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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Rudolph Hermann Lotze
It is a strange and yet an intelligible pride that our scientific illuminati take in requiring for the explanatory reconstruction of reality in thought no other postulates than an original store of matter and force, and the unshaken authority of a group of universal and immutable laws of Nature. Strange, because after all these are no trifling postulates, and because it might be expected to be more in accordance with the comprehensive spirit of the human reason to acknowledge the unity of a creative cause than to have imposed on it as the starling-point of all explanation the promiscuous variety of merely actually existent things and notions. And yet intelligible, for in return for this single sacrifice the finite understanding may now enjoy the satisfaction of never again being overpowered by the transcendent significance and beauty of any single phenomenon; however wondrous and profound may appear to it any work of Nature, those universal laws, which are to it perfectly transparent, give it the means of warding off a disagreeable impression, and, while proving how perfectly it understands that even this phenomenon is but an incidental result of a well-known order of Nature, it succeeds in drawing within the limits of its own finitude what to the unprejudiced mind is conceivable only as a product of infinite wisdom. These tendencies and habits of scientific culture it will be hard to shake, especially by the arguments usually brought to bear on them by the believers in a higher, intelligent guidance of the course of Nature. For however distinctly unbiased observation may suggest this belief, so that it may seem alike foolish and tedious to attempt to understand the order of Nature without it, the supporters of the mechanical conception can always with justice reply that nevertheless in the explanation of details their road is always entered by those who on the whole believe unquestioningly in the government of an intelligent working power. They, too, are not content till, for each result ordained by this power, they have one by one traced out the efficient means through whose necessary and blind causal connection the required effect must be brought about. Even they will never seriously believe that within Nature as it lies patent to our senses, this purposive power makes new beginnings of working, such as, if traced further back, would not always prove to be the necessary results of a prior state of things. While thus even to those who hold the more religious view, the course of events is again converted into the unbroken chain of mechanical sequence, from the scientific point of view the latter alone is conspicuous, and the idea of free action on the part of an intelligent force, to which no sphere of action can be assigned, is readily dropped. Science might be able to allow that the origin of the whole, whose internal relations alone form the subject of its investigations, may be attributed to a Divine Wisdom, but it would demand facts that, within the sphere of experience, made a continuous dependence of the creation on the preserving providence of its author a necessary condition of explanation. Too ingenuous and self-confident, the believers in this living interference of reason "working towards an end bring forward only the fair aspects of life, and for the time forget its shadows; in their admiration of the wondrous harmony of organized bodies, and of their careful adaptation to the ends of mental life, they do not think of the bitter persistence with which this same organized life transmits ugliness and disease from generation to generation, or of the manifold hindrances that come in the way of the attainment even of modest human aims. How little, then, can this conception of the universe -- to which the presence of evil is, if not an insoluble, at least an unsolved problem -- hope by its assaults to overcome a habit of mind that finds numberless special confirmations in observation, and is inaccessible to any feeling of the universal deficiency under which we suppose it to labor! And is it compelled to make even the acknowledgment which it will perhaps make, that this world of blind necessity came forth at least primarily from the wisdom of a supreme creator? Doubtless it can reply that even the purposiveness of the present fabric, as it now is, could certainly have been evolved from the confusion of an original chaos under the sway of universal laws. For all that was brought together by a planless vortex, in unmeaning aggregation and without the internal equilibrium of constituents and forces that might have secured to it a longer existence in the struggle with the onward-sweeping course of external Nature: all this has long since perished. Along with and after numberless unsuccessful attempts at formation, which perhaps filled primeval times in a rapid alternation of rise and decay Nature gradually shrank into a narrower channel, and only those select creatures were preserved on which a happy combination of their constituent parts had bestowed the power of withstanding the pressure of surrounding stimuli, and of propagating their kind throughout an indefinite period. However little we may probably esteem this theory, we could yet hardly snatch it from those whom it satisfies, and we ourselves cannot wholly disallow the charm that