{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/wikisource_The_Problem_of_Personality_Part_1_Chapter_5/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/wikisource_The_Problem_of_Personality_Part_1_Chapter_5","id":"wikisource_The_Problem_of_Personality_Part_1_Chapter_5","license":"Public Domain / CC-BY-SA (see source)","rights_basis":"wikisource_site_inclusion_policy","source":"wikisource","source_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Personality/Part_1/Chapter_5","summary":null,"tags":["75%","Headers_applying_DefaultSort_key","Subpages"],"text":"CHAPTER V.\n\nMR. F. C. S. SCHILLER.\n\nThe works of Mr. Schiller which we shall here study are his Riddles of the Sphinx, his essay on Axioms as Postulates, in Personal Idealism, and his later contribution of Philosophical Essays published under the title of Humanism.\n\nAs these writings extend over an interval of a dozen years, it is not surprising to find a natural development of his thought, and in some instances a change of ideas. Mr. Schiller\u2019s first work was the most ambitious in its range of treatment, although possibly it was not so expressive of his characteristic courage as the later essay on Axioms as Postulates, which, if accepted as valid, would revolutionize our notions of Truth. But this view is still adopted generally in his collection of essays entitled Humanism, and, although he has not yet sought to systematically establish and defend this view, he holds out the hope of so doing in the future. Meanwhile he shows the full scope of his doctrine to be wider than an epistemological theory; involving as it does certain views of experience, the world and God, which he seeks to embody under the inspiring designation \u2018Humanism.\u2019 This he prefers to such titles as \u2018Pragmatism,\u2019 which is good, but not the final term of philosophic innovation, and \u2018Radical Empiricism,\u2019 which it interprets synthetically, and \u2018Personal Idealism,\u2019 which is perhaps liable to ambiguity, and has already been adopted for the System of G. H. Howison in his Limits of Evolution. Humanism is the watchword of the movement which sets up the whole personality in philosophy to the place which it actually occupies in life, namely the supreme place; and from this vantage-ground alone can the problems of thought be properly surveyed and correlated with the essential conditions of will and emotion.\n\nI.\n\nUpon plunging into the Riddles of the Sphinx, which, notwithstanding Mr. Schiller\u2019s development of thought, still contains sufficient permanence of material, especially in its relation to personality, to preserve its value for the student of Humanism, we soon find something bearing on our topic to catch hold of, and upon which we can drift to \u2018high and dry\u2019 philosophic certainty, secure from the waves of Agnosticism, Scepticism, and Pessimism. As it was with the \u03b3\u03bd\u03ce\u03b8\u03b9 \u03c3\u03b5\u03b1\u03c5\u03c4\u03cc\u03bd of Socrates and the Cogito ergo sum of Descartes, so it is with \u2018the one indisputable fact and basis of philosophy\u2019 of Schiller; the reality of the Self it is impossible to doubt. For to deny it is to resolve everything, including our \u2018only chance\u2019 of knowledge, into a destructive whirl of \u2018appearance\u2019 and illusion, from which there is no escape. It is no idle coincidence then that the historical representatives of Scepticism and Agnosticism, Hume and Kant, have been just those who tried to disprove the reality of the Self. Their arguments Schiller refutes, and then fearlessly proceeds to examine the cheap phrases and empty charges of anthropomorphism flung at religion and any philosophy that recognizes the uniqueness of personality in our own interpretation of experience. Science is itself infected with the dreaded taint of anthropomorphism. So is philosophy. It behoves thought, therefore, to be conscious of itself and to construct a system true to the noblest part of reality, the conditio sine qu\u00e2 non of experience, namely, the Self, which furnishes the key to all else, and therefore makes necessary a teleological explanation of the universe.\n\nBefore examining more closely Schiller\u2019s doctrine of the Self, let us briefly state the leading principles of the system laid down in the Riddles of the Sphinx. The \u2018Riddles\u2019 themselves are the relation of Man to the World, to his Cause, and to his Future. The first is to be solved by the doctrine of the Plurality of ultimate reals; the second requires God, non-phenomenal and personal, but also finite; and the third is met by a theory of Immortality, qualified by the degree of consciousness reached by the soul in its past. Prominent in Schiller\u2019s system is the process of Becoming, a real process with a beginning and an end in time. Time comes into being with the World-Process, through a determination of the Divine Spirit to form the ultimate spiritual entities into a harmonious cosmos. Between