. At all events, just such connections of Idea—one thing actually repeating and representing another, throughout duplex, or manifold, spheres of relationship,—are all of what I mean by analogy. And Mr. Wakeman in adopting this basis has become a true universologlst; a destination towards which he has been for some time steadily drifting, as a necessary consequence of the development of his own ideas on classification. That road has no other outcome. Universology (meaning now my own elaboration of it) was the first, and for a time, the only extant effort to exhibit classification itself, as the subject matter of a distinct science,—a science of Its own. Hence, whosoever attempts that achievement must traverse the same field, either in my way, or in a way of his own.
The key to the whole problem is Scientific Analogy; and whosoever abides by it is a universologist When Mr. Wakeman shall have taken a few more steps in that direction, he will perhaps not consign universology, as he has done, to a limbo in the outskirts of his system.
Universology pronounces the fact, however, that the classifiers constitute the preeminent class among scientists. In any seeming criticism I am making upon Wakeman, I should still assign to him a rank In the scientific world, upon the ground of his as yet hardly recognized scientific achievements, far above any which he would probably think of claiming for himself. But to attain the highest rank, classifiers must be true classifiers; their system all-embracing; and itself founded on inexpugnable scientific bases, such as scientific analogy alone furnishes,—not mere empiricists within departmentalism.
On the other hand, the figurative-minded thinkers, whom an easy perception of superficial resemblances, without radical analysis, beguiles into the statement of vague “correspondences,” hermetic philosophers, Swedenborgians and Spiritists, still more grievously need the sobering and discipline of a thorough course in analytical and scientific analogy. Analogic, scientifically pursued, is the vital centre of the entire corpus of human knowledges, as will be illustrated in one of the following tables.
There is a third small and rare class of minds, as already noticed, which may be known as integrative thinkers, who combine literal-mindedness and figurative-mindedness in a just harmony with each other. The study of scientific analogy tends to bring minds naturally inclining in excess to either of the extremes upon this true footing of adjustment, reconciliation, and balanced vibration,—as contexturologists or integralists. By minds so organized and so trained, it is seen to be not only not objectionable, but legitimate, and eminently desirable “to materialize the living world” on the one hand, and to “biologize the inanimate world” on the other hand, by the discovery of the identity of law in all spheres. The “positivlsts” predicate “the invariability of law.” The universologlsts and integralists predicate, in addition to this, the unity of law. This unity of law is only discoverable by the process of radical and fundamental analysis, a propaedeutic wholly foreign to the genius of Comte’s form of “positivism.” The terrible and fatal criticism on it is that it is, negatively, in the nature of arrested development, in respect to that healthy and natural drift towards analysis, or individualization which is going on in the world; and in the nature of premature synthesis, on its affirmative side. A synthesis prior to an absolute analysis of society or of anything else, is necessarily botch-work. I am forced to the emphatic pronouncement of this criticism, because it is this pseudo-social-reconstructionism which stands most immediately in the way, as a hinderance, of the understanding, appreciation, and acceptance of the larger, more thorough, and more artistic work of social demolition and reconstruction involving universology, integralism, and pantarchism. It is like any other shoddy article which preoccupies the market,—all the worse the better it seems to be. There is a resemblance between Comte’s reconstruction theories and those of the Pantarchy, like that of a school-boy’s snow man to a marble statue. Nevertheless, there is the fundamental unity In the two, that they are both figurative representations of a man; and the compensation for hlnderances, that the grosser and more childlike attempt Is legitimately a prior development; and, that while it hinders it does also tend to prepare the way for, the adult appreciation of a more finished specimen of statuary. Taken as ébauche it is therefore admirable.
Meantime, reverting to classification, nothing better could be asked for, than Wakeman’s table in the Library Table, as a point of departure, from which to make apprehended the deeper and more comprehensive basis of classification which universology furnishes. Observe, in the first place, that this table (including the four kingdoms, mineral, vegetal, animal, and hominal) is an abridgment from his larger exhibit, and includes only the concrete portion of it (concretology.) Along with Spencer he has also an abstractology, including logic and mathematics. This basis of classification which first discriminates the concrete and the abstract is Spencerian; and while Wakeman admits it, he makes little of it, and keeps to the Comtean distribution as more practically valuable. He quotes me (from the Modern Thinker), inaccurately, as also depreciating Spencer’s fundamental discrimination. On the contrary, from the point of view of philosophic thoroughness, I regard it as far deeper (and therefore, in the profound sense, more practical) than anything of Comte; while as a convenient popular abridgment or epitome, Comte’s scale of the sciences has the advantage.
Omitting, ourselves, for the moment, the abstract realm, and confining ourselves to the concrete, and setting aside the human, in it, as a distinct kingdom, we have before us the ordinary view,—the three kingdoms. But what, we are driven to ask, does the existence of these three kingdoms mean? What underlying ideas do they typify? It is such men as Schelllng, Oken, Richard Owen, and St. George Mivart, who teach us to look for a meaning in the book of Nature. And what here are the ideas typified? This fact of the three kingdoms is the obvious and popular centre-piece of scientific knowledge; and if we can solve it, as to its occult significance, we shall have made a great advance into the arcana of the universe.
Let us state first, and demonstrate afterwards. In short, the concrete is the embodiment of the cosmos, as the abstract is its framework or outlay. Embodiment or body is either living or dead. The mineral world is then the dead-body-world (excluding, as Elsberg says, the died); and the biologic world is the live-body-world (including the died). So far is clear; but what is death and what is life? None of the definitions of life heretofore given prove satisfactory. Spencer’s and Lewes’ definitions of life are descriptions of the manifestations of life, and not true definitions. Spencer seems to be quite aware of this—and to be baffled in his effort to define life from the point of view of an external dead materialism; for the effort is that merely. (See Principles of Biology, pp. 59-70.) Lewes’ definition (quoted, by him, p. 61) would apply just as well to the processes of building and repairing a house as to the vital processes in a human individual. “Life,” he says, “is a series of definite and successive changes, both of structure and composition, which take place within an individual without destroying its identity.”
