The Idea of Nature - Collingwood PDF
The Idea of Nature - Collingwood PDF
IDEA OF NATURE
BY
"
:g. g.. COLLINGWOOD
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1945
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Capetown Bombay
Calcutta Madras
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY
INTRODUCTION 1
n. THE PYTHAGOREANS 49
1. Pythagoras 49
2. Plato: The Theory of Forms 55
(i) Reality and intelligibility of the forms 55
(ii) Forms conceived :first as immanent; later as
transcendent 57
(ni) Was the transcendence of the forms a Platonic con-
ception? 59
(iv) Participation and imitation 61
(v) The Parmenides. Immanence and transcendence
imply one another 63
CONTENTS vii
(vi) The influence of Cratylus . 65
(vii) The influence of Parmenides 68
(viii) Plato's mature conception of the forms 70
3. Plato's Cosmology: the Timaeus 72
Ill. ARISTOTLE 80
I. Meaning of cPV(fLS 80
2. Nature as self-moving 82
3. Aristotle's theory of knowledge 85
4. Aristotle's theology 87
5. Plurality of unmoved movers 89
6. Matter 9I
I. Berkeley . 113
2. Kant II6
n. MODERN PHYSICS
I. The old theory of matter.
2. Its complications and inconsistencies
3. The new theory of matter
4. The finitude of nature
INDEX 179
INTRODUCTION
I. Science and PhilosoPhy
IN the history of European thought there have been three
periods of constructive cosmological thinking; three periods,
that is to say, when the idea of nature has come into the focus
of thought, become the subject of intense and protracted
reflection, and consequently acquired new characteristics which
in their turn have given a new aspect to the detailed science of
nature that has been based upon it.
To say that the detailed science of nature is 'based' upon the
ide..a .0 nature does not imp1.y th.aftfie ld.'(;a o{riat~re. i!iJiene~~
the idea of nature as a whole, is worked out first, in abstraction
from any detailed study of natural fact, and that when this
abstract idea of nature is complete people go on to erect upon
it a superstructure of detailed natural science. What it implies
is not a temporal relation but a logical one. Here, as often, the
temporal relation inverts the logical relation. In natural science,
as in economics or morals or law, people begin with the details.
They begin by tackling individual problems as they arise. Only
when this detail has accumulated to a considerable amount do
they reflect upon the work they have been doing and discover
that they have been doing it in a methodical way, according
to principles of which hitherto they have not been conscious.
But the temporal priority of detailed work to reflection on
the principles implied in it must not be exaggerated. It would
be an exaggeration, for example, to think that a 'period' of
detailed work in natural science, or any other field of thought
or action, a 'period' lasting for half a century or even for half a
decade, is followed by a 'period> of reflection on the principles
which logically underlie it. Such a contrast between 'periods'
of non-philosophical thinking and subsequent t periods' of
philosophizing is perhaps what Hegel meant to assert in his
famous lament, at the end of the Preface to the Philosophic des
Rechts: 'When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a form of life
has aged; and grey in grey does not enable us to make it young
again, but only to know it. The owl of Minerva begins to fly
only at the coming of dusk.' If that was what Hegel meant,
he made a mistake: and a mistake which Marx only turned
B
2 INTRODUCTION
upside down and did not correct when he wrote that cphilosoph~~.
hitherto has confined itself to interpreting the world: the point,
however, is to change it' (Theses on F euerbach, xi). The complaint
against philosophy is borrowed, in the very same words, from
Hegel; only what Hegel represents as a necessary feature of all
philosophy Marx represents as a defect to which philosophy was
subject until he, Marx, revolutionized it.
In fact, the detailed work seldom goes on for any length of time
without reflection intervening. And this reflection reacts upon
the detailed work; for when people become conscious of the prin-
ciplesupon which they have been thinking or acting they become
conscious of something which in these thoughts and actions they
have been trying, though unconsciously, to do: namely to work
out in detail the logical implications ofthose principles. To strong
minds this new consciousness gives a new strength, namely a new
firmness in their approach to the detailed problems. To weak
minds it adds a new temptation, the temptation to that kind of
pedantry which consists in remembering the principle and for-
getting the special features of the problem to which it is applied.
The detailed study of natural fact is commonly called natural
science, or for short simply science; the reflection on principles,
whether those of natural science or of any other department of
thought or action, is commonly called philosophy. Talking in
these terms, and restricting philosophy for the moment to reflec-
tion on the principles of natural science, what I have just said may
be put py saying that natural science must come first in order that
philosophy may have something to reflect on; but that the two
things are so closely related that natural science cannot go on for
long without philosophy beginning; and that philosophy reacts
on the science out of which it has grown by giving it in future
a new firmness and consistency arising out of the scientist's new
consciousness of the principles on which he has been working.
For this reason it cannot be well that natural science should
be assigned exclusively to one class of persons called scientists
and philosophy to another class called philosophers.. A man
who has never reflected on the principles of his work has not
achieved a grown-up man's attitude towards it; a scientist who
has never philosophized about his science can never be more than
a second-hand, imitative, journeyman scientist. A man who has
never enjoyed a certain type of experience cannot reflect upon it;
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 3
a philosopher who has never studied and worked at natural science
cannot philosophize about it without making a fool of himself.
Before the nineteenth century the more eminent and dis-
t4nguished scientists at least had always to some extent philo-
sophized about their science, as their writings testify. And
inasmuch as they regarded natural science as their main work,
it is reasonable to assume that these testimonies understate the
extent of their philosophizing. In the nineteenth century a
fashion grew up of separating natural scientists and philosophers
into two professional bodies, each knowing little about the
other's work and having little sympathy with it. It is a bad
fashion that has done harm to both sides, and on both sides
there is an earnest desire to see the last of it and to bridge the
gulf of misunderstanding it has created. The bridge must be
begun from both ends; and I, as a member of the philosophical
profession, can best begin at my end by philosophizing about
what experience I have of natural science. Not being a pro-
fessional scientist, I know that I am likely to make a fool of
myself; but the work of bridge-building must go on.
2. The Greek view of nature
Greek natural science was based on the principle that the
world of nature is saturated or permeated by mind. Greek
thinkers regarded the presence of mind in nature as the source
of that regularity or orderliness in the natural world whose
presence made a science of nature possible. The world of nature
they regarded as a world of bodies in motion. The motions in
themselves, according to Greek ideas, were due to vitality or
'soul'; but motion in itself is one thing, they believed, and
orderliness another. They conceived mind, in all its manifesta-
tions, whether in human affairs or elsewhere, as a ruler, a
dominating or regula,ting element, imposing order first upon
itself and then upon everything belonging to it, primarily its
own b~dy and secondarily that body's environment.
Since the world of nature is a world not only of ceaseless
motion and therefore alive, but also a world of orderly or
regular motion, they accordingly said that the world of nature
is not only alive but intelligent; not only a vast animal with a
'soul' or life of its own, but a rational animal with a (mind'
of its own. The life and intelligence of creatures inhabiting the
4 INTRODUCTION
earth's surface and the regions adjacent to it, they argued,
represent a specialized local organization of this all-pervading
vitality and rationality, so that a plant or animal, according to
their ideas, participates in its own degree psychically in the life-
process of the world's 'soul' and intellectually in the activity
of the world's' mind', no less than it participates materially in
the physical organization of the world's 'body'.
That vegetables and animals are physically akin to the earth
is a belief shared by ourselves with the Greeks; but the notion
of a psychical and intellectual kinship is strange to us, and
constitutes a difficulty in the way of our understanding the relics
of Greek natural science which we find in their literature.
3. The Renaissance view of Nature
The second of the three cosmological movements mentioned
at the beginning of this chapter took place in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. I propose to designate its view of nature
by the name of 'Renaissance' cosmology. The name is not a
good one, because the word 'Renaissance' is applied to an
earlier phase in the history of thought, beginning in Italy with
the humanism of the fourteenth century and continuing, in the
same country, with the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies
of that century and the fifteenth. The cosmology I have now
to describe was in principle a reaction against these and might,
perhaps, be more accurately called' post-Renaissance'; but
this is a clumsy term.
Historians of art have lately been using, for some part of the
period with which I am concerned, the adjective 'baroque';
but this is a word borrowed from the technicalities of formal
logic as a term of contempt for a certain kind of bad taste
prevalent in the seventeenth century, and its adoption as a
descriptive epithet for the natural science of Galileo, Descartes,
and Newton would be 'bien baroque'.l The word 'gothic', as
applied to medieval architecture, succeeded in divesting itself
of its original significance and becoming a term merely descrip-
tive of a certain style; but no one, I think, ever proposed to call
I Saint-Simon, apud Littre, quoted in Croce, Storia delta Eta barocca in
Italia (Bari, 1928), p. 22. Cf. Encyclopedia: 'L'idee d.u baroque entratne avec
soi celle du ridicule pousse a l'exces.' And Francesco l\1ilizia, Dizionario delle
belle arti del rlisegno (1797): 'Barocco e il superlativo del bizzarro, l'eccesso del
ridicolo.' Both quoted in Croce, op. cit., p. 23.
THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE 5
the work of Aquinas or Scotus 'gothic philosophy'; and even
as applied to architecture the term is now disappearing. So I
shall use the term 'Renaissance', with this definition of my
meaning and this apology for departing from established usage.
The Renaissance view of nature began to take shape as
antithetical to the Greek view in the work of Copernicus (1473-
1543), Telesio (I508-88), and Bruno (1548-I600). The central
point of this antithesis was the denial that the world of nature,
the world studied by physical science, is an organism, and the
assertion that it is devoid both of intelligence and of life. It is
therefore incapable of ordering its own movements in a rational
manner, and indeed incapable of moving itself at alL The move-
ments which it exhibits, and which the physicist investigates, are
imposed upon it from without, and theirregularity is due to 'laws
of nature' likewise imposed from without. Instead of being an
organism, the natural world is a machine: a machine in the literal
and proper sense of the word, an arrangement of bodily parts
designed and put together and set going for a definite purpose
by an intelligent mind outside itself. The Renaissance thinkers,
like the Greeks, saw in the orderliness of the natural world an
expression of intelligence: but for the Greeks this intelligence was
nature's own intelligence, for the Renaissance thinkers it was the
intelligence of something other than nature: the divine creator
and ruler of nature. This distinction is the key to all the main
differences between Greek and Renaissance natural science.
Each of these cosmological movements was followed by a
movement in which the focus of interest shifted from nature to
mind. In the history of Greek thought this shift took place
with Socrates. Whereas previous thinkers had not neglected
ethics, politics, or even logic and the theory of knowledge, they
had concentrated their main effort of thought upon the theory
of nature. Socrates reversed this emphasis and concentrated
his thought on ethics and logic; and from his time onwards,
although the theory of nature was by no means forgotten even
by Plato, who did far more work on that subject than is
generally realized, the theory of mind predominated, and the
theory of nature took the second place.
This Greek theory of mind in Socrates and his successors was
intimately connected with and conditioned by the results
already obtained in the theory of nature. The mind that was
6 INTRODUCTION
studied by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was always first and
foremost mind in nature, the mind in the body and of the body,
manifesting itself by its control of the body; and when these
philosophers found themselves obliged to recognize mind as
transcending body, they stated this discovery in a way that
shows unmistakably how paradoxical it seemed to them and
how remote from their habitual or (as we sometimes say)
'instinctive' ways of thinking. Socrates in Plato's dialogues
over and over again expects to be met with incredulity and
misunderstanding when he sets out to assert that rational soul
or mind operates independently of the body: either when he is
discussing the theory of knowledge and contrasts the bodily
mind of appetite and sense with the pure intellectual appre-
hension of the forms which is effected by the rational soul's
wholly independent and self-contained activity without any
help from the body, or when he is expounding the doctrine of
immortality and asserting that the rational soul enjoys an
eternal life unaffected by the birth or death of the body
belonging to it.
The same tone is found in Aristotle, who treats it as a matter
of course that the soul' should be defined as the entelechy of
C
bodily organ and is not acted upon, as sense is, by its proper
objects (De Anima4z9aIS seqq.) so that it is nothing apart from
its activity of thinking (ibid. ZI-Z) and is 'separable' from the
body (ibid. 4zgbS). All this shows whatfrom a general knowledge
of pre-Socratic physics we should expect: that Greek thinkers in
general take it for granted that mind belongs essentially to body
and lives with it in the closest union, and that when they are
confronted with reasons for thinking this union partial, occa-
sional, or precarious, they are puzzled to know how this can be.
In Renaissance thought this state of things is precisely
reversed. For Descartes body is one substance and mind is
another. Each works independently of the other according to
its own laws. Just as the fundamental axiom of Greek thought
about mind is its immanence in body, so the fundamental
axiom of Descartes is its transcendence. Descartes knows very
THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE 7
well that transcendence must not be pushed to the point of
dualism; the two things must be connected somehow; but
cosmologically he can find no connexion short of God, and in
the individual human being he is driven to the desperate
expedient, justly ridiculed by Spinoza, of finding it in the pineal
gland, which he thinks must be the organ of union between
body and soul because, as an anatomist, he can find no other
function for it.
Even Spinoza, with his insistence on the unity of substance,
is in no better case; for thought and extension are in his
philosophy two utterly distinct attributes of this one substance,
and each, as an attribute, completely transcends the other.
Hence when in the eighteenth century the centre of gravity in
philosophical thought swung over from the theory of nature
to the theory of mind, Berkeley being the critical point here as
Socrates was for the Greeks, the problem of nature inevitably
stated itself in this form: how can mind have any connexion
with something utterly alien to itself, something essentially
mechanical and non~mental, namely nature? This was the
question, at bottom the only question, concerning nature which
exercised the great philosophers of mind, Berkeley, Hume, Kant,
Hegel.ln every case their answer was at bottom the same:
namely, that mind makes nature; nature is, so to speak, a by-
product of the autonomous and self-existing activity of mind.
I shall discuss this idealistic view of nature more fully here~
after; all I wish to make clear at this point is that there are
two things which it never meant. It never meant that nature
is in itself mental, made of the stuff of mind; on the contrary,
it set out from the assumption that nature is radically non-
mental or mechanical, and never went back on that assumption,
but always maintained that nature is essentially alien to mind,
mind's other or opposite. Secondly it never meant that nature
is an illusion or dream of mind, something non~existent: on the
contrary, it always maintained that nature really is what it
seems to be: it is the work of mind and not existing in its own
right, but a work really produced and, because really produced,
really existing.
A warning against these two errors is needed because they
have been over and over again taught as truths in modern
books whose authors are so much obsessed by the ideas of the
8 INTRODUCTION
twentieth century that they simply cannot understand those of
the eighteenth. They are, in a way, none the worse for this; it
is progress, of a sort, that people should have got right away
from the thoughts of their great-grandfathers; but that is not
a kind of progress which qualifies people for making historical
statements about the ideas which they have ceased to under-
stand; and when they venture to make such statements, and to
say that for Hegel ' material characteristics are delusive appear-
ances of certain mental characteristics' (C. D. Broad, The Mind
and its Place in Nature, Ig28, p. 624) or that according to
Berkeley , experience of green is entirely indistinguishable from
green' (G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1922, p. 14, where
Berkeley is not named, but seems to be meant) respect for their
personal attainments and their academic positions must not
blind a reader to the fact that they are publishing untrue
statements about something they have not understood.
The Greek view of nature as an intelligent organism was
based on an analogy: an analogy between the world of nature
and the individual human being, who begins by finding certain
characteristics in himself as an individual, and goes on to think
of nature as possessed of similar characteristics. By the work
of his own self-consciousness he comes to think of himself as a
body whose parts are in constant rhythmic motion, these
motions being delicately adjusted to each other so as to preserve
the vitality of the whole: and at the same time he finds himself
to be a mind directing the activity of this body in accordance
with its own desires. The world of nature as a whole is then
explained as a macrocosm analogous to this microcosm.
The Renaissance view of nature as a machine is equally
analogical in its origin, but it presupposes a quite different
order of ideas. First, it is based on the Christian idea of a
creative and omnipotent God. Secondly, it is based on the
human experience of designing and constructing machines.
The Greeks and Romans were not machine-users, except to a
very small extent: their catapults and water-clocks were not
a prominent enough feature of their life to affect the way in
which they conceived the relation between themselves and the
world. But by the sixteenth century the Industrial Revolution
was well on the way. The printing-press and the windmill, the
lever, the pump, and the pulley, the clock and the wheel-
THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE 9
barrow, and a host of machines in use among miners and
engineers were established features of daily life. Everyone
understood the nature of a machine, and the experience of
making and using such things had become part of the general
consciousness of European man. It was an easy step to the
proposition: as a c10ckmaker or millwright is to a clock or mill,
so is God to Nature.
after 547/6.
a Kv:Aw8poel.3fj t cylindrical', says pseudo-Plutarch (Swam. 2; apua Diels,
p. 16, 1. IS) using Theophrastus, 'with its height one-third of its diameter';
cf. Hippolytus, Ref. i. 6, apud Diels, ibid., 1. 33. Diogenes Laertius, however,
says that Anaximander regarded the earth as spherical, C1q,alpoEI8fj (Diels,
p. 14,1.5).
3 &.6PICTTOV Kal KaT' E180S Kal KaTa p.lrE9os 'indefinite both in kind and in
extent' (Simplicius, Phys. 154, 14, apua Diels, p. 16, 1. 6, using Theophrastus).
4 Kal 'TOUTO (se. T~ l1.1Te,pov) .tva! 'T~ O.'OV" &'O&'vaTOV 'Yap Kal &.vw~E9pov and the
Divine, he said, was this (the Boundless); for this was immortal and in-
destructible' (Aristotle, Physics, Hi. 203bU, apud Diels, p. 17, 1. 34).
! 'A. &'1Tfiq,.JvaTo 'TO lis &:rrfltpovs oupo.volis geotis 'A. declared the innumerable
worlds to be gods' (A~tius, i. 17. 12, apud Diels, p. 18,1. 30). A. a!liem opinio
est nativos esse deos longis interoallis orientis occiilentisque, eosque innumerabiles
esse mundos 'but A's opinion. is that there are gods, which have come into
existence by birth, situated in. the plane of the earth's equator at wide intervals.
4849 D
34 THE IONIANS
would appear to stand in flagrant contradiction with his own
reported doctrine (unless it is only a gloss, perhaps Aristotelian,
upon that doctrine) that what entitled the Boundless to be
called God was its infinity and eternity, whereas any given
world is finite in extent and finite in the duration of its life.
What could have led Anaximander into such a contradiction
we can only guess. This at any rate is clear, that his most
notorious departure from the cosmology of his master Thales
had a reasoned basis and must have led to reasoned conse-
quences. Water could not be the thing out of which everything
is made, because water, as wet, has an opposite, namely the
dry. Of a pair of opposites each implies the other, and both
must have arisen by differentiation out of something originally
undifferentiated. The thing out of which everything is made
must be, therefore, the undifferentiated. Within this a creative
process occurs by which opposites, the hot and the cold, the
wet and the dry, are generated and simultaneously segregated.
In this way, we are told, Anaximander did in fact argue. We
are also told that he regarded the creative process as consisting
of rotary movement, which might arise anywhere in the
Boundless and thus give rise to a world in any part of it.