the individual selves and God there is interaction. Evil enters through non-adaptation of the Ego to the interaction with God. Hence Evil tends to become less as Evolution goes on. Error is in the same case as Evil. The material world is due to the Divine side of the \u2018stress,\u2019 while on its own side the Ego produces the phenomenal Self. The process of Evolution means the perfecting of the interaction, so that the development of the world will reveal more and more the nature of God, until at the completion, the perfected spirits would behold the countenance of God. The perfection of the individuals and their grouping into societies must go together, and this is the true End of the Process. The Ideal is to be conceived as the perfection of activity (as in Aristotle).\n\nBeginning, then, with the reality of the Self, Schiller examines the question whether our consciousness of our own existence can be made the basis of theoretical inferences. Kant denied this principle put forward by Descartes in his famous formula. But Schiller shows that this is based on a misunderstanding of the Cartesian formula, due to its necessary presentation in an intellectual form in a philosophical argument. But its force does not lie in \u2018I think,\u2019 but in the \u2018I\u2019 whose reality is intuitively assured in all experience. So viewed, the supposed objections are seen to be in the form of an ignoratio elenchi. Schiller goes on, however, to refute Kant from his own words. Because thought cannot adequately think the Self, the latter is a conception only, and\u2014that is to say\u2014no reality. But the true reason for thought\u2019s inability to think the subject, Kant has previously implied, namely, because it is the subject for every conception, and for every experience besides!\n\nHaving passed through the extremes of Agnosticism, Scepticism, Pessimism, and being on the brink of despair, Schiller revives this conviction of the Self\u2019s reality as the one truth which is left and which may be plucked like a brand from the burning\u2014though it merely serve to light the funereal pyre of Knowledge! But no, it serves a purpose far more useful than that, even to kindle one by one the torches of reality in this otherwise dark and unintelligible world. Its light is intelligence! Schiller exposes the futility of Hume\u2019s objection to personal identity. Hume declared that he could not find the Soul without stumbling upon some impression or idea. If absolute blankness of all content was the condition of the \u2018self\u2019 for which he was seeking, and to which he was willing to grant reality, then indeed he was on a vain quest, for it would be a most uncanny ghost of a soul that would satisfy him.\n\nAnd so Schiller finds a basis for his Reconstruction of Reality. The Self is the most certain of all things; it is the Alpha, and it would not be surprising if it turned out also to be the Omega, the goal of philosophy.\n\nAs the unity of thought and feeling, the conscious Self is a better guide now than either (abstract) thought or (phenomenal) perceptions. Schiller has not yet grasped fully the Pragmatic theory of knowledge, for he speaks of \u2018the use of the categories and first principles of our thought.\u2019 And yet he had previously given evidence of having the germ of the later development, when, as a test concerning certain principles of knowledge, he had asked of one \u2018does it work\u00a0?\u2019 But there he concluded that this is not enough; for the principle is not completely disproved because it does not work; logical considerations must be taken into account. And further, the pessimist admits that knowledge appears to work. Schiller\u2019s development of the teleological principle of explanation approximates to the later \u2018Humanistic\u2019 view, in some of its statements. These signs are not only interesting; they are relevant to our inquiry; for between the acceptance of the reliability of the Self and such theories of knowledge as are represented by the designation of \u2018Humanism,\u2019 there is close connection.\n\nSchiller finds use for the distinction, familiar in philosophy, between the phenomenal Self and the Transcendental Ego, that is, between the Self as it appears to itself in its interaction with the Deity, and the Self as the ultimate reality. He seeks to avoid the dualism, however, which proves so dangerous in Kant\u2019s theory. There is needed something in consciousness to connect the moments of experience. The Transcendental Ego serves to do this, as a permanent being, and as the form, which contains the whole of our psychic life as its content. The error of Kant in separating the form from the matter is avoided by maintaining that the two selves are in some way one, an empirical truth corresponding to our conviction that the Self changes and yet is the same. The Transcendental Ego is defined as the \u2018I\u2019 with all its powers and latent capacities of development, the ultimate reality which we have not yet reached. In the progress of development the approximation of the two goes on, until at last coincidence and perfection shall be reached. This is supported by the testimony of Psychology to the phenomena of multiplex personality and \u2018secondary\u2019 selves. Our whole Selves are deeper and more real than our ordinary selves.