What, then, is death, the dead state, the state of being dead, and what is life, in their indubitably direct contrast with each other? Simply and merely death is inertness, and for life we may coin the contrasted word exertness. We may have proximate degrees towards inertness; torpor, etc.; short of death: but absolute inertness is the complete realization of the very idea of death. On the other hand, this absolute inertness is not incompatible with mere motion; but the cause of the motion must come from without. This is motic inertia as contrasted with the static inertia of complete rest. Both ideas are compatible with death, brute matter, and mere external mechanism, and so are directly allied with the monism of the mechanical-causal type of conception (See Haeckel). Exertness is, on the contrary, self-expression in motion; and this we denominate action. Action is a word never applied to any other than living performances, except by figure of speech. We arrive, then, at the conclusion that life is the activity or self-motivistic principle and phenomenality, and that death is the passivity, or aliunde-motivistic principle and phenomenality of the universe; and that they are not to be defined by any mere descriptions of their various modes of manifestion. They are the subjectivity and objectivity of universal nature; inherent and eternal principles in the nature of things, in constant mutual tug or struggle with each other. Life is not, then, as materialism would insist, a mere accidental emergence, from the fortuitous operation of the laws of the inanimate realm of being, but is, itself, a primal and creative factor in the production of the world.
XXI.
We have still to pursue Wakeman in his admirable first sketch (ébauche) of the classification of the sciences. Since the actual writing of the last article (No. XX.) of this series (some months ago), he (Wakeman) has published a new edition of his Epitome of the Positive Philosophy and Religion, accompanying it with an enlarged chart, revised and, to a considerable extent, reconstructed, of his General Science, or Positive Philosophy, divided into, etc, which is his classification of the sciences. (See advertisement in Index.) This little work, full of immensely important scientific conception and coordination, should be upon the table of every reader who is or shall become interested in this style of considerations.
In this new exhibit, the learned author has given a new and enlarged expansion to his classification, in the breadthwise dimension. To expound this expression, let us say that the prime axis of his scheme of classification, as it now stands, is in the lengthwise dimension of altitude—up-and-down the extension of the page or chart; and is as follows—giving now an epitome of his epitome:—
4. Man—the Hominal Kingdom 1.
3. Animal—the Animal Kingdom 2.
2. Plant—the Vegetal Kingdom 3.
1. Mineral—the Mineral Kingdom 4.
This is the ascending-and-descending seriated-linear-prime-axis; “the back-bone” of his system, in epitome (expanded, afterwards, into twelve, or, in a sense, into twenty-four vertebra?). This is at the same time what Elsberg calls departmental; i.e., segmented classification.
But now we have, in addition, in this invaluable chart, a new or newly-pronounced feature, which crosses the previous distribution at right angles, and conforms to the breadthwise axis of the schema of distribution,—as above alluded to. It is this important feature to which we are now to give our chief attention. It is replete, in every sense, with significance; and its analysis will lead to the most thought-worthy consequences. The distribution now lies from the left to the right-hand side of the page (or inversely); and the catch or key-words to the new order of discriminations involved, are as follows (according to Wakeman):—
Direct. 1. 2. 3. 4.
The Real, The True, The Good, The Beautiful.
Inverse. 4. 3. 2. 1.
What is here meant is this: that each Departmental division of being—each kingdom—mineral, vegetal, etc.,—presents for our consideration these four distinctive underlying ideas; exhibits, therefore, these four special Aspects. Each of the great departmental sciences is thus appropriately and necessarily divided into four (at least) great aspectual sub-sciences; and we are thus conducted over from Departmentology to Aspectology; and Wakeman is thus brought into harmony with Elsberg, who had preceded him, in positing the necessity for precisely this kind of discrimination, in the classification of the sciences; in addition to the ordinarily recognized departmental distribution. Perhaps neither of these distinguished classifiers may have perceived, owing to discrepancies in their nomenclature, that they are now occupying substantially the same ground, in this important aspect of their labors; and that they are thus approximating that Grand Reconciliation, in the intellectual basis of ideas, which it is the function of universology to announce and induct.
Elsberg’s subdivision of aspectology is into 1. Hylology (substance-lore); 2. Morphology (form-lore); and 3. Dynamology (force-lore). Hence, tabulated, in breadthwise dimension, we should have, for his thought, the following series of catch or key-words:—
Direct. 1. 2. 3.
Substance Form Force (Power).
Inverse. 3. 2. 1.
We are all familiar, as running through all the domains of thoughtful literature, with the time-honored three-fold aspection of being,—the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Wakeman, discriminating more closely, divides the real from the good, and gives a four-fold in the place of a three-fold resultant. This is correct, and convenient for its purposes; but we may insist on a prior, more general, identification of these two terms under the head of Substance. Substance is both real and good. The Good (goods, property) is such substance as we can appropriate, make our own, make of use to us. A “man of substance” is a phrase carried over from the meaning of mere realty—that which has an existence—into that of appropriated realty, as good, goods, or property. Realty is indeed itself a lawterm, meaning the most substantial kind of property (goods). Substance is, therefore, the genus of which the Real and the Good are species. Elsberg’s substance, and hylology or substance-lore, include, therefore, Wakeman’s second and fourth columns, under the heads of the real and the good; and on this point the two are thus brought into harmony.