scientific ingenuity will always find in the attempt to evolve from the formless chaos of whirling motions the necessity of a gradual sifting, and the spontaneous formation of permanent forms of succession of phenomena. But all such attempts rest on the common assumption that the universal sway of unchanging laws prescribes the kind and amount of the reciprocal actions engaged in by the several substances of the original chaos, and thereby compels them to withdraw from combinations in which no equilibrium is possible, and to enter into others in which they are at rest, or can retain a constant mode of motion. This assumption it is whose trustworthiness we must now test; with it stands or falls the proud certainty of the mechanical conception of the universe. Is this veneration for an all-prevailing law of Nature, as the only bond that forces the scattered elements of the course of things into mutual active relations and determines the character of their results, itself a possible conception, and can it put the finishing touch to our view of Nature, whose perfecting in detail we ourselves have everywhere looked to it to accomplish? Let us suppose two elements originally in existence, not produced by anything, not sprung from any common source, existing from eternity as things actual without any antecedents, but existing so that they have no other community than that of contemporaneous existence: how could the influence of the one be communicated to the other, seeing that each is as it were in a separate world, and that between them there is nothing? How is the efficacy of the one to make its way to the other through this nothing, offering no means of transmission? And if we suppose that the energy of each element constantly diffused itself like a separable atmosphere through a common space, effective like the rays of light where it met with anything on which to act, and floating idly in vacuo where nothing presented itself, what should we have gained? We would not understand our own conception, either how the action could issue from the limits of that in which it was generated; nor how, floating for some interval of time between its source and that which was to be its object, it maintained itself in vacuo; nor, lastly, how, in the end reaching the latter, it was able to exert a transforming power over its states. For while space would offer no obstacle to the mutual action of that which, though separated by it, was yet united by an inherent relation, contact in space would not involve any necessity of reciprocal action, or explain the possibility of it between beings each of which in its complete self-dependence was divided from the other by the impassable gulf of inherent indifference. The transmission of action from the one to the other seems simple only to him who, looking at the question in a superficial, commonplace way, thinks he can distinctly perceive it in the external motions by which it is accompanied; to any one examining it more deeply, it becomes more and more inexplicable how the condition of the one can contain a force compelling the other to a change of its own internal states. As, before, we were unable to follow our will in its outflow into the moveable extremities, but had to acknowledge that all volition remains confined to the willing mind, and that the execution following it is the work of an incomprehensible power: in like manner all the forces which we suppose in any form to inhere in the one element, will be inadequate to give rise to an influence on that in which they do not inhere. Now, can the conception of the universal course of Nature supplied by our previous speculations, can the idea of a realm of eternally and universally valid laws, fill this hiatus, and weld the brittle and isolated fragments into the solid whole of a reciprocally acting world? Certainly it cannot; for how could laws exist of themselves, as a necessity prescribing particular results for particular cases? There can be nothing besides being and its inherent states; and a universal order, before that of which it is the order has come into existence, cannot spring up between beings as a self-existent background holding them together, an efficient, controlling power. If we look back on our human life, we shall find that the laws of our social relations do not exist beside and between us in independent reality, are not powers to direct and control us from without because there they are; they exist only in the consciousness of the individuals who feel bound by them; they receive sanction and reality only through the actions of living persons; they are nothing but the harmoniously and inwardly-developed direction of many individual wills, which to the later generalizing scrutiny of observation appears as a highly externally-directing power because in its common authority over many it no longer presents itself as exclusively the product of one. The laws of Nature may be superior to the ordinances of the human mind; while the latter may be gainsaid and disobeyed, the commands of the former are unlimited and resistless; nevertheless Nature cannot bring to pass what is self-contradictory, or bestow independent existence on that which can have its being only in and through what is self-existent. We are apt to be led astray in these speculations by a widely diffused usage of thought and speech that exercises no prejudicial effect on our judgment of the incidents of daily life, in