This seems to imply that in theology Anaximander reacted
against the transcendence of Thales into a doctrine of imma-
nence. I Instead of conceiving God as a sort of divine magician
making the world by setting up a process of differentiation
within the undifferentiated primary matter, he seems to have
thought of world-making as a process which this primary
matter set going within itself by originating these local vortices.
and that these are innumerable worlds' (Cieero, de nat. Deorum, i. 10. 25,
ap!!d Diels, p. 18, I. 31). That Anaximander conceived these other worlds as
lying in the plane of the equator does not appear from any of our authorities
except Cicero.
I If Thales really said that' all things are full of gods' (as Aristotle says,
in English: and for the very good reason that the English word
is really nothing but the Latin translation of the Greek. For
example, a bullet flies through the air because the powder
behind it has exploded. We should not say that it flies 'by
nature', because the explosion was not in the bullet; the
momentum it conveyed to the bullet was conveyed to the
bullet from outside, and therefore the flight of the bullet is not
'natural' behaviour in the bullet but behaviour under con-
straint. But if in its flight the bullet penetrates a plank, it does
so because it is heavy enough to go through it instead of being
stopped by it, as a lighter missile would have been even though
travelling at the same velocity; therefore its penetrating power,
so far as that is a function of its weight, is a function of its
'nature J, and to that extent penetrating the plank is 'natural'
behaviour on the part of the bullet.
This is how the ronians used the word 'nature', exactly as we
sometimes use it still. Such use of a word does not commit the
user to any scientific or philosophical theory. If the word
'nature' means the internal source of a thing's behaviour, a
person who uses the word does not thereby commit himself to
the assertion that anything signified by it actually exists. A
I Metaphysics, .d, I0I4 b I6-Io15'I9.
THE IONIANS
man might say that there was no such thing as 'nature', mean-
ing by this not, as Gorgias meant, that there is no world of
existing things, but that there is no internal source from which
the behaviour of things proceeds. He might say that every
detail in the behaviour of everything was due to a special ad
hoc act of will on the part of an omnipotent God. In that case
the word' nature' would still be used in its original sense, but
the existence of any such thing would be denied.
Still less does the use of the word 'nature' commit the user
to any theory as to whether the different things that exist in
the world have different natures or one and the same nature.
'Is nature one or many?' is a question upon which the mere
fact that the word' nature' is used throws no light whatever.
A person who uses the word is, so far as that goes, equally at
liberty to say that there is one (nature' or that there are many
'natures', with no upward or downward limit to the question
'How many?' It will, of course, be understood that the question
'Is nature one or many?' does not mean 'Is the natural world
one collection of things or many such collections?' That is a
question which a sensible man would not trouble to ask. It
means 'Do the various kinds of behaviour which we find in the
world proceed from onc principle or from a number of different
principles? '
Least of all does mere use of the word (nature' commit the
user to any theory as to what in itself the thing is which, in
relation to the behaviour of the things that have it, is called
their 'nature'. For 'nature', in what I have called its original
sense, is a relative term. A thing's 'nature' is the thing in it
which makes it behave as it does. When this is said, the question
still remains perfectly open, 'What is the thing in it which makes
it behave as it does?' To say' Its nature' does not answer the
question, because to say 'Its nature is what makes it behave as
it does' is to utter a tautology and therefore to give no informa-
tion. It is like answering the question' Who is that lady married
to?' by saying' Her husband'.
On all these three points the Ionian philosophers did in fact
hold definite views. They believed that there was such a thing
as 'nature'; they believed that nature was 'one'; and they
believed that the thing which in its relation to behaviour was
called nature was in itself substance or matter. But these were
MEANING OF THE WORD 'NATURE' 47
philosophical or scientific doctrines; and they might have
abandoned anyone of them without abandoning their use of
the word' nature', or modified any of them without modifying
the sense in which they used it. For example, someone might
have said that the internal cause of a thing's behaviour is not
what it is made of, but the arrangements of its parts: not its
'matter' but its' form '. In that case he might have said: 'The
true nature of things is not matter but form.' This would not
imply a change in the meaning attached to the word 'nature'.
All that has altered is its application.
The point has to be cleared up because it has been left in a
state of confusion in the works of a very distinguished scholar,
John Burnet, to whom all students of early Greek philosophy
look as to one of their most valuable guides. Burnet says that
the word tftvats meant originally the particular stuff of which
t
teristics.
(U) Forms conceived first as immanent, later as transcendent.
This is the way, or at any rate part of the way, in which we
find 'perceptibles' and 'intelligibles' related in the works of
Plato. There seem to be two stages in the Greek idea of that
relation. At first the intelligible form or 'idea' seems to have
been merely the formal element or structure of a thing which,
looked at as a whole, consisted of matter organized in a certain
way. The matter was that which underwent formation or
organization: the form was the way in which the matter was
THE PYTHAGOREANS
organized. The world, the aggregate of natural things, was
throughout its fabric a complex of matter and form. There was
nowhere in the world any unformed matter, nowhere in the
world any form not embodied in matter. Outside the world
there might be, as the Ionians believed, unformed matter to
an indefinite amount; but it did not follow that there was also
disembodied form. Form was wholly immanent in the world.
Form, the intelligible, had its being only as that which rendered
intelligible the world in which it was immanent.
In addition to this view, however, we find in Greek philo-
sophical literature another, according to which form is tran-
scendent. Form is now conceived as having its being not in the
perceptible world of nature at all, but 'by itself' (mho l<a8' CLlh6)
in a separate world, not the perceptible world of material things
but the intelligible world of pure forms.
This view of form as transcendent has been powerfully and
elaborately stated by Plato in the Symposium and the Phaedo.
Scholars who have analysed the language of the Platonic
dialogues statistically, with a view to determining their relative
date, have placed these two dialogues close together and have
assigned them to the second of the four' groups' into which they
have divided the Platonic writings. Whatever view is taken
of Platonic 'stylometry' in its more detailed development, I
modern scholars are agreed that both the Symposium and the
Phaedo were written in or soon after 385, when Plato had
I Lutoslawski, The Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic (London, 1897). His
names for the four' groups' (pp. 162-83) are (I) Socratic Group (Apology,
Euthyphro, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, Gorgias);
(Il) First Platonic Group (Cratylus, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic i); (Ill)
Middle Platonic Group (Republic ii-x, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Parmenides);
(IV) Latest Group (SoPhist, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, Laws).
Lutoslawski's work was a continuation and elaboration of researches set on
foot by Lewis Campbell in 1867. It is now generally agreed that Campbell's
methods were in principle sound, and that in its main lines the chronology of
Plato's dialogues has been definitely established by their use. Thus A. E.
Taylor (Plato, I926, p. I9) accuses Lutoslawski of having 'pushed a sound
principle to the pitch of absurdity in the attempt' to date every dialogue
relatively to the rest, but admits and incorporates into his own work' the broad
discrimination between an earlier series of dialogues of which the RepubZ~c is
the capital work and a later series '. And L. Robin (Platon, Paris, I935, p. 37)
in effect agrees both that the method of Campbell is sound and that Lutoslawski
has been led by its attractions into a degree of detail which cannot be justified.
The date 385 is fixed by a reference in the Symposium to an event which
happened in that year;
PLATO: THE THEORY OF FORMS 59
recently founded the Academy and was between 40 and 45
years old.
(iii) Was the transcendence of the forms a Platonic conception?
It is possible that the conception of form as immanent was the
original conception: the original Pythagorean conception, in the
case of mathematical forms and the world of nature; the original
Socratic conception, in the case of ethical forms and the world
of human conduct. This seems likely on general grounds; for it
would appear natural that, when people first think about form
and its relation to matter, they should begin by thinking of it
as correlative to matter and as existing only in things which
have a material element as well. And it may have been Plato
who first abandoned this original conception and first pro-
pounded the conception of form as transcendent.
Before looking at the evidence which might be used to sup-
port this suggestion, I will try to define the suggestion itself
a little more precisely. Two qualifications must be borne in
mind.
First, it must be understood that immanence and transcen-
dence are not mutually exclusive conceptions. I have already
pointed out, in connexion with the contrast between the
transcendent magician-god of Thales and the immanent world-
god of Anaximander (see p. 34, footnote I), that a theology
of pure transcendence is a thing as hard to find in the history
of thought as a theology of pure immanence. All theologies
have in fact both immanent and transcendent elements in
them, though in this or that case this or that element may be
obscured or suppressed. What is true in theology is equally
true in the case of a metaphysical conception like form. The
suggestion we are considering, therefore, is not that a purely
immanent conception of form was replaced by a purely tran-
scendent one, but that a conception in which immanence was
emphasized gave way to one in which transcendence was
emphasized: the relatively unemphasized element never being
denied, or at least never being denied except by quite incom-
petent and muddle-headed persons.
Secondly, it must be understood that words like' discovery',
'first', or 'novelty', when used in connexion with the history
of philosophy, bear a rather special sense. Normally, a person
who is said to 'make a philosophical discovery' in, say, his
60 THE PYTHAGOREANS
fortieth year would tell you, if you asked him, that he had known
for a long time, perhaps all his life, the thing which he is said
to have discovered; and that what he did in his fortieth year
was not to discover it but to see for the first time, or to see more
clearly and steadily than before, the connexions between it and
certain other things; or else to see these connexions in a new
light, as useful or clarifying connexions, having seen them
hitherto as irksome and confusing connexions. Normally,
again, a man who is said to have 'made a philosophical dis-
covery' would tell you, if you asked him, that he had the idea
from something that somebody else had written or said.
Whether this forerunner fully understood what he was writing
or saying is doubtful; but if he did, the discovery belongs to
_him, not to the man who gets the credit for it. And even if he
did not, he deserves some share of the credit. Normally, I say,
because how ready a man is to give someone else, or his own
past self, the credit for having already known these things
depeqds on his generosity, his candour, his readiness to admit
his debt to other persons, or the debt of his present self to his
past self, or the opposites of these qualities. Historically, there
always are such debts, whether they are admitted or no. A man
may be psychologically incapable of admitting them, and yet
intellectually able to make important discoveries. But that is
exceptional. Normally, important discoveries are made by
people whose psychological condition with respect to these
questions is a healthy one. If the man who took the momentous
philosophical step of moving from a relatively immanent to a
relatively transcendent conception of form was the same man
who wrote the Platonic dialogues, he was a man of remarkable
modesty and remarkable humour; the last man in the world to
claim exclusive credit for his own discoveries; a man much
likelier to over-estimate than to under-estimate the debt which
in making them he owed to the predecessors whom he has so
vividly and sympathetically brought before us on the stage of
his theatre.
The suggestion we are considering, thus qualified, falls into
two parts. First, that jn early Pythagoreanism mathematical
forms were conceived primarily though not exclusively as
immanent, and that Plato worked out and consolidated, though
he neither absolutely originated nor believed himself to have
PLATO: THE THEORY OF FORMS 6I
absolutely originated, a conception of them as primarily though
not exclusively transcendent; and secondly, that in the human-
istic philosophy of Socrates ethical forms were conceived as
primarily though not exclusively immanent, and that Plato
worked out and consolidated in the same way, and subject
to the same qualifications, a conception of them as primarily
transcendent.
(iv) Participation and imitation. With regard to the first
point there js a curious piece of evidence in Aristotle's Meta-
'
phys'tcs, 987b II- I3 : Ot< fLEP
\ \
yap
nvvayopwt
Q' " .,
fUf.LYJO'Et Ta OVTa
A, \ l' ~'Q ~ T7\ I <;:> \ e' t ; " [3--' ,
't'amv wat TWV apwf.LWv, .LJJ\aTWV O f.L ESEt, TOVVOf.La f.LTa a./IWV
(the Pythagoreans say that things imitate numbers; Plato that
they participate in them: a merely verbal change). This occurs
in a passage dealing with Plato's philosophy and describing it
as very much like Pythagoreanism in its general features but
different from it in certain special ways. The general resem-
blance does not imply affiliation, for Aristotle himself says at
the beginning of the same passage that Plato derived his
philosophical views from early contact with the Heraclitean
Cratylus and later association with Socrates (Met. 987"32 seqq.).
The passage is curious because' imitation' implies transcendence
while' participation' implies immanence. It is for this reason
that Sir David Ross in his note on the sentence (Aristotle's
Metaphysics, Oxford, I924, vol. i, p. I62), calls it 'surprising
that Aristotle should describe the change from f.L{f.L7]O'tS to p-8gts
as merely verbal'. It would be less surprising if Plato's change
of terminology had been intended to signalize the fact that the
Pythagoreans had put forward an immanence-theory of form
, but had used a vocabulary which implied a transcendence-
theory. In that case a post-Pythagorean who wished to put
forward a transcendence-theory would find it necessary to
distinguish more clearly than his predecessors between tran-
scendence-language and immanence-language, and might very
reasonably criticize the Pythagoreans for saying transcendence
when they meant immanence.
There is independent evidence that Plato, when he began
putting forward his own transcendence-theory, found a suitable
terminology already in existence but used for a different purpose.
In the Phaedo transcendence-phrases like who 8 gO'Tt and aUTO
Ka8' a{m> are freely used, as is well known, without explanation,
62 THE PYTHAGOREANS
as if they were already familiar; though whether this means
familiar to a circle of Socratic hearers in 399 or to a circle of
Platonic readers in 385 is another question. Obvious though
this implied familianty with transcendence-language is, how-
ever, it is still more obvIOus that no familiarity is implied with
the transcendence-theory Socrates' expresses by using it.
Either the audience, the 399 audience or the 385 audience, has
been accustomed to hearing transcendence-language used for the
expression of a very imperfectly thought-out transcendence-
theory, or else they have heard it used for the expression of an
immanence-theory. But these two alternatives are not really
distinct. For it is something of an over-simplification to
d escn' b '
e j1-!j1-'T}(ltS or j1-E'8E\,tS,
{; aV'TO, \ 0n ECT7'W
" , \ KO,8' aUTO,
or aUTO " or
indeed any other terms whatever, as transcendence-language'
or 'immanence-language', as if their use implied transcendence
or immanence only. Transcendence and immanence imply each
other; and consequently j1-lp.'T}(lts, which asserts transcendence,
implies immanence, while j1-8Es's, which asserts immanence,
implies transcendence. '
To say that a thing' participates in' a form, or ' shares in' it,
is to use a legal metaphor whose exact significance in such a
context is not easy to estimate. The legal conception which is
being metaphorically used is the conception of joint ownership;
and the verb {J,E'T'XEW normally has a double object, an accusa-
tive of the share and a genitive of that which is shared. Thus,
to say that a rose has its share of red' is to say that there is red
in the rose, hence that red is immanent in the rose: but it is also
to imply that there is other red which is not this rose's share
and is therefore outside it. The other shares of red are, no
doubt, in other roses. But what one is trying to describe in this
legal metaphor is a state of things in which one and the same
colour, red, is found in many different roses but remains one
and the same wherever it is found; this is implied when one
makes the statement that all these roses have their shares 'of
red'. One is even implying that this single indivisible thing
called 'red' is independent of there being any roses at all; just
as the statement' I have a share in the Great Western Railway',
which asserts that the Great Western Railway is divisible and
that I have a part of it, implies that the Great Western Railway
is one and indivisible, a single business unit, and that this
PLATO: THE THEORY OF FORMS
business unit is independent of there being any 'shareholders
in' it, so that if all shareholders were abolished and it were
confiscated by a socialist government it would still be the Great
Western Railway.
If you say that a thing' imitates' a form, you are saying that
the form is not in the thing but outside it. But you are implying
that the thing and the form which it imitates have something
in common; for nothing can imitate any other thing except by
having something in common with that other thing. 'What they
'have in common' is something in which they 'share'. For
example, if you say that red is not shared out among roses but
is a single and indivisible thing, an archetypal red independent
of all the roses in the world, you will describe the relation
between a given rose and this archetypal red by saying that
the rose 'imitates' red. But when you ask how a rose could
imitate red, you will have to answer: 'By having a colour of its
own, namely a colour like enough to red to pass as an imitation
of it'. And when you ask how like it must be, you must
answer: 'As like as red is to red.' The rose can imitate red only
because it has red in itself. As immanence implies transcend-
ence, so transcendence implies immanence.
(v) The Parmeniaes. Immanence and transcenaence imply one
another. The mutual implication of transcendence and imma-
nence is not only a truth, it is a truth which Plato discovered
and expounded; though his exposition of it was only written
down between fifteen and twenty years after he wrote his
expositions of the transcendence-theory, and his discovery of it
is there presented, characteristically enough, as a piece of tardy
justice done to a great man who had taught it nearly a century
ago.
The great man was Parmenides of Elea, and Plato acknow-
ledges the debt which he owes to the Italian philosopher by
publishing his discovery in a dialogue called after him and
describing a conversation between him and Socrates which is
feigned to have happened about 450 B.C. The dialogue was
written soon after 369.1
The young Socrates begins (I29) by stating and defending the
immanence-theory of form, and describing the relation between
I On the dates see A. E. Taylor, The Parmenides of Plato, Oxford. 1934.
pp. 1-4
THE PYTHAGOREANS
it and the things which are formed in the participation-language.
Parmenides replies that this participation-language, if taken
seriously, commits you to thinking of the form as divisible, in
which case you have surrendered its unity; whereas if form is
not one and indivisible it is nothing (131). The young Socrates,
like so many philosophers in distress, takes refuge in a limited
ad hoc subjective idealism: perhaps, he says, forms are only
thoughts. Parmenides with one turn of a wrist pulls him out
of that bolt-hole, and Socrates once more faces the music, this
time by stating the transcendence-theory and using the
imitation-language. Parmenides replies (with the rapidity and
conclusiveness which are so characteristic of this dialogue, and
give the lie to those who think Plato's growing absorption in
philosophical problems is by now weakening his grip as a
dramatic writer) that if anything is like the form it must have
something in common with the form, and this (something in
common' is a second form, immanent of course; and if you
convert this immanent form into a transcendent form you will
need a third form, and so on; so the conversion of immanence
(participation) into transcendence (imitation) does not solve
our problem (132-3).
The arguments of Parmenides are conclusive as against
both the immanence-theory and the transcendence-theory
taken separately, as one-sided and mutually exclusive theories.
They would have no weight against a theory in which imma-
nence and transcendence were regarded as correlatives mutually
implying each other. People who read them often fancy that
no such third theory is possible; that any theory of form must
be either a one-sidedly immanence-theory or a one-sidedly
transcendence-theory; and that since Parmenides has exploded
both these varieties of it, the (Platonic Theory of Forms' is
henceforth bankrupt. This is a mistake. What Parmenides
has shown is not that the theory of forms is untenable, but that
when you try to state such a theory in terms of immanence you
are implying transcendence, and when you try to state it in
terms of transcendence you are implying immanence.
It thus appears, I do not say proved, but probable from the
evidence in our possession that the original Pythagorean con-
ception of form in the world of nature was a conception framed
chiefly, though not exclusively, in terms of immanence, the
PLATO: THE THEORY OF FORMS
transcendence-element appearing, perhaps, mainly in the choice
of vocabulary; and that Plato distinguished these two elements
more clearly than his predecessors and began by emphasizing
the element that had been neglected; perhaps by over-empha-
sizing it. Later it appears that Plato recognized the two
elements to be logically interdependent.