In the next place, as realty goes back to and rests upon substance, so Truth (or the True) goes back to and rests upon form. As substance is made up of points and granules, so form is made up of lines. The line, and specifically the straight line, the dimension or axis—the straight line which goes through—is the prime-elementary type of form, and so also of truth or the true. Truth is etymologically through-th; that which holds on to the end, or goes through; does not come short or fail; as false is that which fails or falls short. True, through, and thorough are the same word, with merely dialectical variations. What goes through comes out, at the other side; hence, what is out-and-out, or through-and-through, or through out, is thorough, or complete. It serves its full purpose,—;fails in nothing; yields no fallacy; can be relied upon; and hence it is true. The True is, therefore, identified, analogically, with Form; and so Wakeman’s second column—including “the theoretic sciences, science proper, or the true, as given by thought”; especially departmental, and strictly, the abstract of the departmental—is also identified with Elsberg’s morphology or form-lore.
So again, in the third place, the third column of Wakeman’s tabulation—for which he has no special catch-word, which he makes to include applied science (still in the theory of application, technological, etc., and prior to actual use in the arts),—together with the fourth column, the good, and the fifth column, the beautiful, are all expressions of dynamis or force tending to, or expressed in, Action; and so all three may be identified with Elsberg’s more generic class-sphere—dynamology or force-lore. We speak of beauty as something striking, and thus assign to it a sort of mechanical activity. In this arrangement, I have withdrawn the fourth column—the good—from its prior identification with the first—the real (under the head of substance),—and now identify It with force—on the ground that it is the practical arts to which Wakeman assigns this designation, and they are specially active.
To restate the parallelism between Elsberg and Wakeman, in their subdivisions of aspectology, as indicated by the catch-words of the respective class-spheres or realms involved, it is as follows:—
Several weighty considerations gather around this new feature of classification.
First, observe that, in passing from departmentology, the altitudinous lengthwise arrangement, to aspectology, the breadthwise arrangement, we pass from an observational and physical basis to an ideal and metaphysical basis of class assignment. When we talk of substance, form, and force, or of the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful, we are not talking of things, but of mere aspects or ideas. With this transition, then, the empirical school in science and philosophy reconverges towards the rational school. Elsberg’s tabulation first, and now Wakeman’s tabulation, bridges the chasm between physics and metaphysics, in science. It is, logically, the difference between substantives and adjective attributions or predicates; as it is, again, the old controversy, in a new form, of the nominalists and the realists; and the only reconciliation is by taking them both in, and finding a place for each.
Secondly, the fact, so simply and naturally worked out, empirically by Wakeman, that departmental science is the altitudinality or ascending and descending lengthwise axis, and expansive and aspectual science the latitudinality or breadthwise axis and expansion of the grand scientific cubosity, confirms both the universological à priori prevision on the subject, and the profound sciento-philosophical insight of Spencer into the fact that the sciences cannot be radically classified otherwise than with reference to the three fundamental dimensions (or axes) of the great globe of space.
Thirdly, it remains merely to be stated, to be now most readily perceived, that Spencer’s grand fundamental basis of classification, the discrimination between the abstract (or thin) and the concrete (or thick) accords with the third axis, or third dimension of space, the protensive lengthwise dimension, as from the back-head to the face of the individual; the abstract corresponding with the face, or its mere skin or mask, and the concrete with the back-depth of the entire head. Or we may say, again, the abstract is as if we were to lift the single leaf of the book, or view Its mere face—the page, especially the title-page, or frontispiece; while the concrete is as when the whole thickness of the book is involved. We thus complete all the dimensions of the cube (of which the form of a book is a mere modification), scientismally speaking, or of the globe, speaking naturismally; the cube having a relation to Science like that which the globe has to Nature.
Spencer, with his entire system of classification, is thus swept, likewise, into the same circle of reconciliation; and that which he has himself regarded as impossible, the harmony of his own ideas with those of Comte, is definitely established. The Importance of reconciliation in this fundamental department of human effort, that upon which the classification of the grand departments of being, and so of the sciences appertaining to all spheres, is founded, will not be, at once, adequately appreciated. Hitherto, in the history of the evolution of ideas, the immense preponderance of the powers of each chieftain of a school of thought has been expended in demolishing the fortresses of his antagonists; and in demonstrating that he alone, of them all, occupied the right position. The true basis of reconciliation consists in showing that all their systems are “parts of one stupendous whole,” and that without any of them the philosophy of integralism cannot be constituted. This reconciliation could not be effected, primarily, within the relatively vague or indefinite spheres of theology and philosophy. It is only when we come into the realm of the positive sciences, that ideas become sufficiently definite to be scientifically compared, adjusted, and reconciled; and heretofore, that ultimate adjustment had not taken place, even within this more exact sphere of the sciences; and of their special philosophy (sciento-philosophy) combining and adjusting them.
The accomplishment of this labor, now that we may, I think, regard it as virtually effected, should have, nay, will have, mainly three grand, all-important results. First, releasing the great leaders of thought from the constant necessity of combating each other, their entire struggle may be given directly and cooperatively, to the more perfect evolution of the several departments of scientific truth to which they may be severally devoted. Secondly, an intellectual harmony being secured at the basis of the definite sphere of positive or scientific Ideas, a reactionary influence will emanate from this source, which will rapidly permeate the naturally less definite spheres of thought, speculative and theological. In this manner, science will repay to philosophy its immense indebtedness. In the third place, the conflict of the religlo-philosophical and the positivistic schools of thought and labor being ended—the reconciliation thereto being also effected,—all parties can and will concur, with a new and immense zest, in the work of practical reform, or true social solutions and construction; within which sphere religion, philosophy, and science will find their harmonious and exhaustless field of conjoint labor. This, then, is the grand reconciliation which it is claimed that unitary science is competent to effect, in all human affairs; and nothing is more fundamental in this behalf than the true, composite, and all-embracing system of scientific classification.
XXII.