reference to which it has arisen. We speak of ties uniting things, of relations into which they enter, of an order which embraces them, finally, of laws under whose sway they respectively stand; and we hardly notice the contradiction contained in these notions of relations lying ready before the things came to enter into them, of an order waiting to receive the things ordered, finally, of ties stretched like solid threads -- of a material that we could not describe -- across the abyss that divides one being from another. We do not consider that all relations and connections exist only in the unity of observing consciousness, which, passing from one element to another, knits all together by its comprehensive activity, and that in like manner all efficacious order, all laws, that we are fain to conceive as existing between things independently of our knowledge, can exist only in the unity of the One that binds them all together. Not the empty shadow of an order of Nature, but only the full reality of an infinite living being of whom all finite things are inwardly cherished parts, has power so to knit together the multiplicity of the universe that reciprocal actions shall make their way across the chasm that would eternally divide the several distinct elements from one another. For action, starting from one being, is not lost in an abyss of nothing lying between it and another; but as in all being the truly existent is one and the same, so in all reciprocal action the infinite acts only on itself, and its activity never quits the sure foundation of being. The energizing of one of its parts is not confined to that and isolated from the rest; the single state has not to travel along an indescribable path in order to seek another element to which it may impart itself, nor has it to exert an equally incomprehensible force in order to compel that indifferent other element to participate in it. Every excitation of the individual is an excitation of the whole Infinite, that forms the living basis even of the individual's existence, and every one can therefore act upon every other which has the same living basis; for it is this which from the unity of its own nature causes the finite event here to be followed by its echo there. It is not anything finite that out of itself as finite acts upon something else; on the contrary, every stimulation of the individual, seeing that it affects the eternal basis that in it as in all, forms the essence of its finite appearance, can through this continuity of related being -- but through this alone -- act upon the apparently remote. We are not constrained to this recognition of an Infinite Substance, that instead of an unsubstantial and unreal law unites all things by its actual reality, merely by admiration for single spheres of phenomena, by whose special significance we are impressed; nay, every example of reciprocal action however insignificant, every instance of causality, forces us, in order to understand the possibility of a transference of influence, to substitute for a merely natural connection a substantial Infinite, containing unseparated the manifold that in phenomenal existence is separated. We could not seek such a bond between the constituents of the living body alone, or between body and soul preeminently, as if we did not need it everywhere; on the contrary, seeing that we look on all that happens, however it may be designated, as but the manifested internal energy of a single Infinite Being, the later course of our speculations will carry us further from the resuscitated mythology that, like the ancient sagas, allots to certain distinguished phenomena their special genii, and leaves the remaining work-day reality to take care of itself. For this Universal Being is not a mere bond, a mere indifferent bridge, having no other office than to form a way for the passage of action from one element to another: it is at the same time the sovereign power that for every antecedent fixes the form and degree of its consequent, for each individual the sphere of its possible activity, for every single manifestation of the latter its particular mode. We deceive ourselves when we imagine we can derive the modes in which things act on one another, as self-evident results, from the particular properties that now constitute their nature, and from the Joint influence of the circumstances of each occasion. Honest consideration, on the contrary, leads us to make the acknowledgment that the effects actually presented to us by experience are not to be got as necessary conclusions from these premises alone, however we may analyze and recombine their content, but that an unknown power, as it were, having respect to something that we do not meet with among these prior conditions, has annexed to their form the particular form of the result. The Infinite is this secret power, and that to which it has respect in the determination of results is its own presence in all finite elements, by which the universe receives the unity of a being, and on account of which the course of its events must receive the unity of a connected manifestation of the content of that being. Every finite thing, therefore, possesses the capability of action only in such amount and such quality as it is permitted by the Infinite to contribute to the realization of the whole.
Excerpted from Microcosmus, by Rudolph Hermann Lotze |
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