\n\nThe existence of other selves and of their worlds of objectivity is explained after the analogy of hypnotism. As \u2018several subjects may be made to share in the same hallucinations,\u2019 so may \u2018an operator of vastly greater knowledge and power\u2019 create subjective worlds valid for several persons. Between the Ego and the Deity interaction is going on, and the material world is the resultant, from the Divine force, and our phenomenal consciousness is due to our imperfect adaptation to the \u2018stress.\u2019\n\nSchiller makes the sensible distinction of a good and bad (including false and confused) anthropomorphism. The false kind consists in the ascription to beings other than ourselves of qualities which we know that they cannot possess. The confused sort is due to a contradiction entering in between the points of analogy with which we start, and the principles with which we conclude. Good anthropomorphism (seeing that non-anthropomorphic truth is a fiction) will seek to parallel all things to the principles of explanation furnished by the human mind, and ultimately the universe must lie stated in these terms (the highest) if it is to be explained. And so Teleology comes in. Action for the sake of rational ends is implied in our natures, and we cannot avoid this, the best explanation of change, in regard to natural processes. A historical method will not suffice, for no description, no mere regress of causes, can satisfy our rational nature. To discover the significance of things is the task of metaphysics, and therefore it is necessary that we explain the lower by the higher, and not the reverse, as the extreme physicists and biologists urge. The final cause will be found to be the true ground of existence, and this is possible only through the Deity transcendent above the evolutionary process. Evolution, \u2018which was to have abolished teleology, turns out itself to require the most boldly teleological treatment.\u2019 But to be free from objection, the teleological explanation must not be narrowly anthropocentric. The universal end of the world-process is being subserved by the lesser ends. If teleology be kept from conflict with scientific mechanism, both philosophy and science will gain. It is only by a knowledge of what has been, that we can venture a prediction of what is to be, and that an adequate explanation can be given of the natural Process as a whole; while, on the other hand, the teleological formula of metaphysics should eventually be of benefit to the sciences of ethics, sociology, biology, and, lastly,\u2014the order being one of time as well as of logic\u2014physics and mechanics. Such is Schiller\u2019s contribution to the Problem of Teleology.\n\nBearing in mind his general Theory of Interaction, previously indicated, the following supplementary ideas on the nature of God are given. God is the Creator, \u2018the non-phenomenal and unbecome Cause\u2019; the Sustainer, as interacting with the Ego; it follows also that he is personal and intelligent Spirit. The reasons given for Personality are to the point:\u2014\n\n(a) Cause is a category which is valid only if used by persons and of persons.\n\n(b) Personality is the conception expressive of the highest we know.\n\n(c) Not only as Cause, but also as Perfector of the world-process, God must be regarded as possessing Personality.\n\n(d) Since purpose belongs only to intelligent beings, and Evolution is meaningless if not teleological, therefore we acknowledge the divine Personality, rather than contradict our principle of not multiplying entities needlessly to invent gratuitous fictions like an unconscious or an impersonal intelligence. In a footnote he expresses his willingness to accept the terms \u2018supra-personal\u2019 or \u2018ultra-personal\u2019 as applicable to God; for doubtless the Personality of God transcends that of man as far as man transcends the atom. But he adds a proviso which is needed in the light of F. H. Bradley\u2019s doctrine of the Absolute as \u2018supra-personal but not personal.\u2019 Schiller is wise therefore in clearing himself from such a meaningless position (which really asserts the Unknowable in a new dress!) by the stipulation that by supra-personal we mean something including and transcending, rather than excluding personality.