There remains something still to be said of Wakeman’s classification. In the earlier edition, in which he introduced, tentatively, his aspectual or breadthwise distribution, the catch-words—the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful—referring to universal being, appear in parentheses merely; while against them stand as equivalent terms, sensation, intellection, conation, and emotion, referring to subdivisions of the observing mind itself—to which last series the predominance was then given. In the later edition, this mental series of keys is omitted, and their more universal or cosmical equivalents are preferred. The question of predominance is not now important; but the admission and affirmation of the essential equivalence of these two series of discriminations is of importance, as Indicating, still more conclusively, Wakeman’s virtual adoption of scientific analogy, as the underlying ground of classification. How can these two series of ideal discriminations— one relating to subjective phenomena (of the human mind), and the other to objective phenomena (of the outer cosmos) repeat each other as equivalents, except upon the prior assumption, whether expressed, or sensed unconsciously, that the distributional schemes of the mind within, and of the material world without, are virtually identical,—which is precisely the universological conception; which is, in other words, the doctrine of a universal, underlying, all-governing, scientific analogy.
Here, again, by separating emotion from conation (effort, mental dynamis, and mental motion at large), the author converts the usual and accepted threefold division of mind—sensation (or feeling), intellection, and conation—into a fourfold distribution, as more convenient for his purposes. Let us restore the threefoldness, for fhe sake of simplicity, as we did for the other series, in comparing it with Elsberg’s classification, in No. XXI.; and bring both series of key-words, as we then did the first series, into analogical relations with the other still more fund a mental and governing series of such discriminations, —matter, form, and movement; or again, with substance, form, and force. The correlations with them stand as follows:—
1. Cosmical Distribution—
— 1. The Good, 2. The True, 3. The Beautiful.
2. Mental Distribution—
— 1. Feeling, 2. Intellect, 3. Conation (will.)
3. Correlational Distribution—
— 1. Matter, 2. Form, 3. Movement. (Substance.) (Eidos.) (Motion and Force.)
The significance and importance of this comparative exhibit of a fundamental distribution of the outer or objective world with the well-established and best recognized distribution of the inner or subjective world (the mind); and the virtual identification of the two distributions, In the two spheres, through correlation or scientific analogy; can hardly be over-estimated. To say that mind In one of its departments, the most objectively fundamental department—sensation or feeling,—is the matter of mind, and that there is, therefore, analogically, a matter of mind; or that mind has its own matter and thence its own form or forms, which are its ideas (and so of the intellect), may seem fanciful and visionary; but here we find Wakeman, arriving by empirical efforts at classification, at precisely this view; which is the prior affirmation, from a priori grounds, of universology Itself. Indeed, precisely this correlated distribution of the outer world of matter, in its threefoldness, and of the inner world of mind, with its correspondential threefoldness—the one answering item for item to the other,—may be called the practically central universological doctrine. It is consigned to the formulae, identity of law in matter and mind; and the typical reproduction of the subjective in the objective world (Basic Outline of Universology, pp. 449, 498). And, more of late, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, in a profound investigation into the true principles of scientific classification, in his work entitled In the Morning land; or, The Law of the Origin and Transformation of Christianity, p. 139, lays down, as the postulate of deductive verification, the principle that “there is correlation between the co-existences of Nature and the sequences of thought.” This is a close approximation to the universological perception, but still an approximation merely. The radical universological statement is that there is correlation, or repetitory scientific analogy, between the co-existences of Nature and the co-existences of Mind, and between the co-sequences of Nature and the co-sequences of Mind—item for item, and point for point—throughout; from the broadest generalizations to the minutest particulars.
Stuart-Glennie has indeed had this very idea before his mind, and rejected it,, without sufficiently comprehending it. Upon the page just quoted from, he says: “If there were identity between thought and nature, there would evidently be no need of deductive verification; for, in that case, If a thing were true in logic it would also be true in fact.” His error here arises from his substituting thought and logic for the larger subjective world. This alone is Mind, of which the thought-domain is only a segment. Thought, or the logical field of mind being only a part of the subjective world at large, its analogies are only correlative with a part of the objective world; which is, then, the corresponding field in it. What is true in logic is true in that domain or aspect of the cosmos which illustrates logic. And—from the universological hypothesis—so perfect is the correlation, that deduction, verification, or rather objective test-verifications, of our deductions from the known à priori universological law remain necessary; and will remain necessary; only because of insufficient knowledge of the law, or lack of familiarity with its operations; and not from any defect in the completeness of the correlation between the subjective and the objective sphere.
I may also quote Stuart-Glennie, p. 140, to the effect that “nothing can more decisively mark the character of a philosophy than its classification of the sciences.” I shall have occasion, subsequently, to give attention to his classification. Here, and as preliminary to such review, let us recur to Wake man’s standard or departmental series of the ordinary special sciences,—“the backbone” of his system. This results from subdividing and enlarging the basic distribution into the four kingdoms—mineral, vegetal, animal, and hominal,—until the series is made to include fourteen sciences, proceeding from an outermost or most objective, to an innermost or subjective point of view, in which order the series is called objective,—or inversely, when the series is called subjective, thus:—
Of these fourteen departmental sciences, the first and the fourteenth, the lowest and the highest, have something much in common with each other, and different from the remaining twelve. If the whole series be taken as a vertebral column, a characterization which Wakeman himself has bestowed upon it, then psychology (better mentology—mind-lore) is the skull, and metaphysics the sacrum. Fourier would have called the whole a series of twelve, with a pivot and sub-pivot added; and would have allied it, then, with the musical scale of twelve chromatic notes, resting upon the octave above and the octave below, as its abutments. This analogy, or figure, or fancy, as the reader may choose to regard it, will be recalled in the next article, In connection with Stuart-Glennie’s and Vander Weyde’s classifications. The location of the science of mind within the skull is, at least, quite apropos. For the sake of easy reference to this columnar exhibit of departmental classification, I shall call it the Wakemanian vertebration. The aspectional adjunction, first of Elsberg, and now of Wakeman, will then accord with the limbs at the sides of the human or animal body; and the Spencerian basis—the discrimination between the concrete and the abstract—with the back and the face of the person, as previously indicated.
