tive generalization. Under the influence of mathematics, deduction has been foisted onto philosophy as its standard method, instead of taking its true place as an essential auxiliary mode of verification whereby to test the scope of generalities. This misapprehension of philosophic method has veiled the very considerable success of phil- osophy in providing generic notions which add lucidity to our apprehension of the facts of experience. The de- positions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limita- tions, adaptations, and inversions, either unknown to them, or even explicitly repudiated by them. A new idea introduces a new alternative; and we are not less in- debted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.
Every science must devise its own instruments. The ophy redesigns language in the same wa ] - ical science, pre-existing appliances are redesi It is exactly at this point that the appeal to facts is a difficult operation. This appeal is not solely to the expression of the facts in current verbal statements. The adequacy of such sentences is the main question at issue. It is true that the general agreement of mankind as to experience
acts is best expressed in language. But the language of literature breaks down precisely at the task of expressing in explicit form the larger generalities—the very generali- ties which metaphysics seeks to express.
The point is that every proposition refers to_a universe
exhibiting some general systematic metaphysical charac-
ter, Apart from this background, the separate entities
which go to form the proposition, and the proposition as
a whole, are without determinate character. Nothing
Speculative Philosophy 17
has been defined, because every definite entity requires a systematic universe to supply its requisite status. Thus every proposition proposing a fact must, in its complete analysis, propose the general character of the universe required for that fact. There are no self-sustained facts, floating in nonentity. This doctrine, of the impossibility of tearing a proposition from its systematic context in the actual world, is a direct consequence of the fourth and the
twentieth of the fundamental categoreal explanations which we shall be engaged in expanding and illustrating.
A proposition can embody partial truth because it onl
onan a certain type of systematic environment, which
is presupposed in its meaning. It does not refer to the
universe in all its detail.
One practical aim of metaphysics is the accurate analy-
sis of propositions; not merely of metaphysi i-
tions, but of quite ordinary _propositi :
is beef for dinner today,’ and ‘Socrates is mortal.’ The
one genus of facts which constitutes the field of some
special science requires some common metaphysical pre-
supposition respecting the universe. It is merely credu-
lous to accept verbal phrases as adequate statements of
propositions. The distinction between verbal phrases
and complete propositions is one of the reasons why the
logicians’ rigid alternative, ‘true or false,’ is so largely
irrelevant for the pursuit of knowledge.
The excessive trust in linguistic phrases has been the well-known reason vitiating so much of the philosophy and physics among the Greeks and among the mediaeval thinkers who continued the Greek traditions. For example John Stuart Mill writes: “They (the Greeks) had great difficulty in distinguishing between things which their language confounded, or in putting mentally together things which it distinguished; and could hardly combine the objects in nature, into any classes but those which were made for them by the popular phrases of their own country; or at least could not help fancying those classes to be natural, and all others arbitrary and artificial. Ac-
18 Process and Reality
cordingly, scientific investigation among the Greek schools of speculation and their followers in the Middle Ages, was little more than a mere sifting and analysing of the no- tions attached to common language. They thought that by determining the meaning of words they could become acquainted with facts.” * Mull then proceeds to quote from Whewell ° a paragraph illustrating the same weak- ness of Greek thought.
But neither Mill, nor Whewell, tracks this difficulty
about language down to its sources. They both presup-
pose that language does enunciate well-defined proposi-
tions. This is quite untrue. Language is thoroughly in-
determinate, by reason of the fact that_every occurrence presupposes some systematic type of environment,
For example, the word ‘Socrates,’ referring to the phil-
osopher, in one sentence may stand for an entity presup-
posing a more closely defined background than the word
‘Socrates,’ with the same reference, in another sentence. The word ‘mortal’ affords an analogous possibility. _A-
recise language must await a completed metaphysical ood
The technical language of philosophy represents _at- tempts of j hought to obtai icit
expression of general ideas presupposed _by the facts of experience. It follows that any novelty in metaphysical doctrines exhibits some measure of disagreement with statements of the facts to be found in current philosophi- cal literature. The extent of disagreement measures the extent of metaphysical divergence. It is, therefore, no valid criticism on one metaphysical school to point out that its doctrines do not follow from the verbal expression of the facts accepted by another school. The whole con- tention is that the doctrines in question supply a closer approach to fully expressed propositions.
The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain ade-
* Cf. Logic, Book V, Ch. ITI. Cf. Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences.
Spacoumagt I Vet Pheloso Ph Y 19
quate representation in the divine nature. Such repre- sentations compose the ‘consequent nature’ of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world without derogation to the eternal completion of its primordial conceptual nature. In this way the ‘ontological prin- ciple’ is maintained—since there can be no determinate truth, correlating impartially the partial experiences of many actual entities, apart from one actual entity to which it can be referred. The reaction of the temporal world on the nature of God is considered subsequently in Part V: it is there termed ‘the consequent nature of God.’