\n\nBut there is a fourth attribute of God, insisted on throughout Schiller\u2019s writings, viz. that God is finite, or rather, that to God as to all realities, \u2018infinite\u2019 has no meaning. For firstly, Kant\u2019s rebuttal of the so-called Teleological (or \u2018physico-theological\u2019) \u2018Proof\u2019of God\u2019s existence turned upon the conclusion to an infinite God from inadequate finite premises. All that could be inferred was a cause adequate to the production of the world. To go beyond this is to argue for the unknowable from the known, to seek the infinite from finite data. Again God is finite as Force, for resistance is implied in Force; and God cannot be all if He is to enforce His will upon the world\u2014\u2018unless He is by some inexplicable chance divided against Himself.\u2019\n\nFrom his previous account of the universe the same result follows. Regarding infinity as negative and conceptual, he had denied that Space and Time possess it; and he had refused to acknowledge an infinite process of Becoming, or the conception of \u2018the world as a whole\u2019 as infinite. \u2018An infinite whole is a contradiction in terms.\u2019 The belief in infinity contradicts the important conception of causation, to which Schiller holds under the form of a First Cause, as against the unprofitable notion of an endless regress. While he is influenced by the Cosmological and Teleological Proofs, it is evident that he has departed from them considerably, inasmuch as he argues to a finite Being.\n\nBut the grand indictment is not yet complete. The philosopher must be told that he has false grounds for the assumption of infinite existence, and the theologian that the doctrine is not only illogical but irreligious, and detrimental to piety, to faith, and to good works. Infinity in God would make Him the Author of Evil would neutralize His Personality, and would deprive the worshipper of his true heritage of religious emotion. Personality and Infinity are incompatible, for Personality rests on the distinction of Self from Not-Self. With this highest attribute sacrificed at the altar of an abstraction, there would disappear also power, intelligence, wisdom and goodness, from an Infinite Being.\n\nThe religious and philosophical doctrines of infinity meet in Pantheism, which leads into the general discussion of Monism and Pluralism. The pantheistic tendency is in every way a mistake, emotionally, scientifically, logically. The result is practically indistinguishable from Atheism. Change and Becoming are impossible on strict absolutistic grounds, as the Eleatics consistently maintained. From the standpoint of the finite, God comes to mean nothing, and from the standpoint of the Infinite, the world is nothing\u2014a practical and theoretical failure is really the result.\n\nExamining Monism, Dualism, and Pluralism, Schiller at once discards Dualism. Between the other two systems he proceeds to a defence of Pluralism. The unity claimed by Monism might indeed have the advantage if it were not necessarily abstract, and devoid of all practical value. It does not simplify the understanding of the world. This merely abstract unity cannot explain the phenomenal manifold. Pluralism escapes the difficult problem of origins. But it is prone to fall into another danger quite as great as that which seems fatal to Monism. A relation between the Reals seems required, and this relation seems to imply a Unity. In such a manner, then, does Pluralism imply the Unity of the world. This difficulty is to be avoided by a rational assumption that \u2018the possibility of the interaction of the many is implied in their very existence, and does not require any special proof.\u2019 In a sense, therefore, Pluralism seems to be based on Monism, but the One is without reality, being merely an ideal factor in a real plurality. Pluralism seeks a better unity, the actual result to be arrived at by the process of interaction, the perfection and harmony of a real universe, evolved in the course of Time. In this conception Pantheism and Individualism are transcended. The Many and the One are recognized, but the primacy and reality of the Many are more valid than the abstractions of the One. The influence of the Divine factor in the interaction provides the element of good in the moral world of our experience. In this sense God is immanent in all things. But He is also transcendent in Himself, though finite.\n\nLeaving the Riddles of the Sphinx, the exposition of which has run into some length\u2014but into no greater than it deserves\u2014I turn to the essay on \u2018Axioms as Postulates\u2019 in Personal Idealism. Here there is the same emphasis, even in the opening words, upon the Self as real and valid, upon the part played by the \u2018whole personality\u2019 in the formation of a metaphysic as in every other human enterprise. Schiller sets forward a twofold ground of agreement among philosophers. The first is that the world is experience, and the second is that for the organization of this experience into a reality for philosophy certain connecting principles are needed. Then he asks that pointed question, which causes such heart-burnings among the \u2018Experience\u2019-Philosophers\u2014\u2018Whose experience?\u2019 and secondly, \u2018Of what is it the experience?