To change the analogy: the city of New York is laid out upon such a plan that the ways running north and south are called avenues; and those running east and west, and of course cutting the others at right angles, are called streets. Now let us suppose three different corps of topographical investigators entering upon the examination of the city of New York, with a view of classifying its most prominent characteristics, and reporting them to the outer world. Corps No. 1 begins with and confines itself to the vertical axis of the city’s presentation, from mud-sills to capstones, or from sub-cellars to roofs, domes, and spires. By be doing, this corps discovers, and articulately defines, the vertebral column of the city’s total structure,—the several stories of the buildings corresponding with, or being analogues of, the several vertebrae (of, for example, a human body, standing erect). Now, this may, for the practical purpose of living in the houses, be the central and most important style of Information; but it is certainly not integral or universal; nor, from the integral or ail-embracing and all-sided or every-aspected point of view, is it the most exact or scientific. The buildings are not constructed upon a uniform plan; their geometrical measures are irregular, fantastic, and whimsical (naturoid, or naturismal). To gain anything exact or scientismal, we must become transcendental, relatively to these heterogenous phenomena; that is to say, go outside of and beyond them, and come upon the regular plan or outlay of the city by streets and avenues; in which department of affairs geometry has reigned supreme; and with reference to which the exactified aspects of the buildings themselves (a subdominant or minor quality with them) have been arranged.
In the next place, no amount of intercalation of minor discriminations, within this back-bone arrangement, will tend, in the slightest degree, to furnish the kind of information which is transcendental. To obtain it, with its broad-spread horizontalism, we must go where it is; we must abandon verticalism (mere observational empiricism), and enter, ex-professo, upon the study of the a priori outlay of the city. In other words, an understanding of the city plot is logically prior to the investigation of basements, parlors, and sleeping-rooms; and from the scientic point of view outranks this other more familiar, and in the usual sense of the term, more practical kind of knowledge; which last is the Comtist hierarchy of the sciences.
A second corps of our topographers enters upon one aspect of the transcendental beat of scientific research, and busies itself exclusively with the broad and prominent avenues, omitting still all consideration of the streets. This leads to the discrimination between the down-town region, at the lower ends of the avenues, with its dense crowd of houses and population—the concrete or compacted—and the uptown and country-aspecting region, at the upper and outer end of the avenues, the abstract, clear of obstructions, and out-drawn. This is the Spencerian classification of the sciences based wholly on the distinction between the concrete (the grown together) and the abstract (the drawn out). The third corps of our topographers enters finally upon the investigation of the streets. This corresponds with the aspectual distribution of the sciences, of Elsberg; and now, also, as we have seen, arrived at by Wakeman. This is the breadthwise outlay of the city; “the fashionable and unfashionable sides,” etc. (the good, the true, and the beautiful).
Is it not high time that a central office of topography should be established, at which all the reports of the various corps of investigators should be reported and rearranged and integrated, or harmonized, as parts of one and the same system?
XXIII.
The really profound and quasi-universological classification of the sciences, by Stuart-Glennie, has only recently come to my knowledge—since my assignment of relative rank to the other prominent and recent classifiers. It deserves special attention; for along with Vanderweyde,—for the delay of the completion of whose system I have expressed my regrets,—he boldly assumes the fundamental ground of the distribution of the sciences to be the world-wide difference between matter and mind; or, in modern scientific parlance, between the objective and the subjective worlds. He adds to these a middle region: the subject-object world which he makes to be man, himself, or the nominal kingdom. The objective, the subjective, and the subject-object are, my readers will remember, identical with the first and fundamental discrimination instituted, in this series of papers, between the without, the within, and the between. At that time, I hesitated as to the proper science-domain to place as the between, and suggested language. Stuart-Glennie says man (who integrates body and mind); and I am greatly Indebted to him for this very simple and now very obvious suggestion, especially as it aids me to a still broader generalization of this middle ground, which will include man, language, and some other things. But for the simple and preliminary presentation of the subject, I gladly adopt his view; and shall regard, therefore, from his and my governing point of view, (governing with me, in a sense, at least) the first grand division of the total field of science as that which distributes it into matter, mind, and man; or technically into object, subject, and subject-object.
It is remarkable that Comte who expressly makes the discriminations into subjective and objective and into static and dynamic to be the most fundamental, makes no use of either or any of them as domains of particular sciences; reserving the terms objective and subjective to apply merely to the order of inspection of the serial relation of the several sciences, as was shown in the table (No. XXII.) in connection with the Wakemanian vertebration. This other mode of classification (Vanderwcyde’s and Glennle’s) lifts the whole subject out of that preponderating influence of matter, which makes both mind and man to be mere minor outgrowths from it,—a view specially allied with the nowadays prevalence of the study of the natural sciences which are coming to claim exclusively the name of science,—a point of view specially degrading to the dignity of mind. But oar vindication of the equal rank of the studies of matter and mind must not be a sentimental one. We must see distinctly upon what analogy the one view and the other view respectively rests. Let us recur for this purpose to the Wakemanian vertebration, and take our departure from it.