With regard to the Socratic conception of form in the world
of human activity the same thing seems to have happened.
To quote Aristotle once more (Met. I078b30-X), 'Socrates did
not make universals or definitions separable, but others
separated them' 0 fJ-V J}WKpd:TYJS Ta Ka86>.ov ov XWpGGTa J:Trott
OvO TOVS 0PW/1,Q'/Js' ol 0' xwpGGav. By' others' Aristotle means
Plato. This has been denied in the interests of a theory that
the views propounded by 'Socrates' in the Platonic dialogues,
or at any rate in a certain group of them which includes the
Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, were the views actually
maintained by Socrates himself. According to that theory, the
transcendence-conception expounded in those three dialogues
must be Socratic in origin and the contrast asserted in this
sentence between Socratic imman!'!nce and Platonic transcen-
dence must be illusory. Sir David Ross, however, has shown
conclusively (Aristotle's Metaphysics, cit., ii. 420-X), by com-
paring this passage in book M with what is practically a dupli-
cate in book A, that 'others' does mean Plato, and that
Aristotle is here telling us that ethical forms were regarded by
Socrates as immanent, by Plato as transcendent.
(vi) The influence of Cratylus., If the conception of form in
Pythagoreanism and in the philosophy of Socrates was in the
first instance an immanence-conception, what was it that drove
Plato towards the opposite extreme? Aristotle (Met. 987a32)
says that Plato in his youth was instructed in Heraclitean
ideas by Cratylus. Elsewhere (Met. IOIO a 7) he tells us that
many people, starting from the Heraclitean doctrine of a
universal flux, came to the sceptical conclusion that if every-
thing was constantly changing no statement about anything
could be true (7TEpt yE TO 7TclVT'[] 7Tav-rws fJ-Ta{3aMov OVK EvOEXEGOaG
M7J8dw). Consequently, says Aristotle, Cratylus ended by
making up his mind never to speak at all: he only wagged his
fi nger (ov'8EV
\" CPTO OEtV
<:> -
/\yw
"
all/\a
'" \
TOV
I\
oaKTV/\OV
<:>
, ,
KWE fl-OVOV
I ' )
1. Meaning of ,pvats
Before considering the doctrine of Book A it is necessary to
analyse the passage in Book LI where Aristotle discusses the
meaning of the word cpuats. Aristotle has a characteristic method
in philosophical lexicography. He recognizes that a single word
has several different meanings, and never falls into the stupid
mistake of supposing that one word means one thing: on the
other hand, he recognizes that these various meanings are con-
nected among themselves, and that the word is not equivocal
because it has more than one meaning. He thinks that of its
various meanings one is the deepest and truest meaning; the
others are approximations to it arising from varying degrees of
failure to grasp this deepest meaning. Consequently he arranges
his meanings in a series like shots on a target which gradually
creep in and find the bull.
He distinguishes seven meanings of the word cpuats.
(I) Origin or birth: 'as if' , says he, 'the v were pronounced
long.' The v is actually short; and Sir David Ross (op. cit.,
ad lac.) points out that in actual Greek literature the word
never has this meaning and conjectures, no doubt rightly, that
this is a sense speculatively forced upon the word by mistaken
MEANING OF rpYI Br
etymologizing in the fourth century. Thus the first shot re-
corded by Aristotle misses the target altogether.
(2) That out of which things grow, their seed. This again is
a meaning nowhere found in Greek: I imagine it is put in as a
link between the first meaning and the third.
(3) The source of movement or change in natural objects (we
shall see later that a natural object is one which moves itself).
This is the meaning when we say that a stone falls, or that fire
rises, by nature: it corresponds to the ordinary untechnical
Greek usage.
(4) The primitive matter out of which things are made. This
is the sense emphasized by the Ionians. Burnet would regard it
as the only sense which the word had in early Greek philosophy.
It would be truer, I think, to say that in sixth-century
philosophy cpvas meant what it always did mean, namely the
essence or nature of things; but that the Ionians, by a philo-
sophical peculiarity, not a lexicographical one, tried to explain
the essence or nature of things in terms of the stuff out of which
they were made. (Cf. above, pp. 45 ff.)
(5) The essence or form of natural things. This is how we find
the word actually used both in philosophy and in ordinary
Greek, in fifth-century writers; but the definition is faulty
because circular. To define nature as the essence of natural
things leaves the term' natural things' undefined.
(6) Essence or form in general. Plato, e.g., speaks of 7j TOV
ci:yaOov cpvas, and the good is not a natural thing. The circle is
here removed, but in Aristotle's opinion the term is now being
too widely and loosely used: so he proceeds to narrow it again, .
but removes the circle by defining the term natural things' as
meaning things that have a source of movement in themselves'.
(7) The essence of things which have a source of movement in
themselves. This Aristotle regards as the true and fundamental
meaning, and this, therefore, is how he uses the word himself.
It certainly does accurately correspond with the ordinary Greek
usage. When a Greek writer contrasts cpvas with TxV1J (i.e.
what things are when left to themselves with what human skill
can make of them) or cpvas with fila (how things behave when
left to themselves with how they behave when interfered with)
he implies that things have a principle of growth, organization,
and movement, in their own right and that this is what he
G
82 ARISTOTLE
means by their nature; and when he calls things natural he
means that they have such a principle in them.
2. Nature as self-moving
The world of nature is thus for Aristotle a world of self-
moving things, as it is for the ronians and for Plato. It is a
living world: a world characterized not by inertia, like the world
of seventeenth-century matter, but by spontaneous movement.
Nature as such is process, growth, change. This process is a
development, i.e. the changing takes successive forms a, {J, y, ...
in which each is the potentiality of its successor; but it is not
what we call' evolution', because for Aristotle the kinds of
change and of structure exhibited in the world of nature form
an eternal repertory, and the items in the repertory are related
logically, not temporally, among themselves. It follows that
the change is in the last resort cyclical; circular movement is
for him characteristic of the perfectly organic, not as for us of
the inorganic.
Since nature is self-moving, it is illogical to postulate an
efficient cause outside nature to account for the changes that
take place in it. No doubt if there had been a time when nature
did not yet exist, an efficient cause outside it would have been
necessary to bring it into existence; but Aristotle follows the
Timaeus in holding that there never was such a time. The
process of the world is for him therefore exactly what Plato in
the Timaeus said it could not be, namely a self-causing and
self-existing process.
This looks as if Aristotle had thrown in his lot with the
materialists, of whom Aristophanes wrote that Zeus is dethroned
and Vortex reigns in his stead. But in M et. A God is reintro-
duced into cosmology by an entirely new argument. In order to
be a materialist on these lines, one would have to hold, as many
modern thinkers have held and some still do hold, that the laws
of nature are merely empirical descriptions of the ways in which
things actually do happen. There are bodies in motion; they
must move somehow; and the ways in which as it happens they
do move are called by us laws of nature, where by calling them
laws we do not imply a lawgiver or ascribe to them any impera-
tive or compulsive force, but merely signify their general
character. But Greek thought never adopted this position.
NATURE AS SELF-MOVING
Nature, for the Greeks, was characterized not merely by change
but by effort or nisus or tendency, a tendency to change in
certain definite ways. The seed is pushing its way up through
the soil, the stone pressing down upon it; the young animal is
working at increasing its size and developing its shape until it
reaches the size and shape of an adult, and then its effort,
having reached the goal, ceases. All process involves a distinction
between the potential and the actual, and the potential is the
seat of a nisus in virtue of which it is forcing its way towards
actuality. This conception of nisus as a factor running through
the entire natural world, with its teleological implications about
ends towards which natural processes are directed, was at one
time rejected by modern science as a piece of anthropomorphism.
But it is by no mean an anthropomorphic idea, unless we falsely
identify nisus with conscious volition. No doubt it would be
anthropomorphic in the worst sense to credit the seed with a
knowledge of what it is trying to do, an imagination of itself
a:s a full-grown plant; but because the seed does not know that
it is trying to become a plant we are not entitled to say that it
is not unconsciously trying to do so. There is no ground for
thinking unconscious effort an impossibility. And more recently
the theory of evolution has necessitated a return to something
not altogether unlike the Aristotelian theory of potentiality.
I t is widely recognized that a process of becoming is conceivable
only if that which is yet unrealized is affecting the process as a
goal towards which it is directed, and that mutations in species
arise not through the gradual working of the laws of chance but
by steps which are somehow directed towards a higher form-
that is, a more efficient and vividly alive form-of life. In this
respect, if modern physics is coming closer to Plato as the great
mathematician-philosopher of antiquity, modern biology is
coming closer to its great biologist-philosopher Aristotle, and
evolutionary philosophies like those of Lloyd Morgan, Alexan-
der, and Whitehead are frank in their acceptance of the ideas of
potentiality, nisus, and teleology.
The conception of development is fatal to materialism.
According to a materialistic metaphysics, that is to say, a
metaphysics according to which bodily existence is the only
kind of existence, whatever works or produces results must be
a body: in other words, there can be no immaterial causes.
ARISTOTLE
But development implies an immaterial cause. If a seed is really
developing into a plant, and not merely changing into it by
pure chance owing to the random impact of suitable particles
of matter from outside, this development is controlled by some-
thing not material, namely the form of a plant, and of that
specific plant, which is the Platonic idea of the plant as the
formal cause of the full-grown plant and the final cause of the
process by which the seed grows into it. This idea, of course,
is not an idea in the ordinary English sense of a thought in
somebody's mind. It does not exist in the mind of the plant;
for if the plant has a mind at all, it has not the sort of mind that
is capable of conceiving abstract ideas. It is an idea in the
technical Platonic sense, something objectively real but not
material.
So far, we are following Plato; but Aristotle now takes a step
beyond him. For Plato, the energy which is canalized by the
idea is not excited by it but exists independently of it. The
origin of this energy is due to an efficient. cause; and Plato's
doctrine, if expressed in Aristotelian language, is that though
the formal and final causes may be identical the efficient cause
is something quite different from them. The mere crude force
which works in the growth of a seed is one thing and the con-
trolling influence which directs that force into the production
of a plant is another. Aristotle, on the contrary, conceives the
notion of a final cause which not only directs but also excites
or awakens the energy which it controls, by arousing in the
appropriate object a nisus towards its own realization in bodily
form. It is thus both a final cause and an efficient: but an
efficient cause of a very peculiar kind, an immaterial effiqient
cause. And Aristotle arrives at this conception of an immaterial
efficient cause by reflection on the fact of development; for
development implies nisus, that is, a movement or process not
merely orientated towards the realization in bodily form of
something not yet so realized, but actually motived by the
tendency towards such realization. The seed only grows at aU
because it is working at becoming a plant; hence the form of
a plant is the cause not only of its growing in that way but of
its growing at all, and is therefore the efficient as well as the
final cause of its growth. The seed grows only because it wants
to become a plant. :Et desires to embody in itself, in material
NATURE AS SELF-MOVING 8S
shape, the form of a plant which otherwise has a merely ideal
or immaterial existence. We can use these words 'want' or
, desire' because although the plant has no intellect or mind and
cannot conceive the form in question it has a soul or !f;vx~ and
therefore has wants or desires, although it does not know what
it wants. The form is the object of these desires: in Aristotle's
own words, it is not itself in motion (for it is not a material
thing and therefore of course cannot be in motion) but it causes
motion in other things by being an object of desire: KLVZ ws
EPW/LEVOV (r072b3).
Now the desire of the material thing is a desire to embody
this form in its own matter, to conform itself to it and to
imitate it, as well as possible, in that matter. The form, in
order to excite such desire, must already be in its own right
something worth imitating, something having an activity of
its own which is inherently valuable. What kind of activity
can we ascribe to the immaterial being which is in this sense the
unmoved first mover of the natural world?
3. Aristotle's theory of knowledge
In order to answer this question we must turn to Aristotle's
theory of knowledge. Long before his time the Greeks had
discovered that sound is a rhythmical vibration set up by a
sonorous body and transmitted by the air to the mechanism of
hearing. The essence of this mechanism is that it is a part of
the organism which picks up the vibrations from the air and
vibrates itself in the same rhythm. Any sound having a rhythm
which our ears cannot reproduce in themselves is inaudible to
us. To reproduce in myself a rhythmical vibration of this kind,
and to hear a sound, are the same thing; because, for the Greeks,
the soul is nothing but the vital activities of the body, and
therefore the gulf which exists in modern thought between the
bodily vibrations of the aural mechanism and the mental
sensation of sound was for them non-existent. Now, the bronze
of the bell, and the gases of the air, do not enter into my
organism; but the rhythm of their vibrations does enter into it ;
and it is precisely this entrance of the rhythm into my head
which is my hearing of the sound. But a rhythm is a Pytha-
gorean or Platonic form; it is an immaterial thing, a type of
structure, or in Aristotle's language a '\6yos. To hear a ringing
86 ARISTOTLE
bell, then, is to receive into one's own organism the ..\6yos of the
ringing bell without its iJAYJ; and this, generalized, gives us
Aristotle's definition of sensation. The ringing of the bell, its
rhythmical vibration, reproduces itself in my head; and that
is hearing. Similarly with sight and the other senses. In every
case there is a perceived object, which is a certain kind of matter
possessing whether permanently or temporarily a certain form:
to perceive that object is to reproduce the form in ourselves
while the matter remains outside ourselves. Hence Aristotle's
definition of sense as the reception of sensible form without its
matter.
This is not a representational or copy-theory of perception.
It would be false to say that on Aristotle's view what we hear
is the ringing in our head, which resembles the ringing of the
bell in pitch and tone. For the note of the bell is nothing but a
..\6yos or rhythm: it simply is the rhythm of 480 vibrations a
second or whatever it may be. Consequently the note ringing
in our head is not another note like that of the bell, it is the
very same note; precisely as the equation (x+y)2 = x2 +zxy+YI
is the very same equation when x = 2 and y = 3 that it is when
x = 3 and y = 4. The note is not matter, it is form; true, a
form which, to exist, must exist in some matter; but it is the
same form in whatever matter it exists.
Now sensation is a kind of cognition; not a perfect kind,
because in hearing the bell we only hear its note, and do not
hear its shape or colour or chemical composition. But to this
extent it is a fair example of cognition, that what we do hear
is a form and that the way in which we hear it is by receiving
that form into our organ of hearing. Suppose now there were a
kind of knowledge whose object was a form not embodied in any
matter: for example, the form of the good, assuming that there
is such a thing. If we apprehend that form by thought, we can
only do so by receiving it into our mind, experiencing it as a
way in which our mind is organized for the time being, just as
we hear a note by experiencing it as a way in which our ear is
organized for the time being. In the case of the bell, the bronze
remains outside us; but in the case of the good, where there is
no matter, only form, nothing remains outside us; the entire
object reproduces itself (not a copy of itself, but its very self) in
our intellect. Hence, as Aristotle puts it, in the case of objects
ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 87
where there is no matter, the knower and the known are
identical.
4. Aristotle's theology
In the light of this idea let us look back at the distinction
drawn in the Timaeus between God as eternal thinker, subject,
mind, and the forms as eternal immaterial objects. God in the
Timaeus certainly thinks the forms; therefore, according to
Aristotle, God and the forms are not two but one. The forms
are the ways in which God thinks, their dialectical structure is
the articulation of His thought; and conversely God is the
activity whose diverse aspects we are describing whenever we
identify this or that form. This identification of God with the
forms removes all the objections brought by Aristotle against
the Platonic theory of forms; for those objections are directed
not against the conception of form as such-Aristotle himself
constantly uses the conception-nor yet against the conception
of transcendent forms existing apart from all matter-that, too,
is a doctrine of his own no less than of Plato's-but against the
conception of these forms as purely and simply objective,
divorced from the activity of a thinking mind. Plato in the
Timaeus represents God, in virtue of His creative act of will, as
the efficient cause of nature, and the forms, in virtue of their
static perfection, as its final cause; Aristotle, identifying God
with the forms, conceives one single unmoved mover with a
self-contained activity of its own, namely self-knowledge,
vO~O'E:WS v6TJO'~s, thinking the forms which are the categories of
its own thought, and, since that activity is the highest and best
possible (Etk. Nic. x. 7), inspiring the whole of nature with
desire for it and a nisus towards reproducing it, everything in
its degree and to the best of its power.
There are certain points in this theory which appear strange
and even perhaps repulsive to persons brought up in a Christian
tradition. In the first place, Aristotle has much to say about the
love of God; but for him God does not love the world, it is the
world that loves God. The love that makes the world go round
is neither God's love for us nor our love for each other, but a
universal love for God which is wholly unreciprocated. I do not
want to explain away the contrast between this idea and those
of Christianity, but I must point out that the contrast is
diminished when we notice the difference of terminology. The
88 ARISTOTLE
word for 'love' in Aristotle is epws, which means the longing of
what is essentially imperfect for its own perfection; EPWS is the
upward-looking or aspiring love felt by that which feels itself
inferior for that which it recognizes as its superior. That was
explained once for all in the classical discussion of"Epws in Plato's
Symposium. The Christian word for 'love' is aya.1T7), which is
originally the downward-looking or condescending love felt by
a superior for an inferior; it is the contentment one has in
things which though admittedly imperfect serve very well for
the purposes of their station in one's life. By denying that God
loves the world, Aristotle is only saying that God is already
perfect and has in himself no source of change, no nisus towards
anything better; by saying that the world loves God, he is
saying that the world is restless in its search for a perfection
already existing in God and identical with God.
But in the second place-and this is less easy to reconcile
with our ordinary notions-Aristotle denies that God knows the
world, and a fortiori denies that He created it by aD. act of will
or has any providential plans for its history or the life of any-
thing in it. Such a denial no doubt relieves the mind of many
embarrassments; it relieves us of the necessity to think of God
as beholding and tolerating, or still worse as deliberately
causing, the evils of which the world 'is full, which is always a
grave moral difficulty to the popular Christian theology; and it
relieves us of the necessity to think of Him as seeing colours,
hearing sounds, and so forth, which would imply His having
eyes and ears, or alternatively as knowing a world so different
from ours that we can no longer call it by the same name. But
although these are great gains, they are offset by what we
cannot but feel to be greater losses. The thought of God as
watching over the life of the world, directing the course of its
history, judging its actions, and bringing it ultimately back to
unity with Himself, is a thought without which we can hardly
care to think of God at all. Here again, I do not want to deny
the contrast between the Aristotelian and Christian conceptions,
or to suggest that the Aristotelian is, even on purely philoso-
phical grounds, the better; but the contrast is mitigated if we
recollect that the self-knowledge of God in Aristotle's -theory
means His knowledge of vovS' as such, with its articulated struc-
ture of forms; and that since we too, so far as we are rational,
ARISTOTLE'S THEOLOGY 89
share in vouS', our self-knowledge and our knowledge of the
forms are participations by us in the life of God, and for that
very reason bring us within the circle of God's self-knowledge.
Even the blind impulses of inorganic nature, though in them-
selves neither parts of God nor known to God, are directed
towards goals which are known to God and are indeed aspects
of His nature.