\u2019 In reply to the first question, it is vain to say that it is the experience of the Absolute. Schiller\u2019s answer is, \u2018our experience,\u2019 or if that is assuming too much, \u2018my experience.\u2019 \u2018Here again,\u2019 he says, \u2018I must be prepared to be assailed by a furious band of objectors intent on asking me\u2014Who are you? How dare you take yourself for granted? Have you not heard how the self is a complex psychological product, which may be divided and analysed away in a dozen different ways? And do you actually propose to build your philosophy upon so discredited a foundation?\u2019 In reply, certain observations are made:\u2014\n\n(a) There is a divergence among the analyses of the Self.\n\n(b) A Self conducts the analysis in every case.\n\n(c) These analyses must serve some purpose, which is relative to selfhood.\n\n(d) For the acceptance of an analysis choice is involved, and \u2018if I choose to analyse differently or not at all, if I find it convenient to operate with the whole organism as the standard unit in my explications, what right have Scribes and Pharisees to complain?\u2019 Now comes the Pragmatism, which is to be so prominent in Schiller\u2019s subsequent work. Since consequences must justify the choice made, it is damaging to the aforesaid analyses that nothing valuable or workable has resulted. He is therefore hopeful that the assumption of his own existence may perhaps prove more valuable than any of the denials of the Self that are propounded by \u2018psychologies which neglect their proper problem in their anxiety to be ranked among the natural sciences.\u2019\n\nSchiller interprets the Self as not yet completely known, but as revealed in its true reality with the process of experience. The World, too, is only imperfectly known as yet. This leads him into an exposition of his Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge. Briefly put, it is that our knowledge is gradually evolved by a series of experimental guesses or \u2018postulates.\u2019 There is a large element of indeterminateness manifested in the World. The same characteristics of plasticity and growth are present in the intellectual cosmos. Logic is essentially dependent upon psychological needs. This, too, must be the method of superhuman intelligence, if there be one at work in the forming of the cosmos. \u2018Its nature must be the same as ours; it also proceeds by experiment, and adapts means to ends, and learns from experience.\u2019 Matter is the raw material and is conceived after the Aristotelian view of potentiality. Bearing this in mind, Schiller criticizes ordinary Empiricism, in which the activity of the Self is ignored in the presence of \u2018impressions and ideas\u2019; and Apriorism, which in its intellectualistic bias has maintained certain \u2018necessities of thought.\u2019 This \u2018necessity,\u2019 this \u2018universality\u2019 claimed for a priori truths, the Postulates of Pragmatism are quite capable of yielding. So Schiller boldly sets out to compel the Axioms, and even the Laws of Thought to own their true nature as Postulates, justified in experience by their working, and by the satisfaction they bring to the whole nature of man. These Postulates depend upon psychical temperament, and \u2018radiate from human personality as their centre.\u2019 This is a confession of the indissoluble relation which exists between a Pragmatic doctrine of knowledge and a conviction that the Self is real. This is the pragmatic motif for Schiller\u2019s insistence upon the fact of the Self, at a period when it is very unfashionable to do so.\n\nHe assumes also the characteristic features of consciousness, e.g. its continuity, coherence, conativeness, and purposiveness. Consciousness cannot be defined, and is the \u03c0\u03bf\u03cd \u03c3\u03c4\u03ce of this, and every such inquiry. But more than all the features above named is the consciousness of an identical Self. The psychological theories do not affect more than the scientific aspect of the matter. Upon this Self-identity of consciousness, which is a psychical fact, he raises his theory of the postulation of logical Identity, the greatest principle of thought. This has come to be through our demand for identity, based upon our consciousness of identity, and ratified by its working in the world of objects. So, too, the consciousness of Self and of Not-Self (as equivalent to the external world) has grown up through successful postulation to account for the felt unsatisfactoriness of experience. This gives the clue to his explanation of the rise of other Postulates\u2014Contradiction, and Excluded Middle, Hypothesis, Causation, Sufficient Reason, Uniformity of Nature, Space, and Time. One postulate is not yet fully axiomatic, that is, Teleology. Schiller again argues in favour of Teleology, and the necessity for anthropomorphism. The bias of Natural Science against these postulates, and the crude treatment of them in the past by their advocates account for the fact that Teleology is still a postulate and not an axiom.