I observed, In the preceding article, in treating of this subject, that, taking this vertebration as such, it is specially apropos that pschyology or mind-lore falls into the place, at the head of the column, occupied by the skull; as mind, brain, and skull are analogically coincident. Observe now that the skull is outside of and beyond (as it is also above) the vertebral column proper; and, in the next place, that It has been discovered and proven to be, itself, another special vertebral column, the vertebra of which are so smelted or anchylosed by Nature’s artistic modification, that it required special discovery to reveal their distinct existence. This discovery was made, contemporaneously, by the two distinguished German sciento-philosophers, Goethe and Oken; and that discovery was the first and decisive step in that long series of splendid scientific observations which has resulted in securely founding the science of comparative anatomy, also called at the time of the first broaching of the subject in France (by Geoffroy St. Hilaire and others) transcendental anatomy. According to this view, the jaws repeat the limbs,—are the limbs, in other words, of the head; and the teeth repeat the nails. The head, so considered, is another trunk set on the top of the trunk (commonly so-called) of the body. And so, analogically, the one science, psychology, standing as the head of Wakeman’s “back bone of the sciences” should or may be expanded, itself, into a new and distinct vertebral column (another scientific series) virtually repeating, and analogically equivalent to the first; and superimposed upon it. So regarded, Wakeman’s series would be prolated at the upper end into a development like that at the lower end (and below the nominal region); and, appropriately, his hominal sciences (sciences of man) would then fall into the middle region between his sciences of matter and his science (now by this process become sciences) of the mind. In this manner we bring Glennie’s classification into complete harmony with Wakeman’s, and all the other classifications we have been engaged in considering.
In a word, then, Glennie’s classification stands in analogical correlation with comparative anatomy (as between head and trunk, and so further out of other living beings) and with comparology at large, which is than again shown to be scientific transcendentalism; while Wakeman’s classification holds relation to ordinary anatomy. From the transcendental point of view, head and trunk are equivalents; while from the ordinary point of view the head is only a minor part of the whole body (one-eighth In art anatomy), in other words, from the transcendental point of view, the skull is a distinct vertebral column, the segments of which are to be correlated with the segments of the ordinary vertebral column, item by item; while, from the ordinary point of view, the skull is no more than a single vertebra, somewhat swollen or enlarged. Each method of inspection and estimation has, it is obvious, its own grounds of justification. That of Wakeman is more Immediate, natural or practical, and that of Glennie more elevated, far-reaching, and transcendentally scientic. The realm which man and speech occupy between head and trunk assimilates to the face and the breath, which last infills the lungs, trachea, mouth and nose; or, in a word, the air-passages. The trachea or wind-pipe, the great central air-passage, is then, itself, another, third rate, vertebral column, its various cartilaginous rings answering to vertebra;. The breath is the spirit of the body; and man is the spiritual entity of the cosmos. The face as mouth, nose, etc., the organs of speech, combines with the breath in the production of speech; and collectively they find their best nomination in the hermetic term, the logos.
Let us recur now to the analogy of the city of New York, with its outlay of avenues, streets, and houses. It will be seen on reflection, that none of these as heretofore considered furnish the proper similitude for this new aspect of classification,—that of Glennie. We should for that purpose institute a comparison between the within and the without, say the city itself and the subjacent country, as subjective and objective. Better, if we confine ourselves to the analogues of the within and without, not of the whole embodiment in question, but of the vertebral column solely, that we should say, between the interior and the exterior of the houses; or, still better, if we permit ourselves to make the transition to the skull and to the brain as the true within of this bony encasement, for then we may make a corresponding transition to the inner and upper dwelling-rooms of the houses, and to their inhabitants.
The inhabitants of the city, especially as having ascended to the domes and observatories, and being upon the outlook, may thus be taken, first, to represent the brain, and then by another easy transition, to represent the mind of the city—as being at once its within and its subjective domain. The outsides of the houses, indeed the houses themselves, and all that is and occurs in the streets, and beyond, is then the without, and, as such, the objective domain. The individual sent out from within the house to communicate with the exterior world, or returning in, the messenger (or angel) is then in loco hominis; or is, in other words, subject-object, a go-between, a mediator. Again, by the laws and license of metaphor, the ventilators, windows, and doors themselves, as means of uniting the without and the within, may he put in the place of man, as intervening between the hidden realm of conscious mind within and the outer world without. This view gives a rhetorical sanction to the bold figure of Jesus when he says: “I am the door,” etc.
In a general sense, it results from what has been said, that the brain, skull, and, in a word, the head, is representative of mind, and so is the subjective man, or the subjective part of the human person; especially so the brain, as a viscus connected with and representing the viscera, “inwards,” or within of the body; and that the trunk walls and so the trunk generally is the objective man, the analogue of matter or mass; while between these is the voice, or “logos,” the word, which is peculiarly representative of man himself, as functionating, transitionally, between mind and matter,—between the within and the without; between the subjective and objective domains. The head in man is somewhat, in the animal wholly, protruded (in ultimate structure) before the trunk; hence It is that the phrase à priori (from before) was adopted for its conventional meaning,—that, namely, of a procedure from mind, subjective conception, metaphysical or abstract principle, backward and downward to the body of facts,—as if from head and brow to trunk and nates; and à posteriori (from behind) for the inverse procedure, from the body of facts, the objective mass of observations forward and upward, to principles subjectively perceived,—as if from trunk and nates, to head and brow. Surely an analogy with these features of the human body which has given rise to such a fundamental sciento-philosophical discrimination as this between à priori and à posteriori cannot be too trivial to be deserving of the attention of either science or philosophy. Comte’s and Wakeman’s use of the terms subjective and objective accord rather with this time-honored discrimination—as expressive of mere orders or directions in which the serial concatenation of the sciences is aspected,—and must be carefully distinguished from Glennle’s use of the same terms, and that of the philosophers, in which they are descriptive of departments of being—the within and the without In the serial sense of Comte and Wakeman, subjective order means analogically from-head-to-trunk-wise, and objective order means inversely from-trunk-to-head-wise.