5. Plurality of unmoved movers
But it is necessary to get a little closer to the detail of
Aristotle's cosmology, in order to show how he imagined the
processes of nature to be produced by love of God. These pro-
cesses are very complex; so complex, that one cannot regard
them as all directed towards the same goal. We have already said
that it was useless for Thales to say that both the magnet and
the worm are simply water; that does not explain why one
behaves like a magnet and the other like a worm. Now, if
Aristotle is to explain the processes in the world by saying that
everything is trying to imitate the life of God, that equally fails
to explain the obvious differences between processes very
different in kind and obviously directed towards the realization
of very different ends. In other words, there must be a hierarchy
of ends, and each order of beings must have an end of its own.
In order to meet this difficulty Aristotle devised a theory to
the effect that the number of unmoved movers is not one but
many. One of these is the first mover, namely God; its activity
is pure self-thought, VO'Y)O'LS' vo~(J'wS', and this absolutely self-
contained and self-dependent activity of an immaterial agent
is copied by an activity of a material agent (that is, a motion)
which is as nearly self-contained and self-dependent as a motion
can be, viz. a perfectly uniform rotation of the primum mobile,
the outermost or stellar sphere of the heavens. The soul of the
primum mobile is thus directly actuated by love of God, and
moves its own body in a way as like the life of God as it is
possible for a body's movement to be.
But the divine activity may be imitated in two ways: either
.by a body (which here as always in Greek cosmology means a
living body, an organism endowed with soul and actuated by
nisus, desire, or love) or by a disembodied mind or intelligence,
voiJs. God thinks or contemplates himself; other intelligences
90 ARISTOTLE
think or contemplate God. To that extent they share in the
divine nature, but their participation in it is imperfect in so far
as it is partial: each intelligence only apprehends part of the
divine nature (that is, certain aspects of the intelligible world
or world of forms) and hence each has a character and a mental
life of its own, which is a peculiar mode or limitation of the
character and life of God.
Now, according to Aristotle, there are cosmological reasons
for believing in such intelligences. The uniform rotation of the
primum mobile represents its endeavour to reproduce the un-
moved activity of God; but the complex and erratic movement
of a planet does not represent a wildly unsuccessful attempt to
move uniformly in a circle, it represents a quite successful
attempt to follow a rational and determinate path of a different
and complicated kind. Greek geometry regards other curves
as modifications of the circle, just as other grammatical cases
are modifications of the nominative and other syllogistic figures
modifications of the perfect figure, the first; and hence there
must be some immaterial activity related to God's activity as
the complex planetary path is related to the circle, and it is this
immaterial activity, not that of God, which the soul of the
planet is immediately symbolizing in material shape as a move-
ment. The planetary path is an imitation of an imitation of
God's activity, whereas the rotation of the primum mobile is a.
direct imitation of it in terms of body, and the thought of the
planet's intelligence is a direct imitation of it in terms of
intellect. The entire complex or society of intelligences form
an immaterial and eternal model upon which the complex of
cosmic movements is modelled: and here Aristotle is repeating
in his own way the doctrine of the Timaeus, that in making the
material or temporal world God modelled it upon an eternal
pattern, viz. the immaterial or eternal world of forms. The
idea common to both these doctrines is one of some importance,
namely that the differentiation of activities which exists in the
world of nature depends on a logically prior differentiation
existing in eternal reality. Not only is immaterial being or
absolute mind logically prior to nature, but the differentiation
of mind into minds is prior to nature also.
Perhaps I may illustrate this point by referring to Sir David
Ross's note on it in his edition of the Metaphysics, one of the
PLURALITY OF UNMOVED MOVERS 9I
very few points at which I am rash enough to differ from any-
thing which he has said in that great work. He argues (i, p. cxl)
that the intelligences are an illogical excrescence on Aristotle's
theory: the celestial spheres, he says, ought to have been repre-
sented as celestial organisms striving each in its degree to
reproduce the unchanging life of the one unmoved mover. But,
I ask myself, what is meant by 'each in its degree'? Surely, it
can only mean that a given celestial organism, say No. 35, is
trying not simply to reproduce the activity of God, but to
reproduce it in the special way appropriate to a body in the
position of No. 35, very much as a right wing three-quarter is
trying not simply to play football but to play it in the way
appropriate to a right wing three-quarter. Hence", just as the
idea or scheme of a Rugby XV is logically prior to the filling of
each place by an actual player, so the idea or scheme of
differentiated activities is prior to the movements of the actual
spheres. In a word, Sir David Ross has conceded Aristotle's
point by using that phrase' each in its degree'.
6. Matter
I must not linger over Aristotle, important though his cos-
mology is both in itself and as the form in which Greek thought
concerning nature bequeathed its ripest heritage to the Middle
Ages; but I cannot leave him without saying a word about his
conception of matter. It is a very difficult thing to decide
exactly what his theory of matter was, especially because,
strangely enough, he has given no account of it in the fourth
book of the Metaphysics which contains his lexicon of meta-
physical terms. God, and in general mind, whether subjectively
as that which thinks or objectively as the eternal objects or
pure forms, contain no matter and cannot be embodied in
matter; that which contains matter is that which is subject to
the process of change, movement, or becoming. Now the matter
in these things is in itself imperceptible and unknowable ; sense
perceives form only, but form incorporated in matter; intellect
knows form only, and form not so incorporated. It is not to be
expected, therefore, that Aristotle should give us a clear con-
ception of matter; for him the phrase is a contradiction in
terms, for that of which we can have clear conceptions is always
form, and form is precisely not matter. What modern science
92 ARISTOTLE
calls the theory of matter, that is to say the theory of atoms,
electrons, radiation, and so forth, is a description of various
types of structures and rhythmical movements, and all this
according to Greek terminology is a theory of form, not of
matter at all, so that the Aristotelian agnosticism about matter
contains nothing that need shock the modern physicist. In
itself, matter is for Aristotle the indeterminate, that which
might be but is not organized into this or that specific form or
structure; hence he often identifies matter with potentiality, or
that which is potentially either of two opposites, ovvapts 'TWV
EvaV'TLwv. When he tries to define it he can only do so negatively:
, By matter I mean that which in itself has neither quality nor
quantity nor any of the other attributes by which being is
determined' (Met. I029aZO). Yet, although matter is unknow-
able and indescribable, it cannot be simply banished from
cosmology, because it is the limiting case or vanishing-point at
the negative end of the process of nature: everything in nature
is constantly developing, that is, realizing itself or becoming in
actuality what it always was potentially, and matter is the
indeterminacy which is the negative aspect of potentiality.
Thus a chick is trying to become a hen, but it is not yet a hen;
there is in it a nisus towards the form of a hen, but there is also
in it something in virtue of which that nisus has not yet reached
its goal, and this something is what Aristotle calls matter.
Matter is thus the unrealizedness of unrealized potentiality; and
because there is no such thing as a wholly unrealized potentiality,
a nisus that is altogether ineffective, there is no such thing as
pure or mere matter; there is always and everywhere matter in
process of organizing itself, matter acquiring form. But matter
completely disappears only when form is fully realized and
potentiality is resolved into actuality; hence Aristotle says that
whatever is pure actuality contains no matter. Thus, anything
situated somewhere in space is material, because it might be
somewhere else and still remain itself; but there is nothing
which God might be and is not, for the things which he is not,
for example a stone, are things which he could not be without
ceasing to be God; and hence God is pure actuality and contains
no matter.
PART II
THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF NATURE
I
THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
I. Anti-Aristotelianism
THE second great cosmological movement is that of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. Its leading characteristic
may be seen most easily by considering it negatively, as a
sustained polemic against the medieval thought inspired partly
by Aristotle and partly by the philosophical views implicit in
the Christian religion. The doctrine specially selected for attack
was teleology, the theory of final causes, the attempt to explain
nature as permeated by a tendency or endeavour to realize
forms not yet existing. Typical of the whole movement is
Bacon's celebrated gibe to the effect that teleology, like a virgin
consecrated to God, produces no offspring-tanquam virgo Deo
consecrata, nihil parit (De Aug. Sci. Hi. 5). He meant that when
an Aristotelian scientist accounted for the production of a
certain effect by a certain cause by saying that the cause had a
natural tendency to produce that effect, he was really telling
you nothing at all, and was only distracting your mind from
the proper task of science, namely the discovery of the precise
structure or nature of the cause in question. The same criticism
is implicit in Moliere's ribald parody of an examination in the
medical schools conducted in execrable dog-Latin according to
Aristotelian methods:
Candidate: Mihi a docto doctore
Domandatur causam et rationem quare
Opium facit dormire.
A quoi respondeo:
Quia est in eo
Vertus dormitiva,
Cuius est natura
Sensus assoupire.
Chorus of examiners:
Bene bene bene respondere.
Dignus, dignus est intrare
In nostro docto corpore.
94 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
In opposition to these teleological methods, the new theory
of nature insisted on explanations through efficient causes,
which meant explaining all change and process by the action
of material things already existing at the commencement of
the change. The assumption that change must be explained
in this way is already a conscious principle in the philosophers of
the sixteenth century. Thus Bernardino Telesio, in the middle.
of the century, regards nature not as drawn onwards by some-
thing outside itself to imitate forms having an eternal and im-
material existence, but as possessed of an intrinsic activity of
its own, namely heat, in virtue of which it generates motion in
itself and thus produces all the various types of structure found
in the natural world. The naturalistic philosophy of the
Renaissance regarded nature as something divine and self-
creative; the active and passive sides of this one self-creative
being they distinguished by distinguishing natura naturata, or
the complex of natural changes and processes, from natura
naturans, or the immanent force which animates and directs
them. This conception was much closer to Plato than to
Aristotle, for the tendency of Plato's Pythagorean cosmology
was to explain the behaviour of natural things as an effect of
their mathematical structure, a tendency quite in harmony
with the work of the new physical science; ~hereas Aristotle's
cosmology tended to explain it through an elaborate chain of
imitations of imitations of the divine nature. Hence the
Renaissance philosophers enrolled themselves under the banner
of Plato against the Aristotelians, until Galileo, the true father
of modern science, restated the Pythagorean-Platonic stand-
point in his own words by proclaiming that the book of nature
is a book written by God in the language of mathematics. For
the Aristotelian doctrine that change is an expression of
tendency, the sixteenth century substituted the Platonic doc-
trine-strictly the Pythagorean doctrine, for in essence it is
pre-Socratic-that change is a function of structure.
2. Renaissance cosmology: First stage
The theory of nature, in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, passes through two main stages. These are alike in their
hostility to Aristotle and their rejection of teleology and insis-
tence on the immanence in nature of formal and efficient
RENAISSANCE COSMOLOGY 95
causes; they are alike in a kind of neo-Platonism or neo-
Pythagoreanism, I mean in their insistence on mathematical
structure as the basis of qualitative differences. The difference
between the two stages lies in their view of the relation be-
tween body and mind. In the early phase, the world of nature,
which is now called natura naturata, is still conceived as a living
organism, whose immanent energies and forces are vital and
psychical in character. The naturalistic philosophies of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attributed to nature reason
and sense, love and hate, pleasure and pain, and found in these
faculties and passions the causes of natural process. So far
their cosmology resembled that of Plato and Aristotle; and
even more that of the pre-Socratics. But this animism or
hylozoism was a recessive factor even in the early Renaissance
cosmologies, whereas it had been a dominant one in Greek
thought; as time went on it was submerged by the mathematical
tendency which from the first had accompanied it; and as this
tendency got the upper hand the idea of nature as an organism
was replaced by the idea of nature as a machine. The change
from the earlier or organic to the later or mechanical view was,
as I shall explain, chiefly the work of Copernicus. But even the
earlier view differed sharply from the Greek theory of the world
as an organism, owing to its insistence on the conception of
immanence. Formal and efficient causes were regarded as being
in the world of nature instead of being (as they were for
Aristotle) outside nature. This immanence lent a new dignity
to the natural world itself. From an early date in the history
of the movement it led people to think of nature as self-creative
and in that sense divine, and therefore induced them to look
at natural phenomena with a respectful, attentive, and observant
eye; that is to say, it led to a habit of detailed and accurate
observation, based on the postulate that everything in nature,
however minute and apparently accidental, is permeated
by rationality and therefore significant and valuable. The
Aristotelian tradition, regarding nature as a material imitation
of a transcendent immaterial model, implied that some things
in nature were accidental. Aristotle himself had said that
matter, i.e. the element of unintelligibility, was the source of
the accidental element in nature; and it was not until the
Aristotelian cosmology was swept clean away that scientists
96 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
could begin to take nature seriously and, so to speak, treat her
lightest word as deserving of attention and respect. This new
attitude was firmly established by the time of Leonardo da
Vinci at the end of the fifteenth century.
But at this early date nature was still regarded as a living
organism, and the relation between nature and man was con-
ceived in terms of astrology and magic; for man's mastery over
nature was conceived not as the mastery of mind over mechanism
but as the mastery of one soul over another soul, which implied
magic; and the outermost or stellar sphere was still conceived
in Aristotelian fashion as the purest and most eminently living
or active or influential part of the cosmic organism, and there-
fore as the source of all events happening in the other parts;
hence astrology. This magical and astrological conception had
powerful enemies from the first, notably Pica della Mirandola,
who attacked it in the late fifteenth century and was followed
by several religious reformers such as Savonarola and Calvin;
but in spite of this, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were
predominantly given over to these occult sciences, which only
died out by degrees, and died very hard, in the popular witch-
craft of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
3. Copernicus
The crisis of modern cosmology dates to the middle of the
sixteenth century. It was in 1543 that Copernicus's work on
the solar system (De revolutionibzts orbium coelestium) was
posthumously published. The new astronomy expounded in
this book displaced the earth from the centre of the world and
explained the planetary movements on a heliocentric hypo-
thesis. The philosophical significance of this new astronomy
was profound, but it has often been misunderstood. It is com-
monly said that its effect was to diminish the importance of
the earth in the scheme of things and to teach man that he is
only a microscopic parasite on a small speck of cool matter
revolving round one of the minor stars. This is an idea both
philosophically foolish and historically false. Philosophically
foolish, because no philosophical problem, whether connected
with the universe, or with man, or with the relation between
them, is at all affected by considering the relative amount of
space they occupy: historically false, because the littleness of
COPERNICUS 97
man in the world has always been a familiar theme of reflection.
Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, which has been called
the most widely read book of the Middle Ages, contains the
following words:
'Thou hast learnt from astronomical proofs that the whole earth
compared with the universe is no greater than a point, that is, com-
pared with the sphere of the heavens, it may be thought of as having
no size at all. Then, of this tiny corner, it is only one-quarter that,
according to Ptolemy, is habitable to living things. Take away from
this quarter the seas, marshes, and other desert places, and the space
left for man hardly even deserves the name of infinitesimal.'
(Book ii, Prosa vii.) \
Every educated European for a thousand years before Coper-
nicus knew that passage, and Copernicus had no need to risk
condemnation for heresy in order to repeat its substance.
The true significance of his astronomical discoveries was far
more important. It consisted not so much in displacing the
world's centre from the earth to the sun as in implicitly denying
that the world has a centre at all. As his posthumous editor
said, you could regard any point as its centre; and for the pur-
pose of studying the planetary orbits it was convenient so to
regard the sun. This statement has sometimes been regarded
as due to timidity in the face of established doctrine, as if it
amounted to saying 'I admit that the orthodox view is true,
but the heliocentric view is nevertheless a convenient fiction' ;
but its real point was that the material world has no centre;
and this was rightly regarded as a revolution in cosmology,
because it destroyed the entire theory of the natural world as
an organism. An organism implies differentiated organs; in the
spherical world-organism of Greek thought there was earth in
the middle, then water, then air, then fire, and lastly, for
Aristotle, the quinta essentia of the world's outermost envelope;
now, if the world has no centre, the very basis of these differen-
tiations disappears; the whole world is made of the same kind
of matter, the law of gravitation applies not only in the sub-
lunary regions as Aristotle thought but everywhere, and the
stars, instead of having a divine substance of their own, are
homogeneous with our earth. This idea, so far from diminishing
the scope of man's powers, vastly enlarged it; for it taught him
that scientific laws established by him on earth would hold good
H
98 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
throughout the starry heavens. It was directly owing to
Copernicus's denial of geocentric astronomy that Newton could
imagine the force which kept the moon in its orbit to be the
same that drew his apple to the ground. For Aristotle, nature
is made of substances differing in quality and acting hetero-
geneously: earth naturally moves towards the centre, fire away
from the centre, and so forth. For the new cosmology there can
be no natural differences of quality; there can only be one
substance, qualitatively uniform throughout the world, and its
only differences are therefore differences of quantity and of
geometrical structure. This once more brings us back to some-
thing like Plato and the Pythagoreans, or again to something
like the Greek atomists with their denial that anything is real
except atoms and void and their reduction of all else to patterns
of determinate atomic structure.
4. Renaissance cosmology: Second stage. Giordano Bruno
Catholics and Protestants united to reject Copernicus's doc-
trines as heretical, and his immediate successors in astronomy
(like Tycho Brahe, born three years after the publication of his
book) refused to accept his system in its strictly astronomical
bearing. But its philosophical importance, as I have explained,
lay in the fact that its main thesis implied an homogeneity of
substance between the earth and the heavenly bodies, and an
identity in the laws governing their movements; and these
implications were quickly welcomed by a new group of thinkers
to whom belongs the credit of initiating the second and final
stage in the Renaissance theory of nature. I will not here con-
sider details concerning the personalities and doctrinal varia-
tions of the group, but will confine myself to its most important
figure, that of Giordano Bruno.
Bruno, born in 1548, and becoming a Dominican friar early
in life, was already obliged to leave Italy under an accusation
of heresy before he was 30, and lived successively at Geneva,
Toulouse, Paris, London, Wittemberg, and elsewhere; he re-
turned to Italy to take up his residence at Venice under the
protection of the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, but was seized by
the Inquisition there and tried at Rome over a period of seven
years (1593-1600), and was finally burnt at the stake.
Bruno's most important contribution to the theory of nature
RENAISSANCE COSMOLOGY. GIORDANO BRUNO 99
consisted in his philosophical interpretation of Copernicanism.
He realized that the new astronomy, which he accepted with
enthusiasm, implied a denial of any qualitative difference
between terrestrial and celestial substance. He extended this
denial, as Copernicus had never done, from the solar or planetary
system to that of the fixed stars, admitting only one kind of
distinction, namely that between fiery or luminous bodies and
translucent or crystalline; all move according to the same laws,
with an inherent circular motion, and the Aristotelian concep-
tions of natural heaviness and natural lightness are rejectetl.
There is no first mover external to the material world; movement
is intrinsic and natural to body as such. The material world is
conceived as an infinite space, not empty but full of a yielding
and plastic matter which recalls to our minds the ether of more
modern physics; in this ether are innumerable worlds like ours,
forming in their totality a universe notjtself changing or moving
but containing all change and movement within itself. This
all-embracing and unchanging substance, the matrix of all
change, is at once matter, in its capacity as extended and
moving, and form or spirit or God, in its capacity as self-
existent and the source of movement; but it is not a transcen-
den,t unmoved mover like the God of Aristotle but a mover
immanent in its own body and causing movements throughout
that body. Thus every particular thing and every particular'
movement has, in Brono's language, both a principle, or a
source within itself, and a cause, or source outside itself: God
is both principle and cause, principle as immanent in each
individual part of nature, cause as transcending each individual
part.