\n\nThe Personality of God is again briefly vindicated, as also is His Goodness, as a methodological postulate. Infinity is again denied. And Schiller concludes his powerful Essay with a polemic against intellectualism, and a plea for the Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge. The Will-to-believe must be regarded, and philosophy must be reconstructed on a voluntaristic basis.\n\nPassing now to the consideration of Humanism we may reserve the examination of the Preface to the last. For it is Schiller\u2019s latest contribution in the book, and also his most pronounced expression of opinion on our general problem.\n\nIn the first Essay on the Ethical Basis of Metaphysics, the development of his theory of knowledge is made clear. Schiller distinguishes between Irrationalism as a doctrine and the view that our cognitive activities are pervaded by the purposive character of mental life generally. The question of value must be raised; purpose and end are, in fact, fundamental to the right understanding of experience. This is further expounded in the \u2018Discourse Concerning Pragmatism,\u2019 entitled Useless Knowledge, in which the position is maintained that action is primary, and knowledge only secondary\u2014that the Good is the Source of the True. This is completed by the third Essay on Truth, in which the various definitions of truth are examined and shown to be open to serious objection. Truth is not individual either; it must win recognition from society. Pragmatism can show how this is possible, viz. by efficiency and usefulness being taken as the criteria of truth in our intellectual activity. The usefulness is relative to any human end, but ultimately to the perfection of our whole life.\n\nIn the Essay on Lotze\u2019s Monism, that philosopher\u2019s \u2018proof\u2019 of the underlying unity is subjected to attack. Schiller enlarges upon his previous view that Pluralism may \u2018beg\u2019 interaction.\n\nIn regard to the argument from Change, appeal must be made to our inner experience, and there we find the consciousness of change based on a feeling of our identity. But this does not apply to the Absolute, for we can have no such feeling of its identity. Lotze\u2019s re-creation of spiritual beings by their stepping out of the Absolute, at the close of his argument is an effort to save his theory from abstractness.\n\nSchiller agrees with Lotze\u2019s arguments to prove that God must be conceived as personal and spiritual. But he differs from him in the attempt to connect this view with the doctrine of God as the Unity of things. Even religion does not require this identification. The Unity of the Absolute could have no religious value. Lotze\u2019s admission of free-will affords a ground for the conception of a Divine guidance and Providence, but it creates an inherent instability in the Absolute. The mysterious problem of Evil thwarts the Unity of things, and destroys the argument. Lotze\u2019s identification of God with the Absolute leads him, according to Schiller, into a kind of Pantheism. The a priori proofs share, in common with Lotze\u2019s proof from interaction, the weakness of being too abstract. This kind of reasoning would hold in any kind of world.\n\nIn the Essay on Reality and Idealism, Schiller clearly indicates the connection between Pragmatism and the conviction of the Self\u2019s reality. \u2018The only certain and ultimate test of reality is the absence of internal friction, is its undisputed occupation of the field of consciousness, in a word, its self-sufficiency.\u2019 Upon this criterion the distinction between real and unreal, and even that between the Self and the World, is based. The emotional consequences of presentations in experience are various; so the subject must, of necessity, distinguish himself from the object, the world, which does not \u2018feel\u2019; and he must seek to control this realm. Hence the attention to phenomena which are followed by pains or other consequences which are practically important.\n\nThe chief remaining essay for our purposes\u2014since I am compelled to exclude the arguments concerning Immortality\u2014is that which controverts the main tenets set forth in Bradley\u2019s Appearance and Reality, in the interests of Schiller\u2019s pragmatistic theory. The title, \u2018On Preserving Appearances,\u2019 indicates its polemical aim. Schiller is opposed to the whole method of the dialectic of Bradley, by which everything is first convicted of unreality and then \u2018somehow\u2019 reconstituted by the Absolute. Such a negative procedure is itself a verdict of condemnation upon the arguments employed, and, perhaps, upon Logic itself, for \u2018nothing which exists in however despicable a sense can really be contradictory.