It must not be Inferred, however, that Comte and Wakeman mean no more by the terms objective order and subjective order than the scientific world at large has meant by à posteriori and à priori, as two opposite drifts of procedure In the order of scientific investigation. They mean far more than this,—something which is quite new in the field of sciento-philosophy, and which is worthy of the profoundest consideration. They include, in the objective order, the total body of influences and forces which sweep in upon the mind from its material or objective environment, furnishing one of the two factors of our destiny; and in the subjective order they include the total body of influences and forces which flow out from the mind, reacting, as human will and purpose, upon the environment, and furnishing the other one of these two factors of the destiny of man as a race, and individually. This is certainly one of the noblest generalizations! discriminations that the philosophy of science has achieved hitherto; and its importance should not be lost sight of by confounding it either with the objective and subjective merely as such, or with à posteriori and à priori. There is analogy as between the three sets of discrimination, but not identity; and each of them has a sufficiently important part to play to require that they be carefully held distinct from the others. The ego, or intelligent consciousness is then posited by Wakeman, as the pivot or hinging centre between the inward-trending and the outward-trending drifts of the universal forces.
Recurring to the musical analogy, the head of the vertebral series, as a single object, is the Do of the octave above; which however may be taken representatively, and so be expanded into the entire octave above. Wakeman takes it as the single note, and adds it as super-pivot, or super-abutment, merely, to the lower series; while Glennie expands it into an equal octave with the octave below.—Instituting, then, a comparological relationship between the two octaves, throughout.
That the relationship between the head and trunk of the human body, and still farther between the head, trunk, and tail of the animal body, furnished a curious and important part of the earliest scientific curriculum of the human race, will abundantly appear, in some exhibits to be made farther on, of the origin of the serpent and dragon myths of antiquity.
XXIV.
The detailed criticism of the Wakemanian vertebration, or of the main stem of scientific classification as propounded by Wakeman, would carry us into too much particularlzation for my present purpose. There is one point, however, upon which, even here, I would suggest an improvement, both upon the ground of intrinsic correctness and because its ratification will tend to a furthering of reconciliation, especially with Elsberg. Wakeman, following Comte, divides the whole larger science of anthropology, homlnology, or man-lore into I. sociology,— Elsberg’s synanthropology,—and II. ethics, or “morale,” which concerns the conscience and deportment of the individual man, in his relations with other men, or society.
The point of rectification here is, that there should be recognized a threefold, instead of a twofold division of the great, all-embracing science of man. There is first, man singly considered,—man as an individual, or in his individual character and properties; secondly, man collectively, or society as a grand organism, having an expansion in space, and a continuity, pretension, or history in time; and thirdly, ethics, which is then the science of the integration and inter-relationships of the former two. Ethics is purely a science of relations between the individual and the community; and it is obvious that a science of pure relation cannot be properly introduced until the termini of the relation have first been posited. The final one of Comte’s series of Universal Laws consecrates (in the French sense) this principle. (See Politique Positive Vol. IV., p. 180—French edition.)
I have, in The Basic Outline of Universology, furnished the name mon-anthropology, for the science of the individual man. Elsberg, accenting it, has suggested syn-anthropology as better than sociology to denote the science of society; and Comte had already introduced morale (ethics) in this connection, but with no very exact definition. Elsberg has contented himself with the two terms monanthropology and synanthropology; and Wakeman with the two terms sociology (synanthropology) and ethics. Elsberg has omitted the third term, ethics; and Wakeman has omitted the first one, monanthropology. They are thus both out of harmony with the fulness of discrimination requisite, as it seems to me; and, at all events, out of harmony with each other. The harmony is restored, in both senses, by admitting the threefold discrimination. Wakeman might, perhaps, better sacrifice Haeckel’s somewhat doubtful subdivision of biology—called protistology—than to omit monanthropology.
Upon strictly à priori grounds, there should be a science for the one man; then for the many; and then for the relations of the one and the many. I am not aware of Elsberg’s reasons for omitting ethics (Comte did so, also, originally, and admitted this branch as an afterthought); but I believe that Wakeman is “shy” of monanthropology, on the ground that man, considered out of his relations with society, is simply a particular species of living being; and that therefore his physiology, anatomy, etc., belong to the general science of biology. This idea, urged a little further, would, however, swamp sociology, in the same manner; for animals and even plants have their consociate as well as their individual lives, and man in every aspect is first a living creature, and only afterwards, or from another point of view, something more than, or different from, ordinary living beings. That other point of view is not, distinctively, his tendency to an aggregative life; but it is his difference, in a quite discrete degree, from other living beings, in the general dignity and rank of his nature.
If even it be granted that ordinary human physiology, anatomy, and hygiene fall properly within the general scope of biology, there is still a large special department of single-man-lore, which has been extensively cultivated under the name of anthropology; Out which, inasmuch as it omits all special treatment of society, as such, and of ethics, should be confined, by the prefix mon– (monos) to the domain of individual man. Of this so-named science of anthropology, intermediate between human physiology and psychology, the name of Joseph R. Buchanan, an American scientist and real discoverer, of great astuteness and breadth of scope, stands preeminently representative. It includes phrenology, sarcognomy, psychometry, the temperaments, etc.
Recurring to, and re-stating the most general aspects of universal scientific classification, which so far result from the comparison we have made of the different most prominent systems of classification, the primary practical schema, that of Comte and Wakeman, eked out and modified by that of Vander Weyde and Stuart-Glennie (vertical and vertebral— ex hypothesi), constituting the vertical axis of the great globe of conception, may, and should be denominated altitudinology; the Spencerian schema, reaching from the back-lying and thickened concrete to the frontwise thinness of the abstract, protensive or forth-reaching, is longitudinology; and the sidewise presentation, named by Elsberg aspectology, is the latitudinology of this grand exhibit. The exhibit itself, grand as it is, is still, however, only static, in space, or existential. The changes which occur in time are unprovided for in it. While it collectively is, therefore, the statology, the science of those changes is the motology of being. These are denominated by Comte (in respect to society) the statique and the dynamique, or, again, solidarity, and continuity, instead. Of natural science at large, Elsberg makes the corresponding division into physography, for the science of objects in respect to “their spacic or static existence, or the state of their existence at a definite time, i. e., the present,” or as answering to the question, “How or what are you?” And physogeny, or the science of objects “in respect to their development in time, or their tempic, i. e., their motic or sequential existence,” or as answering to the question, “How came you so? or what were you before?” To all this he makes the exceedingly important addendum and suggestion, That every “ology” has its “ography” and its “ogeny.” A strict compliance with his injunction, to use these terminations in these specific senses, would remove a great deal of confusion from our scientific literature.