This pantheistic cosmology reminds us on the one hand of the
later Ionians, and on the other hand of Spinoza. It is like
Anaximander in conceiving our world as one of an infinite
number of vortices in an infinite homogeneous primary matter
extending throughout infinite space, and in conceiving this
matter as identical with God. And I must remark that just as
the pantheism of Anaximander gave way, as Greek thought
developed, to a doctrine according to which the world is' n9t
God but God's creature, so Brono's pantheism gave way
to a doctrine according to which the world is not divine
but mechanical, implying therefore a transcendent GO?! who
lOO THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
designed and constructed it. The idea of nature as a machine is
fatal to monism. A machine implies something outside itself.
The identification of nature with God breaks down exactly
when the organic view of nature disappears.
On the other hand, Bruno's thought resembles Spinoza's in
so many ways that it has been described as stopping short of
Spinoza's complete position only because Bruno was an un-
systematic and desultory thinker, more rich in passion and
intuition than in method and logical perseverance. But this is
not the whole truth. Spinoza's cosmology presupposes the
whole mechanistic theory of the universe, which Bruno's has not
yet envisaged. The great feat of Spinoza is to bring together
two conceptions which in Bruno are not yet distinguished, the
conception of a world of mechanical matter and the conception
of a world of mind, as these were worked out separately by
Descartes.
Bruno's synthesis of the two ideas of principle and cause is
only apparent. By principle he means immanent cause, causa
sui: by cause he means transeunt cause, where A is the cause
of B. In terms of pantheism, the world which is also God is,
taken as a whole, the cause of itself; but the cause of any
particular event is not the world as a whole but some other
particular event. For the whole does not transcend this or that
part of it; it is immanent in this or that part ; what transcends
anyone part can only be another part. To speak of the whole
as transcending a part is to degrade the whole to the status of
one of its own parts. In order to clear up this confusion Bruno
would have had to take one decisive step which he never took,
viz. abandoning the conception of nature as an organism and
developing the conception of nature as a machine.
5. Bacon
Dualism is therefore not overcome in Bruno. It remains as
a dualism between immanent and transcendent causation
(causing oneself to move and being caused to move by some-
t:qing else). This was why in the seventeenth century there was
a huge outbreak of dualisms: e.g. (a) in metaphysics, between
body and mind; (b) in cosmology, between nature and God;
(c) in epistemology, between rationalism and empiricism.
These dualisms emerge with Descartes. In Bacon (r56r-I626)
BACON ror
they are not yet conscious. This can be seen from his account of
scientific method, where he sees no difficulty: he rejects both
empiricism and rationalism, comparing the empiricist to the
ant and the rationalist to the spider, whereas the true scientist
is like a bee, which transmutes what it wins from the flowers
into a new and precious substance: that is, the scientist advances
by means of experiments conducted in the light of theories and
uses them to test and confirm these theories. In his meta-
physics Bacon followed the sixteenth-century tradition, and
regarded all qualitative differences in nature as functions of
structural differences which are ultimately quantitative in
character or amenable to mathematical study; thus he believed
firmly in the homogeneity or unity of substance; but his grasp
on the implications of this principle was very inadequate, and
he never realized the paramount importance of mathematics in
physical science. Hence, although it would be quite wrong to
identify him with the empiricist tendency in scientific method,
from which in theory he sharply dissociated himself, in practice
he constantly lapsed into it, substituting the classification of
qualitative differences for their explanation in quantitative
terms.
6. Gilbert and Kepter
It was Gilbert's work on magnetism, published in 1600 and
rejected by Bacon, that determined the next step in the general
theory of nature. Gilbert, studying the force of magnetic attrac-
tion, suggested that attractive forces pervaded the whole of
nature and that all bodies exercised an attraction of this kind
upon all others. Kepler (1571-163), early in the seventeenth
century, developed this suggestion with pregnant consequences.
By nature, he said, every body tends to remain stationary
wherever it happens to be-thus stating the principle of inertia
and emphatically repudiating the Greek and early Renaissance
conception of natural movements; but, he continued, whenever
one body is near another, its rest is disturbed by a mutual
affection which tends to draw every body towards its neighbour.
Thus a stone falls because the earth attracts it; and similarly.
Kepler suggested, the tides move because of the attraction of
the moon. With this clue to the phenomena of gravitation,
Kepler took the momentous step of proposing that in treating
of physics the word anima should be replaced by the word vis:
102 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
in other words, that the conception of a vital energy producing
qualitative changes should be replaced by that of a mechanical
energy, itself quantitative, and producing quantitative changes.
7. Galileo
For Kepler this was a mere suggestion thrown out in a foot-
note; but for Galileo (1564-1642) it was a principle clearly
grasped, with its presuppositions clearly stated.
'Philosophy', wrote Galileo, 'is written in that vast book which
stands ever open before our eyes, I mean the universe; but it cannot
be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with
the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical
language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical
figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to compre-
hend a single word.'l
The meaning is clear: the truth of nature consists in mathe-
matical facts; what is real and intelligible in nature is that
which is measurable and quantitative. Qualitative distinctions,
like those between colours, sounds, and so forth, have no place
in the structure of the natural world but are modifications pro-
duced in us by the operation of determinate natural bodies on
our sense-organs. Here the doctrine of the mind-dependent or
merely phenomenal character of secondary qualities, as taught
by Locke, is already full-grown. English students of philosophy,
finding this doctrine in Locke, do not always realize that it is
by no means an invention of his, but had been long ago taught
by Galileo as an important truth, and was in fact one of the
leading principles of the whole scientific movement of the pre-
ceding two centuries; and that by the time it reaches Locke it
is already somewhat out of date, and ready to collapse at the
first touch of Berkeley's finger.
For Galileo, the secondary qualities are not merely functions
of the primary and thus derivative and dependent on them,
they are actually devoid of objective existence: they are mere
appearances. Thus Galileo's world is' a world of pure quantity,
which through the inexplicable intrusion into it of living and
sensible beings acquires the diversified qualitative aspect with
which we are familiar'.2 Nature, so regarded, stands on the one
t Il Saggiatore' (Opere, I890, &c., vi, p. 232). Quoted in G. da Ruggiero,
Lafilosofia moderna, i (Barl, 1933), p. 70. 2 Ruggiero, op. cit., p. 74.
GALILEO r03
hand over against its creator, God, and on the other over
against its knower, man. Both God and man are regarded by
Galileo as transcending nature; and rightly, because if nature
consists of mere quantity its apparent qualitative aspects must
be conferred upon it from outside, namely by the human mind
as transcending it; while if it is conceived no longer as a living
organism but as inert matter, it cannot be regarded as self-
creative but must have a cause other than itself.
8. Mind and Matter. Materialism
With Galileo the modern science of nature reaches maturity.
It was he who first laid down clearly and finally the terms on
which nature could be an object of adequate and certain
scientific knowledge. In a word, these terms were the exclusion
of everything qualitative and the restriction of natural reality
to a complex of quantities-quantities spatial or quantities
temporal, but quantities and nothing more. The principle of
science as understood by Galileo is that nothing is scientifically
knowable except what is measurable.
I have indicated the steps by which this conception was
reached; it remains to estimate the price paid for reaching it.
First, nature is no longer an organism but a machine: that is to
say, its changes and processes are produced and directed not by
final causes but solely by efficient. They are not tendencies or
efforts; they are not directed or orientated towards the realiza-
tion of anything not yet existing; they are mere movements,
produced by the action of bodies already existing, whether this
action be in the nature of impact or in the nature of attraction
or repulsion. Secondly, that which has been extruded from the
concept of nature must find a lodgement somewhere else in
metaphysical theory. These homeless entities fall into two main
divisions: first, qualities in general; secondly, minds. According
to Galileo, whose views on this subject were adopted by
Descartes and Locke and became what may be called the
orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, minds form a class of
beings outside nature, and qualities are explained as appear-
ances to minds: in Descartes's words t1"!-ey 'belong to the union
of minds with bodies " and the senses by which we apprehend
them are in general our organ for apprehending that union.
This was the two-substance doctrine ,of mind and matt~r; but
I04 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
it was never held without strong opposition from a formidable
minority. Descartes himself, the best philosophically equipped
follower of Galileo, asserted this two-substance doctrine, but
recognized that the two substances must have a common source,
which he identified as God, and pointed out quite correctly that
in that case the term 'substance' could be properly applied
only to God: for if a substance is something existing in its own
right, without the need of anything else (which is his definition
of it), matter and mind, being created by God and therefore
needing him in order to exist, are not strictly substances at all.
They are only substances in a secondary sense of the word.
During Descartes's own lifetime, however, the pantheistic
tendencies of the Renaissance were developed into a new direc-
tion. The idea of the world of nature as self-creative and self-
regulating, combined with the idea of nature as a machine, gave
rise to a materialistic theory of nature. The leader of this
movement was the neo-Epicurean Gassendi, who held that the
quantitative and mechanical nature described by Galileo was
the only reality, and that mind was merely a peculiar kind of
p:;ttern or structure of material elements. This gave a monistic
result which was metaphysically attractive; but it could never
be worked out in detail, for no one could ever explain (far less
demonstrate by experiment) what precise pattern of material
elements produced either mind in general, or any particular
kind of mental disposition or activity.
Materialism as the heir of Renaissance pantheism continued
to live and thrive not only in the seventeenth century but
throughout the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries,
until it was finally destroyed by the new theory of matter which
grew up in the late nineteenth century. To the very end it
retained the impress of its pantheistic origin. This appears in
the outspokenly religious character of its attitude towards the
matter which it postulates as the only reality. It denies God,
but only because it has transferred the attributes of God to
matter, and being the offspring of a monotheistic tradition
thinks one God quite enough. The phenomenon is so uniform
that in a general way we can recognize a mat~rialist author by
his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in
speaking about the material world. On occasion he will even
pray to it. Thus the famous materialist Holbach (Baron
MIND AND MATTER. MATERIALISM 105
d'Holbach, I723-89, a native of Hildesheim in Germany, but
a writer of the most limpid and elegant French) closes his great
work Du systeme de la Nature with what is nothing more nor less
than a prayer to matter couched in such language that the
alteration of a word here and there would lead any reader to
think it an outpouring of Christian piety.
Scientifically speaking, on the other hand, materialism was
from first to last an aspiration rather than an achievement.
Its God was always a miracle-working God whose mysterious
ways were past our finding out. The hope was always cherished
that with the advance of science we should find them out some
day; so the scientific credit of materialism was maintained by
drawing very large cheques in its own favour on assets not yet to
hand. Failing experimental confirmation in the laboratory-the
kind of confirmation which was provided when biochemists
achieved the feat of producing urea synthetically-a statement
such as this, that the brain secretes thought in exactly the same
way in which the gall-bladder secretes gall, might pass as a dogma
of religion, but scientifically considered was simple bluff.
9. 5pinoza
Hence materialism, though it long continued to be a minority
report, always remained on one side of the main tradition of
European thought, a stagnant backwater of Renaissance ideas.
The main stream moved from Descartes in another direction,
namely that taken by Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, and Locke.
The idea common to all these was that matter was one thing
and mind another and that both somehow proceeded from God
as their source. God, as the source of all things, was regarded as .
working (so to speak) in two directions at once; in one direction
he created the world of nature or matter; in the other direction
he created the human mind, and whatever minds there may be
besides.
This development was indicated plainly enough by Descartes
himself; for, as I have said, Descartes did not advance a simple
or unqualified two-substance doctrine; he qualified that doctrine
by saying that because substance means that which exists of
itself, or in its own right, there was strictly speaking only one
substance, namely God.
Spinoza took this qualification seriously and drew its logical
Io6 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
consequences. He asserted that there was only one substance,
God; and that since there could be no other substance neither
mind nor matter was a substance, and therefore neither mind
nor matter was a substance created by God. Mind and matter,
he said, were two attributes' of the one substance; and this
t
one substance, after the fashion of Bruno but with far greater
systematic coherence, he called indifferently God and Nature,
representing it as an infinite unchanging whole which, qua ex-
tended, is the material world, and, qua thinking, is the world
of mind. In both aspects it contains within it finite, changing,
and perishable parts which are at once individual bodies and
individual minds. Each part undergoes its changes solely
through the operation of efficient causes, that is, through the
action upon it of other parts; here Spinoza corrects Bruno,
eliminating the last vestige of the early Renaissance hylozoism
and, while accepting the physics of Galileo in its entirety, at
the same time overcoming its main philosophical paradox, the
separateness of material nature from the perceiving mind on
the one hand and from its divine creator on the other, by insist-
ing upon its inseparable unity with mind and giving to this
unity the name of God. But in spite of the brilliant merits of
Spinoza's cosmology-merits to which I cannot do justice in
this brief description-it failed because the two attributes of
extension and thought are held together in the theory, so to
speak, by main force: there is no reason that Spinoza can give
why that which is extended should also think, and vice versa;
and consequently the theory remains at bottom unintelligible,
a mere assertion of brute fact.
IQ. Newton
But if Spinoza's theory of the relation between body and
mind is at bottom unintelligible, it is obviously the work of an
exceedingly intelligent mind which has understood the weak
point of Descartes's theory and has worked heroically to amend
it. This is more than can be said of Newton (1642-I727). New-
ton's work has placed him securely among the great thinkers;
but when Wordsworth described his statue in Trinity as
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone
NEWTON I07
he over-estimated not so much Newton's greatness as his
loneliness and the strangeness of the ideas which he explored.
In mathematics, it is true, he was an innovator and a notable
one in discovering the differential calculus; but in this he was
so far from being alone that the simultaneous and independent
discovery of the same method by Leibniz gave rise to a squabble
between the two great men which reflects ill on the moral
character of both; and in any case the seeds of the discovery
were obtained by each of them from a far more important
invention, the analytical geometry of Descartes. The genius
of Newton lay in the patient thoroughness with which he worked
out the details of what he called, on the title-page of his im-
mortal work, the 'Mathematical Principles of Natural Philo-
sophy' (I687; ed. 2, I7I3; ed. 3, I726). But the main idea of
that work is nothing more nor less than Descartes's idea
of a 'universal science' mathematical in its form; the rules of
method which he lays down at the beginning of his third book
are drawn from Bacon; and the cosmology which he develops
is nothing but Galileo's cosmology, according to which the
natural world is a world of bodies possessing extension, figure,
number, motion, and rest, modified by Kepler's idea of force
and Gilbert's hypothesis of universal attraction between body
and body: this natural world being regarded in the fashion of
Galileo as a machine made by God and known by human beings
who, in their capacity as sentient creatures, invest it with
'secondary qualities' of colour, sound, and so forth, which in its
own right it does not possess.
Newton also owed something to the neo-Epicureans. Follow-
ing them, he believed that all bodies consisted of minute
particles surrounded by empty space. Their rest or motion in
this empty space was determined, he thought, by forces of two
kinds: vis insita, or inertia (an idea derived from Galileo),
because of which they either rested or moved uniformly in a
straight line; and vis impressa, which caused accelerated
motions, and of which he recognized that there was more than
one kind; he mentions two: (i) gravity or weight, which he
defined mathematically as a force of mutual attraction varying
directly as the product of the masses of the bodies concerned
(where mass is defined as quantity of matter) and inversely as
the square of the distance between their centres (where centre
108 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
. is circularly defined as centre of gravity); and (ii) electricity, of
which he characteristically refuses to say anything on the
ground that our experimental knowledge is at present inade-
quate.
Of the theoretical difficulties lurking among the foundations
of his natural philosophy Newton seems quite unaware,
although many of them had been familiar for a very long time.
In the Scholium appended to his definitions he distinguishes
absolute time, which' in itself and without relation to anything
external flows at a uniform rate', from relative time, which 'is
measured by movement', without asking whether the two are
really distinct, how anything can be said to 'flow' except
relatively to something that stands still, or how it can be said
to flow' at a uniform rate' unless its flow is measured by move-
ment. He distinguishes absolute space which 'is everywhere
uniform and immobile', from relative space which 'is defined
by our senses by its position relatively to bodies', again without
asking any questions. He distinguishes absolute motion from
relative motion, again in a quite uncritical way. And these
uncritical distinctions form the groundwork of his entire
treatise. To a critical eye they vanish as soon as they are
looked at, leaving the conclusion, which Newton's successors
have at last consciously embraced, that for what he called
'experimental philosophy' the only kind of time is relative
time, the only kind of space relative space, and the only kind
of motion relative motion.
Similarly, in the Scholium Generale at the end of the work he
demolishes by unexceptionable arguments the Cartesian theory
of vortices (that is, Descartes's view that the space vulgarly
called empty is full of a continuous and very subtle matter in
constant motion, which revolves in eddies round every body
of gross matter, and that the rotary movement of a planet, for
example, is caused by its floating in this subtle matter and
being carried round in the solar vortex) and thinks that in this
way he has demolished the doctrine that all space is full of
matter and established the reality of empty space. He argues
that since we cannot on his own principles explain why all the
planets revolve in the same direction round the sun, or why
their orbits are so disposed that they never bump into one
another, this' supremely elegant structure of the solar system
NEWTON l09
cannot have arisen except by the device and power of an
intelligent being', thus exalting the limitations of his own
method into a proof of the existence of God. Finally, in the
last paragraph of the whole work, as if to apologize for not
having carried out the Cartesian programme of a universal
mathematical science, he calls attention to some of the things
he has left out. I will translate the whole paragraph.
(I should have liked to say something of the highly subtle spirit
which pervades crass bodies and lurks in them, by whose force the
particles of bodies attract each other to within minute distances and
cohere in this contiguity; electrical bodies act at greater distances,
repelling others as well as attracting them; light is emitted, is
reflected, is refracted, is inflected, and warms bodies; and sensation
is excited, and the limbs of animals are moved at will, by vibrations
of this spirit propagated through the solid nerve-filaments from the
external sense-organs to the brain and from the brain to the muscles.
But these matters cannot be expounded in a few words; nor is there
a sufficiency of the experiments by which the laws of this spirit's
action would have to be accurately determined and demonstrated.'
There speaks a man great enough to be aware of his own
work's shortcomings. He knows that his programme has been
carried out only in part. But he is not great enough to be
aware that the questions he has left unanswered bear upon
those which he has answered. For example: are the phenomena
of light consistent with his doctrine of empty space? Is the
admission that a body coheres in virtue of a mutual attraction
between its parts which is not gravitation, consistent with his
doctrine that mass is simply quantity of matter? Is the admis-
sion that nature contains repulsive forces, as well as attractive
ones, consistent with his doctrine that only an omnipotent God
can prevent the planets from colliding with one another? And
what reason has he for asserting that all the phenomena
catalogued in this paragraph are due to one and the same
spiritus subtiUssimus ?
Newton had become professor at the age of 27. He published
the Principia at 43 ; from 54 to 85 he was controlling the Mint
and living in the retirement of old age. One of the unsolved
problems, mentioned in the paragraph I have quoted, we know
that he tried to solve: that of light. He published the results
in his Optics in I704, at the age of 62 ; but he himself, as well as
110 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
the friend to whom he submitted them for criticism, found them
unsatisfactory. He had tried conclusions with that spiritus
subtilissimus, and had suffered defeat. It is perhaps legitimate
to infer that the careless and second-hand thinking on funda-
mental questions of cosmology, to which I have called atten-
tion, proved his undoing in the end.