Whateyer_is found in ‘practice’ must lie within the
scope of the metaphysical description. When the descrip-
tion fails to include the “practice, the_metaphysics_is
inadequate_and_requires_revision. There can be no
appeal to practice to_su nt_metaphysics, so long a
we remain contented with our metaphysical doctrines. etaphysics is nothing but the description ot the gen-
eralities which apply to all the details a] practice.
o metaphysical system can hope entirely to satisfy
these pragmatic tests. At the best such a system will
remain only an approximation to the general truths which
are sought. In particular, there are no precisely stated
axiomatic certainties from which to start. There is not
even the language in which to frame them. The only
possible procedure is to start from verbal expressions
which, when taken by themselves with the current mean-
ing of their words, are ill-defined and ambiguous. These
are not premises to be immediately reasoned from apart
from elucidation by further discussion; they are en-
deavours to state general principles which will be exem-
plified in the subsequent description of the facts of ex-
perience. This subsequent elaboration should elucidate
the meanings to be assigned to the words and phrases
employed. Such meanings are incapable of accurate
apprehension apart from a correspondingly accurate
apprehension of the metaphysical background which the
20 Process and Reality
universe provides for them. But_no_ language can be
anything but elliptical, requiring a 128 of the imagina-
tion to understand itS meaning in its relevance to 1mme-
diate experience. The position of metaphysics in the
development of culture cannot be Tn eree without
pemnembering that no verbal statement is the adequate
expression of a propositio a old sabe metaphysical system gains a false
air of adequate precision from the fact that its words and phrases have passed into current literature. Thus propositions expressed in its language are more easily correlated to our flitting intuitions into metaphysical truth. When we trust these verbal statements and argue as though they adequately analysed meaning, we are led into difficulties which take the shape of negations of what in practice is presupposed. But when they are pro- posed as first principles they assume an unmerited air of sober obviousness. Their defect is that the true propo- sitions which they do express lose their fundamental character when subjected to adequate expression. For example consider the type of propositions such as ‘The grass is green,’ and “The whale is big.’ This subject- predicate form of statement seems so simple, leading straight to a metaphysical first principle; and yet in these examples it conceals such complex, diverse meanings.
It has been an objection to speculative philosophy that
it is overambitious. Rationalism, it is admitted, is the
method by which advance is made within the limits of
particular sciences. It is, however, held that this limited
success must not encourage attempts to frame ambitious
schemes expressive of the general nature of things.
One alleged justification of this criticism is ill-success:
European thought is represented as littered with meta-
physical systems, abandoned and unreconciled.
Such an assertion tacitly fastens upon philosophy the old dogmatic test. The same criterion would fasten ill-
SewOWwE ATIVE PHEELOSOPH Y 21
success upon science. We no more retain the physics of the seventeenth century than we do the Cartesian philos- ophy of that century. Yet within limits, both systems express important truths. Also we are beginning to understand the wider categories which define their limits of correct application. Of course, in that century, dog- matic views held sway; so that the validity both of the physical notions, and of the Cartesian notions, was mis- conceived. Mankind never quite knows what it is after, When we survey the history of thought, and likewise the history of practice, we find that one idea after another is tried out, its limitations defined, and its core of truth elicited. In application to the instinct for the intellectual adventures demanded by particular epochs, there is much truth in Augustine’s rhetorical phrase, Securus judicat
orbis terrarum. At the very least, men do what they can
in the way of systematization, and in the event achieve
something. ‘The proper test is not that of finality, but of
rogress. ale
But the main objection, dating from the sixteenth cen- tury and receiving final expression from Francis Bacon, is the uselessness of philosophic speculation. The position taken by this objection is that we ought to describe de- tailed matter of fact, and elicit the laws with a generality strictly limited to the systematization of these described details. General interpretation, it is held, has no bearing upon this procedure; and thus any system of general interpretation, be it true or false, remains intrinsically barren. Unfortunately for this objection, there are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system. Whenever-we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understandin Teads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to_its past,
to 1ts future, and to the universals in terms of which its
defhiniteness 1s exhibited. But such universals, by their
very character of universality, embody the potentialit
of other facts with variant types of definiteness. Thus
22 Process and Reality
the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation_as_an item In a wor with some systematic relation to it. When thought comes _ hought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. Tis search for a rationalistic scheme is the search_for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate Justifica- tion, of the interpretations which we perforce_employ, Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and_suc- cess in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. The methodology of rational interpreta- tion is the product of the fitful vagueness of conscious- ness. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation.
Philosophy_is the self-correction by consciousness of sion contri ] stances of its origin addi-
tional ti epening i wn peculiar
individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest
of such elements by which the selective character of the
individual obscures the external totality from which it
originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of s i rade, has truck with the totality of thin
reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. e task of philosophy is to recover. the totality obscured by the selection. It replaces in rational experience what has been su bmerged in the higher