It again results, from this analysis, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps to the reader, that latitudinology (the aspectology of Elsberg) is metaphysics, or our old friend “philosophy” under a new guise; and that Elsberg is wrong in transferring this term (metaphysics) to his and Spencer’s “abstract science” (including mathematics and logic). This last, in conjunction with metaphysics, is abstractology; and singly, it is physo-abstractology, Elsberg’s physology being then physo-concretology (the science of dead and living real objects). This identification of latitudinology with metaphysics is made as follows: The substantial (hylic), themorphlc, and the dynamic of Elsberg have been previously identified with the real (and good), the true, and the beautiful of Wakeman. We have only now to recur to the great masters of metaphysical philosophy to discover that the subdivisions they have made, as most fundamental of their immense field of speculative investigation, have been precisely those of this newly recognized, aspectological department of science; if not in explicit terms, still really so.
Kant, the greatest of masters in the metaphysical sphere, treated the whole field of philosophy in three Kritiken; which are: I. Of the pure reason, which is obviously of the True; II., Practical reason; and III., Kritik of the judgment. This third or last proves, however, to mean “judgment of the laws for the emotion of satisfaction and dissatisfaction”; that is to say, æsthetic determination, or the mental criterion of the beautiful. Metaphysics concerns then primarily, or in the first division of its scope,—the true, the practical, and the beautiful. (The good [and evil] tills the distinct branch called ethics.)
I have previously identified, in a preliminary way, form with the true, substance with the good, and the practical with action or achievement; but more specifically I may now quote Schelling’s sublime generalization, on this head, of the three potencies of the ideal, as I., the assimilation of matter (substance) into form, for the true; II., the assimilation of form into matter (substance) for the good; and III., the absolute assimilation or smelting of these two, for the beautiful. (Schwegler’s History of Philosophy, Stirling’s Translation, p. 301.) But what is still more important for our present purpose, we have the authority of Schwegler for the assertion, that the three parts of Schelling’s Transcendental Philosophy correspond completely with Kant’s three Kritiken (Ib. p. 295). Now these three parts are respectively: I., theoretical—the true; II., the practical; and III., philosophy of Nature, design, and art—the beautiful. Let us now recast the scale of these several grand aspections of the ideal, as follows (reading upward):
5. The beautiful; design, art.
4. The practical.
3. The good.
2. The true, “theoretical,” “pure reason,” form.
1. The real, the hylic, substance.
It will then appear that of the authors cited all except Wakeman having attempted to condense these “aspects” into a series of three, Elsberg has, virtually, taken the first, the second, and the fourth; while Kant and Schelling have taken the second, the fourth, and the fifth; and Wakeman has, I think, taken them all, at various times, but not quite systematically. It also appears that Elsberg and Wakeman, by a mere enlargement of scientific classification, have come out, it would seem quite unconsciously; upon the beat of the metaphysicians, in its most transcendental altitudes—the realm in philosophy of the (of late) much-reviled absolute, as contrasted with the relative. The relativity-domain furnishes Schelling’s nature-philosophy—the realm of the ordinary sciences.
Twenty years ago, Lewes, the English historian of philosophy, performed the funeral services over metaphysics as a dead thing, giving it no place as science any longer; and the empirical scientific world followed in his wake. Quite of late he has reconsidered that somewhat rash judgment, and revokes it, reinstating metaphysics as a legitimate scientific arena, and introducing metempirics, as the name for what he meant to condemn. At the same time, scientific classification by the mere enlargement of its own borders finds itself embracing the metaphysical domain. I am not aware whether Wakeman is aware that his “Infinitology” is, again, this “aspectology” and the dread region of transcendental metaphysics itself. Let, however, all apprehensions be allayed. We have in all this merely a new swinging of the pendulum, back towards philosophy; which, however, must now rise to the higher plane of a broad sciento-philosophy, and show itself competent to the reconciliation of all past dissensions.
Recurring to the scale of ideal aspections, and introducing Schelling’s modification, they may be most perfectly exhibited as follows:—
I. Object; the Objective.—(Naturismal.) Compounded of SUBSTANCE (objective reality) plus form (material shape) —matter, the material, THE REAL.
II. Subject; the Subjective.— (Scientismal.) Compounded of FORM (mental, the categories of thought) plus substance (the objective materials of thought, imparted through the senses, from objective reality), —mind, the ideal, THE TRUE.
III. Subject-Object; the Subjective-Objective.—(Artismal.) Mind-and-Matter, in co-existent and co-actionary relation with each other; subject to another tri-grade distribution as follows:—
III., 1. Artismo-naturismal.—Matter affecting mind, THE GOOD (or, in a state of inversion, the evil).
III., 2. Artismo-scientismal.—(Useful, Technological). Mind affecting matter, THE PRACTICAL (or inversely, the impractical; or misconceived purpose).
III., 3. Artismo-artismal.—(Fine-art-like, the true artismal). Matter-and-Mind, perfectly correlated, or harmoniously adjusted to each other,—the beautiful (or, inversely, the hideous or ugly).
These are the infinities; and such is the completer explication of what, with its new names, is aspectology and infinitology, and with its old names metaphysics, and transcendented or speculative philosophy. The work of reconciliation is then, here again, immensely forwarded. Physics and metaphysics need no longer stand aloof from each other. To marry these great segments of human knowledge is no small achievement; it is, however, a preparation only for still more important conquests over the dissonance and dissensions of humanity. In the next article, we shall make the transition to the social, the religious, and the more practical spheres of being.
[ XXXV–XXXVI ]
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