H. Leibniz
The cosmology of Leibniz is not unlike that of Spinoza in
essentials, and in the last resort it breaks down over the same
difficulty. For him, too, reality is both physical and mental,
possessed both of extension and of thought; it consists of
monads, each of which is a point spatially related to other
points and also a mind apprehending its environment. The
paradox of holding that every piece of matter has its mind is
removed by the conception of low-grade mind; the conception,
that is, of minds enormously more primitive and rudimentary
than ours, whose perceptions and volitions are mere momentary
flashes of mentality far below the threshold of consciousness.
The great difference between Spinoza and Leibniz is that
Leibniz emphatically reaffirms the doctrine of final causes; he
has a clear conception of development and sees that develop-
ment is nothing if it is not purposive, while at the same time he
sees that if primitive mind is unconscious it can have purposes
and yet be unconscious of them. Thus, Leibniz's nature is a
vast organism whose parts are lesser organisms, permeated by
life and growth and effort, and forming a continuous scale from
almost unmitigated mechanism at one end to the highest
conscious developments of mental life at the other, with a
constant drive or nisus working upwards along the scale. Here
again the theory has brilliant merits; but once more the relation
between the mental and material aspects of reality is in the last
resort unintelligible; for Leibniz saw, as Spinoza saw before
him, that the life of an organism qua material, the . physical
process of nature, must be accounted for by purely physical
laws, whereas its life qua mental must be accounted for solely
by the laws of the mind; and hence, when he asks himself why
a blow on my body should be accompanied by pain in my mind,
he can give no answer except to say that there is a pre-established
harmony between the two series of events, a harmony, that is,
LEIBNIZ HI
pre-established by the ordinance of God, the monad of monads.
But by saying this Leibniz does not solve the problem, he only
christens it with a long name.
12. Summary: contrast between Greek and Renaissance
cosmology
Before we take the next step let us pause to review the situa-
tion in which we stand. For the early Greeks quite simply, and
with some qualification for all Greeks whatever, nature was a
vast living organism, consisting of a material body spread out
in space and permeated by movements in time; the whole body
was endowed with life, so that all its movements were vital
movements; and all these movements were purposive, directed
by intellect. This living and thinking body was homogeneous
throughout in the sense that it was all alive, all endowed with
soul and with reason; it was non-homogeneous in the sense that
different parts of it were made of different substances each
having its own specialized qualitative nature and mode of
acting. The problems which so profoundly exercise modern
thought, the problem of the relation between dead matter and
living matter, and the problem of the relation between matter
and mind, did not exist. There was no dead matter, for no
difference of principle was recognized between t4e seasonal
rotation of the heavens and the seasonal growth and fall of
leaves on a tree, or between the movements of a planet in the
sky and the movements of a fish in the water; it was never for
a moment suggested that the one could be accounted for by a
kind of law which did not even begin to account for the other.
And there was no problem of the relation between matter and
mind, for no difference was recognized between the way in
which an Athenian conceives and obeys the laws of Solon, or
a Spartan the laws of Lycurgus, and the way in which inanimate
objects conceive and obey those laws of nature to which they
are subject. There was no material world devoid of. mind, and
no mental world devoid of materiality; matter was simply that
of which everything was made, in itself formless and indeter-
minate, and mind was simply the activity by which everything
apprehended the final cause of its own changes.
For the seventeenth century all this was changed. Science
had discovered a material world in a quite special sense: a
II2 THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
world of dead matter, infinite in extent and permeated by
movement throughout, but utterly devoid of ultimate qualita-
tive differences and moved by uniform and purely quantitative
forces. The word' matter' had acquired a new sense: it was no
longer the formless stuff of which everything is made by the
imposition upon it of form, it was the quantitatively organized
totality of moving things. Now, this new idea of a material
world was not a vain imagining; it had yielded solid results in
the shape of physical science as that had been worked out by
men like Galileo and Newton; and this new physical science
was recognized on all hands as a genuine and secure possession
of the human intellect, perhaps the greatest and most secure
advance made by human knowledge since the Greeks invented
mathematics. Just as Greek philosophy in the time of Plato
had above all to take mathematics seriously, to recognize it as
an established fact, and to ask not whether it was possible but
how it was possible, so modern philosophy from the seventeenth
century has been obliged as its first duty to take physics seriously,
to confess that the knowledge acquired for mankind by Galileo
and Newton and their successors down to Einstein is genuine
knowledge, and to ask not whether this quantitative material
world can be known but why it can be known.
I have indicated two ways in which this question was un-
successfully answered in the course of the seventeenth century.
One was materialism, or the attempt to explain knowledge as
the specific activity of mind regarded as a special kind of
material thing. This broke down because the modern concep-
tion of matter contained as its very essence the postulate that
all activities of material things are describable in terms of
quantity, as movements mathematically determined in time
and space; anq. knowledge simply cannot be described in these
terms. The other was the two-substance doctrine with its
modifications in Spinoza and Leibniz, and this broke down
because it was impossible to see any connexion between mind
and matter as thus conceived. The corollary of such theories
was their reductio ad absurdum in the view that mind could
know nothing but its own states, and ex hypothesi the material
world is not a state of mind.
II
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
THE seventeenth century bequeathed unsolved to the eighteenth
the problem of discovering some intrinsic connexion between
matter and mind: some connexion which would preserve the
special character of each, and yet make them genuinely and
intelligibly parts of the same world. Two errors had to be
avoided: first, their essential difference and indeed opposition
must not be denied-mind must not be reduced to a special
kind of matter, matter must not be reduced to a special form of
mind; secondly, while this difference and opposition are still
asserted, they must not be so asserted as to deny an essential
unity connecting the two. By an 'essential' unity is meant
a unity which is necessary to the existence of the things united.
Thus, if a rope is stretched taut between two posts, there is a
strain in one direction on one post and another strain, in the
opposite direction, on the other. These are different strains;
they work in opposite directions; and if the two posts are
differently constructed and differently embedded in the ground,
they will operate in very different ways; but there is an essential
unity between them, because each strain is conditional upon
the other.
I. Berkeley
A solution of this problem was put forward by Berkeley.
Accepting the seventeenth-century account of nature as a
complex composed of inert matter-that is, matter whose every
movement was produced by some vis impressa, the operation
of some external efficient cause-a complex describable
throughout in purely quantitative terms and wholly devoid of
qualitative differences, he pointed out that this idea was an
abstract idea, that is, the idea of something essentially incom-
plete, which must therefore be a partial account and not a
complete account of the thing it professed to represent. In
the language he inherited through Locke from Descartes and
Galileo, the material world as described by the physicist
possesses only primary qualities, but nature as Wy actually
know it possesses secondary qualities too. Nowhere in nature
4849
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
do we find things having primary qualities without secondary;
or, in more accurate language, nowhere do we find pure quantity
devoid of quality. Quantity without quality is an abstraction,
and a world of quantity without quality is an ens rationis, not
a self-existing reality but a schematic view of certain selected
aspects of reality. That is the first step in Berkeley's argument.
The second step is this: the current doctrine, again inherited
through Locke from Descartes and Galileo, attributes all
qualitative differences in nature to the work of the mind.
Colours exist because they are seen, and so forth. Now, if that
is so, one integral element in nature as it actually exists is the
work of the mind; and if nature as a whole cannot exist without
that element, it follows that nature as a whole is the work of
the mind.
Thus we get a wholly new metaphysical position. Taking the
elements of the traditional seventeenth-century cosmology and
simply rearranging them, Berkeley shows that, if substance
means that which exists in its own right and depends on itself
alone, only one substance need be asserted to exist, namely,
mind. Nature as it exists empirically for our everyday percep-
tion is the work or creature of mind; nature in Galileo's sense,
the purely quantitative material world of the physicist, is an
abstraction from this, it is so to speak the skeleton or armature
of the nature we perceive through our senses, and create in
perceiving it. To sum up: we first, by the operation of our
mental powers, create the warm, living, coloured, flesh-and-
blood natural world which we know in our everyday experience;
we then, by the operation of abstractive thinking, remove the
flesh and blood from it and are left with the skeleton. This
skeleton is the (material world' of the physicist.
In the essence of Berkeley's argument as thus restated there
is no flaw. He often expressed himself hastily, and often tried
to support his contentions by argument that is far from sound;
but no criticism of details touches his main position, and as
soon as one understands the problem which confronted him
one is bound to realize that he solved it in the only possible way.
His conclusion may seem unconvincing, and the difficulties in
which it places us are undeniable; but there is no way of escap-
ing the admission that, if the conceptions of mind and matter
are defined as they were defined by the cosmology of the seven-
BERKELEY !IS
teenth century, the problem of discovering an essential link
between them can only be solved as Berkeley solved it. The
emphasis of Berkeley's argument lies on the thesis that, matter
being what by common consent it is, it can only be created in
these two stages by a double operation of mind; but he left
altogether untouched the complementary question, why, mind
being .what it is, should it perform this double operation and
thereby create matter? This was the question asked by Kant
in the section of the Critique of Pure Reason called the 'Tran-
scendental Analytics'; and his answer was that if the current
theory of mind is correct, that is to say, if the activity of thought
has been correctly described by the logicians, the characteristics
which physicists find to exist in the material world are precisely
those which would exist in any object constructed for itself by
the understanding; in other words, anyone who thought at all,
provided he thought in the way described by logicians, would
find himself constructing an object having the characteristics
ascribed to matter by the physicists of the seventeenth century.
But there was another question which not only Berkeley but
Kant himself left insufficiently treated. If nature is created by
mind as the product of its thinking activity, what mind is it
that thus creates nature? Obviously it is not the self-contained
mind of this or that human individual. Neither Berkeley nor
Rant nor any of their followers ever thought for a moment
that Copernicus created the heliocentric planetary system, or
Repler its elliptical orbits, or Newton the inverse relation
between the mutual attraction of two bodies and the square of
, the distance between their centres. Berkeley asserted quite
definitely that the creator of the physical world was not any
human or finite mind but an infinite or divine mind, God con-
ceived as absolute subject or thinker. Thus he swept away the
pantheism of the Renaissance thinkers, the theory of the
physical or material world as God's body:' which survived not
only in the materialism that was still fashionable in his own day
but even partially in Spinoza and Leibniz. For Berkeley, as for
Plato and Aristotle and for Christian theology, God is pure
thought and has no body; the world is not God but God's
creature, something which He creates by His activity of
thinking. But then arose the problem of the relation between
God's infinite mind and the various finite human minds. For
II6 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Berkeley these are two quite different kinds of mind; God's
mind becomes something like the intellectus agens of Aristotle
which creates what it thinks, man's mind something like the
passive intellect which passively apprehends an objective order
given to it by God. But this was not really consistent with
Berkeley's own starting-point; for when he inherited from
Locke the doctrine that the mind creates one part at least of
nature, the secondary qualities, this doctrine implied that the
mind in question was human mind. Deny that, and the whole
structure of Berkeleian idealism falls to the ground.
2. Kant
Kant, more cautious and logical than Berkeley, insisted that
the mind which makes nature is a purely human mind, bloss
menschliches; but this again is not the mind of the individual
human thinker but a transcendental ego, mentality as such or
the pure understanding, which is immanent in all human
thought (and it does not create, though it makes nature). Thus
the Kantian form of idealism represents nature-by which I
mean, as Kant meant, the physicist's nature, the material
world of Galileo and Newton-as a product, not an arbitrary
or irrational but an essentially rational and necessary product,
of the human way of looking at things; and when we ask what
these things are in themselves, Kant simply replies that we do
not know.
The problem of the thing in itself is one of the most puzzling
problems in Kant's philosophy. What makes it so puzzling is
the fact that it seems impossible to state the problem without
flatly contradicting yourself. The problem is stated in some
such way as this:
Whatever we know, we know at once intuitively and discur-
sively, that is, by the combined use of our senses and under-
standing. The only genuine intuition is sensuous intuition, and
the only valid use of the understanding is to think about things
which we sensuously perceive. The only knowledge, therefore,'
is an intelligent or thoughtful perception. Now, that which we
perceive is made up (to use a modern term) of sense-data, and
Kant accepted what for nearly two centuries had been the
accepted view, that sense-data could exist only in relation to a
sentient: they are essentially data, which therefore in order to
KANT II7
exist must be given and received. Consequently, whatever we
know is phenomenal only: that is, it exists only in relation to
our knowing mind. So far this is consistent enough; but nOVi'
comes the contradiction. The mind to which these data are
given is not itself a datum; and that which gives it, the thing
in itself, is not a datum either. The argument implies that
there must be minds, and must be things in themselves; if these
do not exist the whole argument falls to the ground; yet, since
we can know only phenomena, we cannot on the argument
know either minds or things in themselves. If so, how can we
say that they exist? If the thing in itself is a mere synonym for
the unknown, it is a nonsense phrase which makes nonsense of
any argument into which it enters; and it does enter as an
indispensable element into the whole structure of Rant's
philosophy.
Rant's own attempt to get out of this difficulty often appears
to his readers an addition of insult to injury. What he says is
that although we cannot know the thing in itself we can think it :
e.g. we think of it as that which gives us sense-data, and hence
as something creative, and rationally creative; and since his
ethical studies convinced him that a rational creative activity
is to be found in the human will, he actually went so far as to
suggest that the thing in itself is more like will than anything
else. This brings him back to a metaphysics not very remote
from that of Berkeley and Aristotle, a metaphysics according
to which the ultimate ground of phenomena is to be sought in
something which is at any rate more like mind than it is like
matter. And it is Rant's opinion that whereas nature or the
material world is known to us only as a collection of phenomena,
owing their existence to our own thinking activities and
essentially relative to these activities, our practical experience
as active moral agents reveals to us not a mere collection of
mental phenomena but mind as it is in itself. Any attempt
(e.g. that made by psychologists) at a 'scientific' study of
mind under laboratory condHions will result in the construction
of 'mental phenomena' which are just as relative to our own
modes of thinking as are the phenomena of nature. If we want
to know what mind really is in itself, the answer is, tAct, and
you will find out'. In action we are, as we never are in scientific
research, 'up against reality'. The life of action is a life in
!IS THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
which the human mind achieves its own reality, its own exis-
tence as a mind, and at the same time achieves consciousness
of its own reality as mind.
Hence, as Rant's critical philosophy develops, it seems to
contradict itself at least twice. In the first critique (Critique
of Pure Reason) where Rant is inquiring into the metaphysical
foundations of physical science or knowledge of nature, his
doctrine is that we can know only a phenomenal world which
we make in the act of knowing it. In the second (Critique of
Practical Reason), where he is inquiring into the metaphysical
foundations of moral experience, his doctrine is that in moral
experience we know our own minds as things in themselves.
In the third (Critique of Judgement), his doctrine is that the
thing in itself which underlies the phenomena of nature has the
character of mind: so that what we know in our practical or
moral experience is of the same kh'1d as what we think, but
cannot know, in our theoretical experience as students of
natural science.
The ordinary modern reader ignores this side of Kant's
philosophy, because it seems an insult to his intelligence to take
seriously a doctrine which in one breath tells him that the thing
in itself is unknowable and claims to tell him what it is. But
this is to misunderstand Rant. Rant never for a moment
thought that the thing in itself was unknowable in the sense in
which his critics understand that statement. The words wissen,
Wissenschaft in Rant have the same kind of special or restricted
significance that the word 'science' has in ordinary modern
English. Science is not the same as knowledge in general; it is
a special kind or form of knowledge whose proper object is
nature and whose proper method of procedure is exactly that
combination of perception with thought, sensation with under-
standing, which Rant has tried to describe in the Aesthetics and
Analytics of the Critique of Pure Reason. Rant has not given
us a theory of knowledge in the modern sense of the term: what
he has given us is a theory of scientific knowledge; and when he
said that we could think the thing in itself though we could
not know it he meant that we had knowledge of it but not
scientific knowledge.
And in this connexion I may remark that the attempt to
mark out a special field for scientific knowledge, outside which
KANT II9
there should lie other fields to be explored by other forms of
thought, was not new. Descartes's project of a universal
science was explicitly conceived as leaving outside itself the
three great fields of history, poetry, and divinity. The forms of
thought which held good in these fields were not regarded by
Descartes as invalid or worthless; we have no right to doubt
his sincerity when he tells us that he attaches high importance
to them; but he regards them as fields in which his proposed
method, just because it is in the narrow sense a scientific
method, will not apply. Kant inherited this point of view from
Descartes, and differed from him chiefly in the one point that,
whereas Descartes placed metaphysics inside the proper sphere
of scientific method, Rant placed it outside.
Rant's view, then, comes to this: the proper object of scientific
knowledge is not God or mind or things in themselves, but
nature; the proper method of scientific knowledge is a combina-
tion of sensation with understanding; and since nature is that
which we know by this method, it follows that nature is mere
phenomenon, a world of things as they appear to us, scientifically
knowable because their ways of appearing are perfectly regular
and predictable, but existing only in so far as we take up the
point of view from which things have that appearance. These
truths are known to us by a kind of knowledge that is not
scientific: let us call it philosophical. Our knowledge that there
are things in themselves, then, is philosophical knowledge, and
this is the kind of knowledge that must teach us what things in
themselves are.
If we try to find out exactly how Kant did think of the thing
in itself, in other words what his philosophical doctrine of it
was, we can get no clear answer. There are two possible explana-
tions of this fact. In general, if someone does not say something
the reason may be either that he cannot make up his mind
about it and has nothing definite to say, or that he thinks it so
obvious that it does not need saying. It might be that Rant was
so much under the influence of the metaphysical scepticism of
writers like Voltaire and Hume that he really doubted whether
there could be a philosophical theory of the thing in itself,
although the logic of his own position implied the possibility of
such a theory. Or again, it might be that he was still so far
influenced by his early training in the school of Leibniz that he
I20 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
took it for granted that the thing in itself was mind. Perhaps
both explanations contain part of the truth and are not incom-
patible. The first awakening from a dogmatic slumber into a
state of scepticism brings one into a condition not very far re-
moved from dogmatism itself. This at any rate is clear, what-
ever the reasons for it may have been, that Kant, while rightly
insisting that the idea of a thing in itself was an essential ele-
ment in his philosophy (for he gave that definite answer when
challenged on the point in his old age by Fichte), never took in
hand the task of working out that idea and saying to himself,
'since I admit that we can and do think the thing in itself I
must make up my mind exactly how we think it and what we
think it is '.
By neglecting to do this, Kant imposed on his successors the
task of doing it for him. Fichte tried to solve the problem by
cutting it out, eliminating the thing in itself and representing
the mind as constructing nature out of nothing. This produced
a philosophy which on the face of it looked like a Kantianism
made for the first time coherent and logical; but it really de-
stroyed the Kantian problem instead of solving it, for the
problem arises not from a general consideration of knowledge
but from the special peculiarities of nature as something given
to mind, something with which mind finds itself confronted,
and this implies that there is a thing in itself. The alternative
method ot developing Kant was therefore the right one, and
this was adopted by Hegel.
III
HEGEL: THE TRANSITION TO THE MODERN
VIEW OF NATURE
RANT admitted that we can and may think of the thing in itself ;
but he set his followers the task of discovering how in fact we
must and do think of it.
