THE

HOPELESS PROBLEM OF

METAPHYSICS.

BY HENRY H. HOWORTH, F.S.A.

I. PLOTINUS AND MODERN TRANSCENDENTALISM.

"To condemn philosophy because no man has solved its riddle is as absurd as to contenin morality because no man has reached perfection."-MANSEL'S Essays, 140.

"Had there not been many

A gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought,'

we should not have been able to travel on the secure terrestrial path of slow inductive science. The impossible has to be proved impossible before men will consent to limit their endeavours to the compassing of the possible."-LEWES and TENNYSON.

HERE are few phenomena in the history of human

THE

thought more interesting than the revival of metaphysics in Germany in the latter part of the last century. The study of metaphysics after the assaults of the English philosophers, which culminated in that of Hume, was virtually in its last throes when a sudden and vigorous revival took place in Germany, which has lasted nearly to our own day. It has begun to wane there, but as it wanes in Germany itself an afflatus has crossed over to our shores, and we now have a thriving metaphysical school among us which is growing in numbers and influence. Either the movement is a proof that we are on the verge of a new era of mental activity in Western Europe, or else it is an example of those ebbing tides to which the human mind. is sometimes subject, and which threatens to drive us back

G

upon the road of medievalism in quest of a hopeless and misleading goal. In either case it is surely well worthy of our attention. I shall endeavour in what follows to explain in as untechnical and simple terms as the subject admits of some phases of this German metaphysical revival. I shall deem myself fortunate if I can interest you in a question which is too generally ignored from its difficult and abstract nature, but which has stirred the enthusiasm of some of the greatest minds. When Andronicus Rhodius first collected the works of Aristotle he placed those dealing with physics in the beginning of his edition, and applied the name metaphysics-i.e., " after physics"—to the rest. This is the most plausible explanation of the name metaphysics. The connotation or meaning of the name has varied at different periods. I propose in what follows to limit it to its primitive sense. Everybody has heard of the famous philosophical distinctions between substance and accidents, reality and appearance, being and phenomena. Metaphysics in its original sense is the science which deals with substance, reality or being, as distinguished from accident, appearance or phenomena. "There is a science," says Aristotle, "which contemplates being in so far as it is being and the attributes that belong to it essentially as such." This science is metaphysics, or, in modern phraseology, "ontology," which means simply "the science of being."

The object of metaphysics, or ontology, is to reach reality or being by separating it from appearance or phenomena. Appearance and accident, we are told, are transient, deceptive, misleading. The real is alone permanent and true, that is to say, alone fundamentally and necessarily permanent and true. The apparent and phenomenal can at the best be only conditionally true, and must always be subject to doubt or error.

This being the aim of metaphysics, the first question

that arises is-Is such necessary truth attainable at all by man? If so, how? That is to say, Is a science of being possible? Is metaphysics possible?

The questions it will be admitted are important ones, nor will they admit of compromise of any kind. Unless the answer be logically sound at every point, it is worthless. Directly it is shown that the armour is not shot-proof everywhere, or that some tendon of Achilles is vulnerable, however ingeniously constructed the system may be, it ceases to have any value as a system of philosophy with infallible pretensions. In such a case it is especially true that the chain is no stronger than its weakest link. This being so, let us first consider what is involved in a system of human inquiry which discards all sources of possible error, and professes to rely on immutable data alone; to put aside the transient and the phenomenal, and to give us only what is permanent and real.

Is necessary truth then attainable by man? The question brings us face to face with the most fundamental of all problems, namely, the mode by which we acquire knowledge, and the mode by which we verify it when acquired— a problem which has been fiercely disputed from the carliest times. There are two possible methods by which we can conceive knowledge to be acquired either it is instinctive and intuitive, or else it is acquired by experience. Either a man is born into the world with an absolutely blank mind, which would continue to be blank and void of all knowledge if he were rigidly secluded from contact with the world, or else he is born and endowed with knowledge which is his, independent of experience altogether, and which he would possess if secluded as just described.

Whether a portion of our knowledge is instinctive and intuitive or not, it is quite certain that much the larger portion of it is not, but is acquired and learnt by contact with

the world. This is admitted fully by all those who claim intuition as a coordinate source of knowledge with expérience. Our only medium of communication with the world is by means of our senses. It is our senses, of course, which supply us with the greater part of the data of knowledge. The knowledge thus supplied is stored up in memory. In regard, therefore, to the greater part of our knowledge, its validity depends upon the reliability of our senses and memory.

Now the frailty of the senses and of memory is one of the most elementary of axioms; so elementary that it was realized at the very beginning of human inquiry into these questions, and it was seen that large portions of our doubt and incertitude are traceable to nothing else than the fragility of these human faculties. It was early seen, therefore, that if we are to arrive at perfect and unassailable truth, we must discard what we derive from our senses or from memory as tainted with incurable doubt, since we must not build up what is to be changeless and immutable upon what is unstable, uncertain, and fragile, nor attempt to draw clear water from polluted streams. The Greeks realized this in very early times, and they turned away from the senses and from empirical knowledge as inevitably uncertain, and appealed to the reasoning faculty and the process of inference as alone worthy of confidence; and this appeal to the logical faculty as the only available human instrument in arriving at truth is the only appeal which Greek philosophy virtually makes with varying ingenuity until the days of the Neo-Platonists.

This appeal seems strange to us. If our senses and memory are fragile, so assuredly are our inferences. A very large portion of the mistakes which have misled mankind have been those of inference and not of fact. “Humanum est errare" is a maxim which applies equally

strongly to the faculty of reason as to that of sense, and it is most clear that if we are to get beyond the reach of possible mistake we must discard from knowledge every element dependent upon inference no less than those dependent on the senses or memory for verification. All are equally tainted witnesses, and their testimony where the question is one of attaining immutable truth is equally irrelevant and inadmissible.

This cuts away the foundation of so-called intuitive truth, no less than of empirical, in so far as either is the subject matter of philosophy. If we are distinctly and directly inspired with universal truths by intuition, it is quite clear that such truths are not capable of verification by us at all. We have no means of verifying them save by appealing to sense, memory, or reason, all of which being fallible are incompetent to give testimony as to universal truth; but to go beyond this, how do we know that there is any intuitive truth available to man? A large school of inquirers. deny it entirely, so that the fact is not plain and indisputable. Those who believe in it claim to show its existence by argument, but argument is a mere process of reasoning, and being itself subject to lapses can only attest the greatest. probability and not any absolute certainty, so that any conclusion whatever arrived at by reasoning is inevitably vitiated by doubt; but if the problem of metaphysics is to be solved at all, it must be so beyond the possibility of doubt. So long therefore as metaphysics relies upon reasoning and argument, so long must its results fall short of necessary truth.

It is clear, therefore, that in our search for truth which is necessary and universal we must discard the senses, memory, and the process of inference, and if we do so whither are we to turn, where are we to find an organon for reaching it save the ecstasy and inspiration to which Plotinus appealed, and to which I shall revert presently. This is assuredly a