\u2019 The contradictions can only be in our thought, for the reality is there in spite of them! Therefore, Bradley\u2019s criterion that the real is that which is not self-contradictory is only partial, the complete criterion being, according to Schiller, the principle of Harmony. The Absolute, furthermore, is \u2018quite as unknowable as Spencer\u2019s monstrosity.\u2019 And then once again Schiller lays it down that the only reality we can start with is our own immediate, personal experience, and that apart from this basis no ultimate reality can be reached. The distinction of \u2018appearance and reality\u2019 remains always relative to our knowledge of our world, or, if preferred, Schiller is willing to say \u2018that for me it remains relative to my world.\u2019\n\nIn the Preface, the chief topic is the advent of \u2018Humanism,\u2019 in place of the terms \u2018Pragmatism\u2019 and \u2018Personal Idealism.\u2019 It represents an attitude of thought which is sympathetic towards the full life of Personality. It signifies an attempt to put forward a philosophic theory of a \u2018re-anthropomorphized\u2019 or, as Schiller prefers, a \u2018re-humanized\u2019 universe. He is ready to stand by Protagoras, and maintain that Man is the measure of all things. Instead of illusory hopes of a philosophy without assumptions, Humanism candidly confesses that its starting-point is our immediate experience and experienced self, from which it can proceed in any direction. Even the a priori philosophers really take this for granted, and cannot give us any superhuman system.\n\nII.\n\nWith much of Schiller\u2019s philosophy of personality I find myself in hearty agreement. Without committing myself to his theory of knowledge, it seems plain to me that such a Pragmatism or Humanism depends for its very life upon the conviction of the reality of the Self. This is the starting-point, actual no less than theoretical, for a philosophy of postulation. If the fashionable \u2018Experience\u2019 philosophy will hide a multitude of distinctions in other realms, both of Absolutism and of Empiricism, here in Humanism it has to own its twofold aspect of subject and object. Schiller is ready to ask the simple question \u2018Whose experience?\u2019 which causes such a commotion among the \u2018Pure Experience\u2019 philosophers. And with the problem of the Self thus raised philosophy must deal. The task of Metaphysics is to explain the distinctions which palpably lie within experience, involving the problems of the relation of the Self to Nature, of Self to Self, and of Self to God.\n\nLet us briefly consider now the more detailed view of the Self given by Schiller. It seems to me that he does not improve his system by his distinction between the Empirical Self and the Transcendental Ego. For the latter is confessedly an ideal. The difficulties of the Kantian dualism concerning the Ego can hardly be avoided by clipping off the epistemological function of the Transcendental Ego, or by saying\u2014with surely a Bradleian reminiscence\u2014that the two are somehow one. Nor can the difficulty of knitting up the moments of our experience with an identical Ego, which we know as ourself, be overcome by making an Ideal Ego do it. Of course, there is this Interaction Theory to support, and both the Ego and the Self are needed for the \u2018stress\u2019 of the Divine and the human sides. But neither this nor the hypnotistic analogy will carry our sympathies any further in this direction.\n\nBriefly then, Schiller\u2019s view of the Self as real and the centre of experience and philosophy accords entirely with that adopted in the present work. Humanism insists on Personality throughout. With the intention of Schiller in giving a place to the Transcendental Ego as opposed to the Self as existing at any one moment, I am in sympathy, but I cannot endorse his use of the term so redolent with historical associations, nor can I approve of his method of seeking the Ego as distinct from the Self, in the future, as an Ideal. I agree with his maintenance of self-identity (worked out in \u2018Axioms as Postulates\u2019) as the basis of all postulation of identity and of the Law of Identity. His emphasis upon the whole Personality throughout his works, as opposed to a shallow empiricism, or an abstract intellectualism is also valuable. His recognition of purpose and practical needs, of individual and social satisfaction when experimentation is found to work is also true to a certain extent, and may be true in the sense that Pragmatism or Humanism claims.\n\nWith Schiller\u2019s views on Anthropomorphism and Teleology I am in accord, and so I may pass them over. It is the outcome of the Humanistic view of things to see that the significant thing in thought, as in all else, is to be aware of the active personality which reclaims an unknown void, and is rewarded by reality and enrichment of experience. And so the highest explanation of the Universe must be in the highest terms, along the lines of purpose, meaning, and development towards an Ideal, as we know it in ourselves.