The person who set himself this task as the starting-point of
all cosmological theory was Hegel. Rejecting the exclusive
claim of scientific thought to the title of knowledge, and con-
sequently rejecting the idea that the thing in itself is unknow-
able, he affirmed that the thing in itself is the easiest of all
things to know: it is simply pure being, being as such, without
any particular determinations whether qualitative or quantita-
tive, spatial or temporal, material or spiritual. The only reason
why it seems to be unknowable is because there is nothing
particular in it to know; it has no characteristics to distinguish
it from anything else, and so when we try to describe it we fail,
not because we cannot understand the mystery of its nature
but because we understand perfectly well that there is nothing
there to describe. Being in general is nothing in particular; so
the concept of pure being passes over, as Hegel puts it, into the
concept of nothing. This passage or logical transition from one
concept to another is not a merely subjective or psychological
transition of our thought from one concept to a different con-
cept; it is an objective transition, a real process by which one
concept evolvesitselflogicallyout of another which it presupposes.
This is the idea of becoming, development or process, which in
its primary or fundamental form is logical becoming: a process,
but not a process in time or a movement in space, still less a
change of mind or process of thought, but a process of the
notion, a logical movement inherent in concepts as such. Thus
Hegel has answered the question how the thing in itself can be
creative or a source of something other than itself: its activity
is the same as what we call logical necessity, the inherent power
by which one concept generates another, which is at once a
fresh concept and a new form of itself. The concept grows like
an organism, passing from potentiality to actuality by sprouting
122 HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
new determinations of itself which are heterogeneous with their
undifferentiated starting-point.
From this beginning Hegel develops a system of concepts
which he expounds in what he calls the science of logic. This
system of concepts is like the Platonic world of forms in being
immaterial, purely intelligible, organically constructed, and the
presupposition of all material and mental existence. The differ-
ence between Hegel's conception and Plato's is that whereas
Plato's world of forms is static, devoid of change and becoming,
Hegel's is permeated through and through by process, it is
dynamic, its being constantly issues in a becoming where every
concept leads on by logical necessity to the next. This over-
comes Aristotle's objection to Plato that his forms, because
they are static, cannot explain the origin of change and process
in the natural world; for Hegel, the changes in nature and
indeed the origin of nature are an outcome or logical consequence
of the process in the world of concepts: logical priority is the
ground of temporal priority. Hence, unlike Aristotle, Hegel
need not place a thinker or mind at the beginning of his cos-
mology as the first cause; it is true that he describes God as the
object which the science of logic studies, but God is not for him
a mind-that is a falsely anthropomorphic way of conceiving
Him; God is the self-creating and self-subsisting world or
organism of pure concepts, and mind is only one, though the
highest and most perfect, of the determinations which God
acquires in that process of self-creation which is also the process
of creating the world. Here lies Hegel's answer to the problem
of the relation between human mind and divine mind, which
Berkeley left unsolved and Kant gave up as insoluble: the
importance of man in the world lies precisely in the fact that
he is the vehicle of mind, the form in which God's being or
rather becoming develops itself into its crowning phase as the
being or becoming of spirit. This resembles pantheism in that
the process of the world is conceived as identical with the pro-
cess of God's self-creative life; but it differs from pantheism in
that God in Himself, as the pure creative concept, is prior to
the material world and transcends it as its cause.
This dynamic world of forms, which Hegel refers to collec-
tively as the Idea, is the source or creator immediately of nature
and mediately, through nature, of mind. Thus Hegel rejects the
HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE 123
subjective idealism, as he calls it, of Berkeley and Kant, accord-
ing to which mind is the presupposition or creator of nature;
that, says Hegel, inverts the relation between them, and he
prefers in this respect the materialistic view of nature as the
source of mind. In his eyes the only error of that view is to
make nature something absolute, self-creative or self-explana-
tory, whereas in point of fact, he thinks, the subjective idealists
are right, as were Plato and Aristotle, in regarding nature as
essentially created, derivative, dependent upon something else:
only that something else is for him not mind but the Idea. And
Hegel thoroughly agrees with Plato in regarding the Idea not
as a state of mind, or an activity of mind, or a creature of mind,
not in short as anything subjective, but as a self-contained and
self-existing reahn of being which is the appropriate object of
mind. This is what Hegel calls' objective idealism', as opposed
to the subjective idealism of Kant, or alternatively' absolute
idealism' because it conceives the Idea as something real in
itself and not depending in any way upon the mind that thinks it.
I am here following Hegel in describing the philosophical
view common to Kant and Berkeley as subjective idealism. I
am not sure whether Hegel invented the name, but in any case
our ordinary use of it comes from him and consequently he has
a right to be consulted as to its meaning. As he used it, sub-
jective idealism is the theory that ideas or concepts exist only
for a subject, or (as Hegel puts it) the illusion that' ideas exist
only in our heads'. He regards this illusion as a legacy of the
Cartesian body-mind dualism, which has trained people to
think that whatever is not material is mental, so that the con-
cept, instead of being a presupposition of thought, is twisted
into a mere way of thinking, an act or habit of thought. Sub-
jective idealism in this sense must be clearly distinguished from
solipsism, which is the theory-actually held by one school of
Cartesians-that nothing exists except myself, i.e. my mind.
That, of course, is one form of subjective idealism, but not a
form ever held either by Berkeley or by Kant.
Hegel's philosophy is a system in three parts. The first part
is logic, or the theory of the Idea. The second part is the theory
of nature; the third is the theory of mind. These three together
form what he calls the encyclopaedia of the philosophical
sciences, and every phiJ.osophical topic and doctrine falls
124 HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
somewhere into a place in this framework. I shall of course make
no attempt here to give an account of the system as a whole; I
shall merely try to outline Hegel's conception of nature and to
show how it stands to the Idea on the one hand and to mind on
the other.
Nature, for Hegel, is real; it is in no sense an illusion, or
something which we think to exist when what really exists is
something else; nor is it in any sense a mere appearance, some-
thing which only exists because we think it. It really exists,
and exists independently of any mind whatever. But the word
'real' is somewhat ambiguous. Literally, it means having the
character of a res or thing; and if things are what exist in space
and time, nature is not only real but it is the only reality, for
it is precisely the totality of things, the realm of thinghood.
But in ordinary usage the word 'real' has at least one other
, meaning: as when we say that this picture is not a real Rem-
brandt but only a copy. The picture is a thing, it has realitas;
but it has not veritas; it does not embody the idea which it
professes to embody.
Now, according to Plato and Aristotle, all natural things are
essentially things engaged in a process of becoming; and this is
because they are always trying to become adequate embodi-
ments of their own forms and never quite succeeding. In this
sense everything in nature is to some extent unreal in the
second sense of the word: not a mere appearance, still less an
illusion, but something not altogether succeeding in being itself.
Hegel accepts this Platonic-Aristotelian view of nature.
Nature is permeated, for Hegel as for Aristotle, by nisus;
everythiI].g in nature is trying to become something definite; but
the convergence of the process upon its own proper goal is
always asymptotic and never reaches the point of coincidence.
This is why the laws of nature are what modem scientists call
statistical laws, not describing with rigid accuracy the behaviour
of each single individual to which they apply, but describing
the general tendency of their behaviour, the type of behaviour
towards which their movement is orientated. In this sense
nature is not real; nothing in nature fully and completely tallies
with ou~ scientific description of it; and this not because our
descriptions are in need of correction, but because there is
always in nature a certain backlash, an element of indeter-
HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE I25
minacy, of potentiality (to use Aristotle's language) not yet
resolved into perfect actuality.
What is the reason for this element of backlash or indeter-
minacy in nature? Hegel's answer to this question is profoundly
original. The Greeks had been inclined to throw the blame for
it upon matter, and to suggest that the form, though perfect in
itself, was not perfectly embodied in matter because the matter
was somehow recalcitrant; but this was no answer, because the
alleged recalcitrance of matter was only a name for the fact that
the form, for whatever reason, was not perfectly embodied
there. Hegel's view is that the forms of nature fail to get
perfectly embodied because of a certain peculiarity in these
forms themselves. They are forms of a peculiar kind, which
owing to something in their very structure cannot be completely
realized. The task which nature sets herself in trying to realize
them is therefore an inherently impossible one, and can only be
accomplished in an imperfect and approximate way. They are,
so to speak, Utopian forms, at once demanding realization and
yet having in them something which makes realization im-
possible. What makes their realization impossible is the fact
that they are 'abstract': that is, the fact that they stand over
against their own instances as transcendent patterns which in
themselves are essentially immaterial but which nevertheless
demand to be reproduced in matter.
The concepts of nature may be contrasted in this respect with
two other types of concept: thqse of pure logic and those ot
mind. The concepts of pure logic are determinations of pure
being, and all belong as necessary attributes to anything what-
ever; there is no possibility of anything's failing to exhibit
anyone of them, because they are all bound up together in such
a way that where one of them is realized all are realized; and
they are all realized everywhere. The description of them is the
elaborated or developed description of anything whatever just
so far as it is anything-a body or a mind or anything else, if
there is anything else. .
The concepts of mind, on the other hand, are (like those of
nature) concepts determining the character of a special kind of
actually existing thing: but this thing (viz. the mind) has the
peculiarity that it imposes this character upon itself by its own
free activity, and therefore is free to develop in itself a perfect
rz6 HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
possession of this character. They define what mind ought to
be, and what mind ought to be it can be, and indeed only
knows that it ought to be this in so far as it is already being
this. Morality, e.g., is a concept of mind; and only a mind which
is already a moral agent recognizes that it ought to be a moral
agent.
The way in which Hegel thinks of the concepts or forms which
direct the processes of nature is parallel to the way in which
Plato thought of all forms. For instance, Plato himself explains
that the conception of the ideal State cannot be exactly realized
in any actual State, because human nature, being what it is, can
never organize itself into a perfect embodiment of that concep-
tion; yet the demand that this shall be done, the demand that
the form of the ideal State shall be realized in human nature, is
a demand essential to the form itself: so that the form sets
human nature a task which it cannot shirk and yet can never
hope really to accomplish.
But why should Hegel have supposed that all the forms of
nature have this curious character? For answer, we must ask
what is the differentia of nature, the peculiarity which dis-
tinguishes it as a whole from the Idea on the one hand and from
mind on the other. Hegel's answer is that nature is essentially
reality as external, the external world. Here external does not
mean external to us. Nature is in no sense external to us. It
i!l not external to our bodies; on the contrary our bodies are
part and parcel of it; nor is it external to our minds, for no one
thing can be outside another unless both occupy positions in
space and are therefore material bodies; and our minds, not
being bodies, are not situated anywhere in space; indeed, if
they were, they too would be parts of nature~ What is meant
by calling nature the external world is that it is a world per-
vaded and characterized by externality, a world in which every-
thing is external to everything else. Nature, then, is the realm
of outwardness; it is a world (or rather the world) in which things
are outside each other. This outwardness has two forms: one
in which every thing is outside every other thing, namely space;
the other in which one thing is outside itself, namely time.
When I say that a thing is outside itself in time, I mean that
the realization of its concept or idea is spread, out over time;
the various elements which go to make up that concept, the
HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE 127
various attributes or characteristics of the thing, are separated
from each other by belonging to it successively, and cannot
belong to it together. It is in the nature of a heart, for example,
that it should both expand and contract; but because the pro-
cess involving these two phases is a natural and not a logical
one, the transition from one phase to the other takes place in
time, and the heart stops doing one thing when it begins doing
the other. Its complete being, as a heart, involves both systole
and diastole; but this being is broken up and realized piece-
meal, time being the manner of its breaking-up and of its
piecemeal realization.
The idea of nature, according to Hegel, is the idea of a reality
thus doubly broken up, spread out or distributed over space and
time. This characteristic affects not only the idea of nature
as a whole, but every idea of any thing in nature. The idea of a
material body is the idea of a number of particles distributed in
space; the idea of life is the idea of a number of characteristics
distributed in time. Hence there is no one place at which the
idea of a body can be locally exemplified, and no one time at
which all the characteristics of life can be actualized. You can
nowhere say, the body is here; you can never say, I am now, at
this instant, alive. Even if you indicate a cubic foot of space
when you say here, and a span of eighty years when you say now,
.you still cannot say that the being <* the body is wholly contained
within that region, or the being of the organism within those
eighty years; in both cases the being of the thing overflows
beyond these boundaries; the body makes itself felt by its gravita-
tional effects throughout space, and the organism, whether you
look at it physically, chemically, biologically, or morally, is only
a temporal and local concretion in a life-stream stretching vastly
beyond it on all sides, and what we call its peculiarities are
really characteristics pervading that life-stream as a whole.
Following this line of thought we soon arrive at the concep-
tion, which Whitehead has rediscovered and made familiar in
our own time, that each piece of matter in the world is located
not here or there simply, but everywhere. This conception, as
Whitehead has well insisted, is by no means shocking to modern
physics; and this is q remarkable fact about modem cosmology,
that the physical science of to-day has arrived at a view of
matter and energy which so far agrees with the implications of
128 HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
Hegel's theory of nature, that a philosopher-scientist like White-
head can restate Hegel's theory (not knowing that it is Hegel's,
for he does not appear to have read Hegel, so far as I can judge)
~md allow that theory to take him wherever it likes, setting his
sails to it with a good conscience and cheerfully resolving the
concept of nature, as he says himself, into the concept of pure
activity. What is possible for Whitehead, however, was not
possible for Hegel, because the physics of Hegel's day was still
the physics of Galileo and Newton, a physics conceived in terms
of things' simply located' (to use Whitehead's term) in space.
Consequently the whole Hegelian theory of nature is rent by a
dualism which in the long run breaks it in pieces. On the one
hand there is the presupposition which he inherited from the
seventeenth century, the conception of nature as a machine, a
moving congeries of pieces of dead matter; on the other hand
there is the cosmological implication of his own thought, which
insists that all reality must be permeated by process and
activity; that nature cannot be a mere machine, because it has
in it the power to evolve out of itself, by a logical necessity, life
and mind.
Hegel belonged to a generation of Germans who worshipped
ancient Greece with an almost idolatrous worship and studied
its art, literature, and thought with passionate intensity. The
organicism or anti-mechanism of Hegel's N aturphilosophie might
be cheaply and easily described as a philosophy in which the
unsolved problems of eighteenth-century thought were solved
by borrowing from the thought of ancient Greece. I say cheaply
and easily, because these methods of description are charac-
teristic of that frivolous and superficial type of history which
speaks of 'influences' and' borrowings' and so forth, and when
it says that A is influenced by B or that A borrows from B never
asks itself what there was in A that laid it open to B's influence,
or what there was in A which made it capable of borrowing
from B. An historian of thought who is not content with these
cheap and easy formulae will not see Hegel as filling up the
chinks in eighteenth-century thought with putty taken from
Plato and Aristotle. He will see Hegel as the point at which,
through its own spontaneous development, eighteenth-century
thought became sufficiently mature to understand Plato and
Aristotle and the!efore to connect its own problems with the
HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE I29
problems which it found them discussing. But in making this
contact with Greek ideas Hegel lost contact with the practical
life of his own generation. Hegel was a revolutionary. His view
of nature led (consciously) to revolutionary conclusions about
the correct procedure of scientific research. He wanted to go
from Galileo more or less direct to Einstein. But he lived in a
generation of counter-revolutionaries who maintained that what
was good enough for Newton was good enough for them and
would be good enough for all future generations. This quarrel
between Hegel and his contemporaries arose from certain dis-
crepancies in Hegel's own thought.
He followed Rant and Newton, Descartes and Galileo, in
taking empty space and time as the fundamental things in
nature, the double framework over which all natural fact is
spread out; the movement which pervades nature he takes,
in the Platonic-Aristotelian manner, as a translation of some-
thing more fundamental, namely, logical process, into terms of
space and time; but he sees that if the conception of nature as
thus spread out over space and time is taken seriously, it leads
to the conclusion that no natural thing or process ever has a
home of its own either in space or in time, and consequently the
very idea of existing in space or happening in time is an idea
that contradicts itself.
In this situation, what is Hegel to do? Some philosophers,
when they find a thing to contain self-contradictions, argue that
therefore it is only an appearance, not a reality. But that method
of escape is not open to Hegel, because he is an ultra-realist in
his theory of knowledge, and thinks that whatever appears, so
long as it really does appear, is real. Now, nature really does
appear to us; it is visibly present to our senses, or rather, as
Rant had shown, not to our senses but to our imagination, and
intelligibly present to the thought of the scientist. It is there-
fore real. But the contradiction in it, according to Hegel, proves
that it is not complete; it is something which is engaged in
turning into something else. This other thing, into which nature
is turning, is mind. We may therefore say if we like that for
Hegel nature implies mind. But this implication has nothing
to do with any train of thinking. It does not mean that when
we think of nature we are obliged to go on and think of mind.
Nor does it mean that nature is something which cannot exist
4849 K
130 HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
unless mind exists too. It means that nature is one phase in a
real process which is leading on to the existence of mind.
Nature for him is an abstraction, as it is for Berkeley and Kant;
but a real abstraction, not a mental abstraction. By a real
abstraction I mean a real phase in a real process, in itself, and
apart from the subsequent phase to which it is leading. Thus,
the growth of a leaf-bud is a process which really happens, and
happens before the leaf is fully formed; the separateness of the
two things, bud and leaf, is not a fiction of the human mind;
but although the bud has a character of its own really different
from that of the leaf, it is also engaged in turning into a leaf, and
this activity of turning into a leaf is part of its essence, indeed
it is the most essential part of that essence. Bud and leaf are
thus phases of one process, and the bud in itself is an abstraction
from that process, but an abstraction made by nature, which
everywhere works in this way through successive phases of the
process, doing one thing before it goes on to the next. Now, for
Hegel nature as a whole implies mind in the same way in which
the bud implies the leaf; nature must first of all be itself, so our
conception of it is true and not illusory; but it is only being
itself provisionally; it is going to stop being itself and turn into
mind, as the bud is only being itself in order to stop being a bud
and turn into a leaf. And this provisional character of the bud
as a transitory phase in the whole process appears logically as a
self-contradiction in the idea of a bud, a contradiction between
what it is being and what it is becoming. The contradiction is
no fault of the botanist's; it is not a fault at all; it is a charac-
teristic inherent in reality so far as reality means what exists
here and now, that is, the world of nature.
In one respect the parallel between the process from bud to
leaf and the process from nature to mind is imperfect. The
process from bud to leaf is a process within nature and is there-
fore in time: the bud exists at one time and the leaf at a later
time. Obviously the transition from nature to mind cannot fall
within nature, for it takes us beyond the idea of nature; there-
fore the transition is not a temporal transition but an ideal or
logical one. There will never be a time, according to Hegel,
when all nature will have turned into mind, and conversely
there never was a time when none of nature had turned into
mind; mind always is and always has been growing out of
HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE I3!
nature, somewhat as gravitating bodies have always been
generating fields of force, or as the series of numbers has always
been generating itself to infinity.