\n\nA discussion of Schiller\u2019s views of the Deity would strictly involve an estimate of his Interaction Theory. But this is not possible here. And. we are concerned more with those doctrines which have been emphasized in his recent writings. As to the Personality of God, I consider Schiller\u2019s views well-founded. At the same time some of his conclusions appear to be uncritically anthropomorphic, not only in his early work, but also in his later Essays, as when he says that the nature of a superhuman intelligence must be the same as ours, proceeding by experiment, adapting means to ends and learning from experience! This surely deserves the charge which Professor Howison brings against Schiller\u2019s \u2018God,\u2019 of being \u2018finite and pathological.\u2019\n\nBut there is another serious question to which my answers would scarcely coincide with his. I refer to the view of the finite nature of God. This is, of course, a part of the general discussion of Infinity, against which Schiller is strenuous in season and out of season. But strictly the question arises in this paper merely as bearing on our prime subject.\n\nNow I am unwilling to dogmatize in regard to the Infinite, and for this reason especially, viz. that mathematical usage has so put its stamp upon the term, as to invalidate any outside claim for it. Accordingly I consider that a different concept should be employed in philosophy. Again, I would not maintain that this metaphysical concept will meet the requirements of the definition of \u2018Infinity.\u2019 Hence it is of no avail to try and refute such a metaphysical Absolute or Perfect, with the objection that it does not answer to Kant\u2019s definition of Infinity, viz. \u2018that which cannot be completed by successive syntheses.\u2019 If the conception \u2018Absolute\u2019 be granted in a relative sense, relative like all else to our capabilities (surely a Humanistic position), there is no contradiction in regarding such a conception as preserving all that was valuable in the conception of the Infinite, without incurring the charges of falsity and abstractness which are hurled at us for using it in a \u2018philosophical\u2019 sense. The proper distance between the science of mathematics and constructive metaphysics is thereby preserved. If this, then, be what Schiller means when he says, \u2018to God, as to all realities, infinite has no meaning,\u2019 I should agree with him. But it is not. He will not allow one uninterrupted gaze towards reality as a whole. He denies that the universe may be conceived under such ideas. His pluralism is vital and fundamental. Not only is there no Absolute, no Unity of all; there is division and discord at the heart of things. We may hope for a unity as the world learns to swing together better, as Evolution does its work in nature, society, and the individual; but there is no underlying unity or world-ground. The whole process is one of approximation toward unity, never before realized in thought or existence; the Becoming is essential to the true conception of things, and it is in Time.\n\nThe idea of God as being but a part of the universe does not satisfy \u2018the craving for unity\u2019 which, abuse it as one will, has at least a pragmatic bearing. It seems to me that we require a Personal Ground of all things, the Supreme Unity. But I leave this for the present.\n\nGod is not limited by some accident or \u2018chance,\u2019 as Schiller implies as a possible view,\u2014\u2018dividing Him against Himself.\u2019 It is not reasonable to introduce chance in such a connection, but it is rational to endow the Perfect Personality with the power of Self-determination. I have previously indicated my objections to Pluralism. It lacks the defmiteness at least which belongs to the One. The possibility of ultimate interaction between pluralistic entities is opposed surely to our notions of rationality. And why the unity, which even Schiller has to admit to account for this ultimate possibility of interaction, should be merely abstract, I am at a loss to conceive.\n\nSchiller is willing to hold to Teleology as a postulate on its way to becoming an axiom. And yet against an \u2018infinite\u2019 unity he is emphatic. May not a similar venture of faith rationalize the universe, and so justify itself? May not Perfect Personality be the ground of all, even of the independence of the world of Egos? May not God be more than a strenuous Pilot wrestling with a refractory fleet in an unfortunate storm, and seeking to make a possible port? May He not be what unbounded worship wills, what faith believes, goodness implies, reason justifies, and love demands, when it uses the controversial terms \u2018Infinite\u2019 and \u2018Unity\u2019? In the light of the views which are set forth later, I think that the \u2018venture of faith\u2019 is reasonable and even necessary.\n\nNotes","title":"The Problem of Personality/Part 1/Chapter 5","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":6261}