This brings us to a point where Hegel's cosmology differs
sharply from most of those current to-day: it is indeed the main
or crucial point of difference. The point to which I refer is
concerned with the significance of time. Modem cosmologies
are in general based on the idea of evolution, and represent the
development not only of one natural species or order as a
development in time, but also the development of mind from
nature as a development in time. Views of this kind were
already being canvassed in Hegel's day, and he considered them,
only to reject them with emphasis. All reality, he says, is a
system of strata or grades, higher and lower; this is true both
of mind, where there is a lower stratum of sense and a higher
one of intellect, with subdivisions, and also of nature, where the
inorganic or lifeless and the organic or living are the two main
divisions; and in nature, which is the realm of externality, the
living and the lifeless instead of interpenetrating must exist
outside one another as separate classes of things. But he insists
that there cannot be a temporal transition, but only a logical
transition, from the lower forms in nature to the higher. Now,
there is a reason why Hegel took up this position. The reason
is, that a purely dead and mechanical world of matter, as con-
ceived by the physics of his day (which he accepted as his
starting-point), cannot conceivably produce life by doing the
only thing which it has the power to do, namely, redistributing
itself in space. There is a new principle of organization at work
in living things, which differs qualitatively from that of dead
matter; and since the realm of matter was ex hypothesi devo~d
of qualitative differences, it could not produce that particular
qualitative novelty in itself.. Consequently, so long as physicists
were content with their conception of dead matter, their
authority made it impossible to accept a theory of evolution.
Here once more we observe the incompleteness of Hegel's
N aturphilosophie, the unremoved contradictions in its logical
basis. What was he doing? Was he trying to give a philoso-
phical account in the Kantian manner, of what natural scientists
had actually done and did actually believe? In other words, is
his N aturphilosophie an attempt to answer the question how
I32 HEGEL: THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
natural scientists come to know what they do in fact know?
Or was he trying to go behind the results already achieved by
natural scientists and to get a different set of results by a
method which was not the traditional method of natural science
but his own philosophical method? .
He has been blamed for doing both these things, each time on
the ground that he ought to have been doing the other. The
fact is that he really was doing both. He begins by provisionally
accepting natural science as it stood in his own day (and he has
been frequently and bitterly and very unfairly blamed for doing
that, in other words for accepting what was told him by men
who, because they lived in the late eighteenth century, are by
now supposed to be mere examples of medieval folly), and he
goes on to find himself deeply dissatisfied with this contemporary
natural science and trying to improve on it according to his
own ideas of what science should be. And he has been frequently
and bitterly and very unfairly blamed for that too, in other
words for not accepting what these same alleged fools told him,
and for trying to criticize their work when he ought to have left
it alone as 'scientific' and therefore sacrosanct.
'Hegel was struggling to bring about a synthesis between con-
temporary science and the results he had achieved by his own
methods, between the conception of nature as a machine and
the conception of all reality as permeated by process. He was
right in thinking that a synthesis was needed. I do not say
that he was right with regard to the particular synthesis at
which he arrived. What I say is that he was in a hurry, and
tried (having committed himself to an unsatisfactory distinction
between natural science and philosophy) to solve by philosophy
the problems of natural science, not seeing that natural science
must solve its own problems in its own time and by its own
methods. He tried to anticipate by philosophy something
which in fact could only be a future development of natural
science. His anticipation, as we can now see, was in many ways
startlingly accurate; but scientific thought has no place for
anticipation; it only values results scientifically achieved.
PART III
THE MODERN VIEW OF NATURE
I
THE CONCEPT OF LIFE
1. Evolutionary biology
SINCE Hegel's day the concept of evolution has passed through
two main phases: first, a biological phase; then a cosmological.
The biological phase is of extreme importance in its relation
to the general theory of nature, because it was this movement
of thought which ultimately broke down the old Cartesian
dualism of matter and mind by introducing between them a
third term, namely, life. The scientific work of the nineteenth
century was largely devoted to establishing the autonomy of the
biological sciences as forming a separate realm, independent of
physics or the science of matter on the one hand and the science
of mind on the other. In ancient and -medieval cosmology the
ideas of matter, life, and mind were so fused together as to be
hardly distinguishable; the world, qua extended, was regarded
as material; qua moving, as alive; q~,a orderly, as intelligent.
The thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries expelled
its soul from the world, and created modem physics by con-
ceiving the orderly movements of matter as dead movements.
There was already implicit in this conception a contrast with
living movements, but modem biology was as yet unborn, and
Descartes deliberately tried to think of animals as automata,
that is, to explain biological facts in terms of the new physics.
Even in Hegel, the division of his cosmology into theory of
nature and theory of mind betrays a relic of the Cartesian
dualism and shows that biology was not yet a third division
of science with principles of its own.
Before the rise of nineteenth-century biology, the process of
generation in living organisms was conceived as a reproductive
process, that is, a process by which the specific form of the
parent organism was reproduced in the offspring. Any failure
to reproduce it exactly was regarded as an aberration, a failure
in the strict sense, a shot in which nature simply missed her
134 THE CONCEPT OF LIFE
mark. And of course there was a vast amount of evidence in
favour of such a view; within our experience organic species
remain relatively stable, and conspicuous aberrations from their
form are in general either incapable of living or at least in-
capable of reproducing themselves. But palaeontology, as
studied by the geologists of the eighteenth century, made it
clear that over a longer stretch of time this evidence no longer
held good; for geology very soon presented us with pictures of
past ages in which the flora and fauna of the world had been
very different from what they are now. The natural way of
interpreting this new knowledge was by assuming that the
organisms of to-day trace their pedigree not through a line of
ancestors all specifically identical with themselves, but through
these specifically different forms; so that the specific form itself
undergoes change in time as the history of the world proceeds.
This hypothesis was greatly strengthened, if not actually sug-
gested, by the study of human history, where the forms of
political and social organization can be seen to have undergone
an evolution of the same kind. It was verified by the study, due
especially to Darwin, of the breeding of domestic animals, where
within comparatively short spaces of time human agency, by
selecting certain strains to breed from, can produce forms
having at any rate a strong resemblance to independent species
and capable like them of breeding true to type.
These considerations led to an entirely new conception of the
generative process. Whereas nature had hitherto been credited
with an effort to reproduce fixed specific forms of life, she was
henceforth conceived as attempting, like a human cattle-
breeder, to produce always new and improved forms. But for
the cattle-breeder an improved form means one better suited to
the breeder's interests, which are not identical with the interests
of the cattle themselves: thus the purposes of the breeder are
imposed on the cattle from without. If nature is improving the
forms of life, she works from within; and hence when we say
that nature produces an improved form of life, what we mean
is a form that is better fitted to survive or simply to live, i.e. a
form more adequately embodying the idea of life. The history
of life was thus conceived as the history of an endless succession
of experiments on the part of nature to produce organisms more
and more intensely and effectively alive. This conception of
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY 135
life was with great difficulty and severe struggles distinguished
from the already familiar conceptions of matter and mind.
The new biology thought of life as resembling matter and unlike
mind in being wholly devoid of conscious purpose; Darwin
talked freely of selection, and constantly used language imply-
ing teleology in organic nature, but he never for a moment
thought of nature as a conscious agent deliberately trying
experiments and aware of the ends which she was pursuing;
if he had troubled to think out the philosophy underlying his
biology he would have arrived at something like Schopenhauer's
conception of the evolutionary process as the self-expression of
a blind will, a creative and directive force utterly devoid of
consciousness and of the moral attributes which consciousness
bestows on the will of man; and it is some such ideas which we
find floating everywhere in the atmosphere of Darwin's con-
temporaries, such as Tennyson. On the other hand, life was
conceived as like mind and unlike matter in developing itself
through an historic process, and orientating itself through this
process not at random but in a determinate direction, towards
the production of organisms more fitted to survive in the given
environment, whatever that might be. If the environment
changed, if, for example, a sea containing fishes very slowly
dried up, the theory was that the fishes, generation by genera-
tion, would find means of adapting themselves to live first in
mud and then on dry land; if it remained stable, the theory was
that stronger and more active fishes would by degrees come into
existence and crowd out or devour their less capable neighbours.
This theory implied the philosophical conception of a life-force
at once immanent and transcendent in relation to each and
every living organism; immanent as existing only as embodied
in these organisms, transcendent as seeking to realize itself not
merely in the survival of the individual organisms, nor merely
in the perpetuation of their specific type, but as always able
and always trying to find for itself a more adequate realization
in a new type.
This new philosophical conception of life as something differ-
ent from both matter and mind was not established without
opposition. This came, as was natural, from the heritage of the
Cartesian two-substance theory, with its traditional inclusion of
life within the realm of matter, and its consequent impulse to
THE CONCEPT OF LIFE
explain biological facts through the concepts of physics. The
stronghold of this opposition was the theory that modifications
in specific form depended on pure chance, paternal and maternal
cells being shuffled and arranged in the fertilized ovum at
random, and thus forming offspring of various kinds where
some, owing to this inborn structure, were able to live in their
environment and others were not. On the basis of this theory
there has arisen an imposing structure of materialistic genetics,
where by the word' materialistic' I mean that it attempts to
explain physiological function wholly in terms of physico-
chemical structure. I cannot here go into the controversies,
which are still lively, between views of this type and those of
other schools, because these controversies really belong to the
field of biology, and it is only their remoter implications that
affect the philosophical questions I am here discussing. On the
ground of philosophy, I think it is fair to say that the conception
of vital process as distinct from mechanical or chemical change
has come to stay, and has revolutionized our conception of
nature. That many eminent biologists have not yet accepted it
need cause no surprise. In the same way, the anti-Aristotelian
physics which I have described as the new and fertile element in
sixteenth-century cosmology was rej ected by many distinguished
scientists of that age; not only by futile pedants, but by men
who were making important contributions to the advancement
of knowledge.
z. Bergson
This phase of thought, in which the idea of evolution was
worked out as an essentially biological idea, may be con-
veniently regarded as culminating in the work of Bergson. I do
not mean here to review that work as a whole, but only to
indicate the main lines of what may be called the biological
element in his philosophy and its relation to certain other
elements.
Bergson's thought about life begins by firmly grasping the
difference which marks it off from matter as understood by the
physicist. There, everything that happens is the mere result of
a cause already existing; matter and energy are constants, and
all movements are predetermined and theoretically calculable;
that is to say, there can never be anything really new; all future
BERGSON I37
events are implied in any past event, or in Bergson's own
phrase, tout est donne, the gates of the future are shut. In life,
on the contrary, the gates of the future are open; the process
of change is a creative process, leading to the appearance of
genuine novelties. Here is a prima facie dualism within nature
between a realm of matter and a realm of life. What are we to
do with the dualism? Bergson approaches it through the theory
of knowledge. There, too, he finds a dualism between intellect,
which reasons and demonstrates, and works with rigid concepts,
and is the appropriate organ for conceiving matter, and intui-
tion, which enters into the life of its object, follows it in its
movement, and is consequently the appropriate organ for
cognizing the fluid and self-creative world of life. This second
dualism Bergson attempts to resolve by maintaining that the
human mind as a whole being a product of natural evolution,
we need not suppose nature to have given us mental faculties
in order to know the truth; in fact, our intellect is not a truth-
knowing faculty at all, it is essentially a practical faculty, a
faculty for enabling us to act effectively in the flux of nature
by cutting this flux up into rigid chunks and thus manipulating
it, much as a butcher manipulates animal flesh or a joiner
manipulates trees. Thus Bergson has fallen back on a third
dualism, a dualism between knowledge and action: knowledge
conceived as essentially intuitive, the work of living conscious-
ness steeping itself in its living object, and action conceived as
manipulative, the work of that same consciousness detaching
itself from its object and standing over against it in order to
kill it, cut it up, and make things out of it.
These three dualisms turn into one another kaleidoscopically
in Bergson's philosophy; but of the three the one which is
fundamental for our purpose is the cosmological dualism be-
tween matter and life. We have already seen that life is the
power or process which has created, among other things, the
human mind, and that matter is a way in which this mind
conceives reality for the purpose of manipulating it; but this
reality, whatever else it is, is life itself; and since life and matter
are opposites in every way it cannot therefore be matter too:
consequently matter is a figment of the intellect, useful and '
necessary for purposes of action, but not true in any sense
whatever. Thus matter is eliminated from Bergson's cosmology,
THE CONCEPT OF LIFE
and we are left with a world consisting simply and solely of the
vital process and its products.
This process is described as a process of creative evolution.
Efficient causes are banished from it as belonging merely to the
fictitious world of matter; what moves in obedience to an
efficient cause is merely pushed or pulled into motion, but life
moves of itself, in obedience to its own inherent elan vital. But
final causes are banished too; for in final causation the end is a
ready-made datum, and therefore the process leading to that
end must run on predetermined lines, and once more tout est
donne and the absolute creativity or spontaneity of the process
is denied. Bergson puts this by saying that teleology is only
mechanism turned upside down-un mecanisme au rebours.
The process of the world is a vast extemporization; the vital
force has no aim, no goal, no guiding lights outside it or guiding
principles within; it is sheer force, whose only inherent property
is to flow, to push indefinitely onwards in any and every direc-
tion. Material things are not the vehicles or presuppositions of
this cosmic movement, they are its products; and laws of nature
are not the laws guiding its course, they are merely the shapes
which for a time it adopts. Thus the old distinction between a
substantial, extended, perceptible world of natural objects and
the immaterial and unchanging intelligible laws which govern the
behaviour of these objects-the Greek distinction between the
perceptible and intelligible worlds-is denied in a new way, by
resolving both terms alike into the concept of process or evolu-
tion, which produces at once the things which change and the
changing laws of their changes.
The high and permanent merit of Bergson's theory of nature
is that he is in earnest with the conception of life; he has grasped
that conception with great firmness and defined it in a way
which is not only brilliant and impressive but within its own
limits conclusive. But when we look at his philosophy as a whole
and see how he has attempted to identify this concept of life
with the concept of nature, reducing everything in nature to the
one term (life', we see that he has done over again for life what
the 'materialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did
for matter. They took physics as their starting-point, and argued
that, whatever else nature might be, it was at any rate material
in the sense in which that word was understood by the physicists.
BERGSON I39
They then proceeded to reduce the entire world of nature to
terms of matter. Bergson takes biology as his starting-point,
and ends by reducing the whole world of nature to terms of life.
We must ask whether this reduction is any more successful than
the parallel reduction attempted by materialism.
Two questions arise here. First, are there any things which
obstinately resist absorption into the concept of life, as mind
resisted absorption into the concept of matter? And secondly,
is the concept of life able to stand by itself as a cosmic principle,
capable of doing its work when all other concepts have been
knocked away from around it like a scaffolding?
The first question is one which the Bergsonian vitalism can
face more confidently than the old materialism. The idea of
life, bridging as it does the gap between matter and mind, can
plausibly claim to explain both. I shall therefore not linger over
that question.
The second is more serious. Life, as we know it, plays its part,
on a stage already set by matter. It is, so far as we can see, a
local and transitory efflorescence on the surface of one among
immense numbers of inorganic bodies. The inorganic world of
astronomy and physics is a vast system with a range in space
and time incalculably greater than that of the organic world.
The fact that life ever and anywhere appears in this inorganic
world is no doubt a fact throwing important light on the nature
of the inorganic world; but when we extricate our minds from
the spell of Bergson's eloquence and ask ourselves in a cool hour
whether matter is a by-product of life, as he argues, or life a by-
product of matter, as the materialists believe, we can hardly
refuse to admit that the position he is defending is a monstrous
and intolerable paradox. If we cannot seriously accept Kant's
theory that nature is a by-product of the thinking activity of the
human mind, because we are sure that the opposite is nearer the
truth, how can we accept Bergson's very similar theory that
the world of physics is a by-product of the self-creative activity
of life? This is a new form of subjective idealism, of which we
must say what Hume said of Berkeley's, that the argument
might admit of no answer, but it produced no conviction.
This sense of the disproporiions and paradoxes involved in
Bergson's vitalism must lead us to a closer inspection of his
fundamental concept. The life-force whose working creates both
THE CONCEPT OF LIFE
natural organisms and natural laws, and endows organisms with
minds working intuitively for knowledge and intellectually for'
action, is a force outside of which and prior to which there is
nothing; yet it differentiates itself, organizes itself in different
ways, ramifies and develops on different lines, succeeds in
developing along this line and fails to develop on that; here it
congeals into stagnation, there it flows on with uninterrupted
vigour. In short, throughout his detailed descriptions of its
activity he thinks of it as if it were a river flowing among rocks
and mountains which though they do not determine its move-
ment do determine the ramifications and diversifications of that
movement. This implies one of two things: either that the cause
of these obstructions and ramifications is inherent in the life-
force itself, or that this cause is something other than life. The
first alternative is ruled out by Bergson's conception of life as
pure activity, sheer infinite positive elan. We are therefore
thrown back on the second, and compelled to think of this cause
as something real in its own right, an obstruction to the flow of
life; in short, a material world in which life develops and by
whose agency the workings of life are conditioned; in a word,
we come back to the idea of matter as the stage on which life
plays its part. This is the vicious circle of Bergson's cosmology:
ostensibly he regards matter as a by-product of life, but actually
he cannot explain how that or any other special by-product can
arise without presupposing, alongside of and indeed prior to
life, matter itself.
This conclusion is fatal to Bergson's theory of knowledge.
If matter is no less real than life, the intellect which thinks the
material world is no less an organ of knowledge than the intui-
tion which envisages life, his sceptical or pragmatist attitude
towards physics and in general logical thinking breaks down,
and we are forced to admit that the intellect in dissecting the
world and solidifying the fragments of it into conceptual units
is not falsifying reality for practical ends, but dividing reality
(as Plato put it) at its joints, discerning divisions in it that really
exist. Consequently Bergson's theory of intuition must go too;
it is no longer possible to restrict knowledge to a mere immediate
consciousness which life has of itself, a consciousness as fluid
and changeful as that of which it is conscious; and we come
back to the idea of consciousness as rising to the level of know-
BERGSON 141
~~o~~:~~~gf~ti~~fEe~tt~t~?~=~~;t~:9~!~~~ !~~~~rz~
the solutions it has offered by applying'its own criteria: in other
words, that natural science is not a tissue of fancies or fabrica-
tiQVJ!1Yi1i.9Joiior'''tayt,Q,logy, ~i$~,~,~EYE' !2L!ill,th,-an(f.~
.se~QQ~_no.!..KQ.tlllr~1~x,9$d: bu.i.t.g~t.n.~!u.ralscience is
not, as the posi~~~s~~ ima,gined, the only departrriynLo~, faim
of human tliought about which this can be said, and is not even
a self-contained and se!i-sufflciendorm-oftIiought, but depends
for its very existence upo~meo1lier {oiiii-orthought which is
differentfr.om it art,Cl&a.Unot Tie-reducecr to
it. -:- "
I think that the time has comewnen"WesllOuld ask what this
o.t!::~E1r.m-~thq,ygpt is, and try to understand it, its methods,
its aims, and its object, no less adequately than men like White-
head and Alexander have tried to understand the methods and
aims of ~atura:rsaence, and the natural world which is the
object of natu;;;rs~i~~~~. r do not think that the defects I seem
to have noticed in the philosophy of these great men can be
removed by what may be called the direct route of starting
according to their own methods from their own starting-point
MODERN COSMOLOGY
and doing their work over again and doing it better. I do not
think it can be done even by starting from their own starting-
point and working by better methods. I think that these defects >
are due to something in their
.:! ,. " ..
starting-p-;int it'siH. Tliat'starffng-
" . " ,.'~_"'ff"~"_'" ~_,...",,-