Whether Euclid's axioms are true, is a question as to which
the pure mathematician is indifferent; and, what is more, it is a
question which it is theoretically impossible to answer with certainty
in the affirmative.
the pure mathematician is indifferent; and, what is more, it is a
question which it is theoretically impossible to answer with certainty
in the affirmative.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
For instance, the
whole of Arithmetic and Algebra has been shown to require three
indefinable notions and five indemonstrable propositions. But without
a symbolism it would have been very hard to find this out. It is so
obvious that two and two are four, that we can hardly make ourselves
sufficiently sceptical to doubt whether it can be proved. And the same
holds in other cases where self-evident things are to be proved.
But the proof of self-evident propositions may seem, to the
uninitiated, a somewhat frivolous occupation. To this we might reply
that it is often by no means self-evident that one obvious proposition
follows from another obvious proposition; so that we are really
discovering new truths when we prove what is evident by a method which
is not evident. But a more interesting retort is, that since people
have tried to prove obvious propositions, they have found that many of
them are false. Self-evidence is often a mere will-o'-the-wisp, which
is sure to lead us astray if we take it as our guide. For instance,
nothing is plainer than that a whole always has more terms than a
part, or that a number is increased by adding one to it. But these
propositions are now known to be usually false. Most numbers are
infinite, and if a number is infinite you may add ones to it as long
as you like without disturbing it in the least. One of the merits of a
proof is that it instils a certain doubt as to the result proved; and
when what is obvious can be proved in some cases, but not in others,
it becomes possible to suppose that in these other cases it is false.
The great master of the art of formal reasoning, among the men of our
own day, is an Italian, Professor Peano, of the University of
Turin. [12] He has reduced the greater part of mathematics (and he or
his followers will, in time, have reduced the whole) to strict
symbolic form, in which there are no words at all. In the ordinary
mathematical books, there are no doubt fewer words than most readers
would wish. Still, little phrases occur, such as _therefore, let us
assume, consider_, or _hence it follows_. All these, however, are a
concession, and are swept away by Professor Peano. For instance, if we
wish to learn the whole of Arithmetic, Algebra, the Calculus, and
indeed all that is usually called pure mathematics (except Geometry),
we must start with a dictionary of three words. One symbol stands for
_zero_, another for _number_, and a third for _next after_. What these
ideas mean, it is necessary to know if you wish to become an
arithmetician. But after symbols have been invented for these three
ideas, not another word is required in the whole development. All
future symbols are symbolically explained by means of these three.
Even these three can be explained by means of the notions of
_relation_ and _class_; but this requires the Logic of Relations,
which Professor Peano has never taken up. It must be admitted that
what a mathematician has to know to begin with is not much. There are
at most a dozen notions out of which all the notions in all pure
mathematics (including Geometry) are compounded. Professor Peano, who
is assisted by a very able school of young Italian disciples, has
shown how this may be done; and although the method which he has
invented is capable of being carried a good deal further than he has
carried it, the honour of the pioneer must belong to him.
Two hundred years ago, Leibniz foresaw the science which Peano has
perfected, and endeavoured to create it. He was prevented from
succeeding by respect for the authority of Aristotle, whom he could
not believe guilty of definite, formal fallacies; but the subject
which he desired to create now exists, in spite of the patronising
contempt with which his schemes have been treated by all superior
persons. From this "Universal Characteristic," as he called it, he
hoped for a solution of all problems, and an end to all disputes. "If
controversies were to arise," he says, "there would be no more need of
disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For
it would suffice to take their pens in their hands, to sit down to
their desks, and to say to each other (with a friend as witness, if
they liked), 'Let us calculate. '" This optimism has now appeared to be
somewhat excessive; there still are problems whose solution is
doubtful, and disputes which calculation cannot decide. But over an
enormous field of what was formerly controversial, Leibniz's dream has
become sober fact. In the whole philosophy of mathematics, which used
to be at least as full of doubt as any other part of philosophy, order
and certainty have replaced the confusion and hesitation which
formerly reigned. Philosophers, of course, have not yet discovered
this fact, and continue to write on such subjects in the old way. But
mathematicians, at least in Italy, have now the power of treating the
principles of mathematics in an exact and masterly manner, by means of
which the certainty of mathematics extends also to mathematical
philosophy. Hence many of the topics which used to be placed among the
great mysteries--for example, the natures of infinity, of continuity,
of space, time and motion--are now no longer in any degree open to
doubt or discussion. Those who wish to know the nature of these things
need only read the works of such men as Peano or Georg Cantor; they
will there find exact and indubitable expositions of all these quondam
mysteries.
In this capricious world, nothing is more capricious than posthumous
fame. One of the most notable examples of posterity's lack of judgment
is the Eleatic Zeno. This man, who may be regarded as the founder of
the philosophy of infinity, appears in Plato's Parmenides in the
privileged position of instructor to Socrates. He invented four
arguments, all immeasurably subtle and profound, to prove that motion
is impossible, that Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, and that
an arrow in flight is really at rest. After being refuted by
Aristotle, and by every subsequent philosopher from that day to our
own, these arguments were reinstated, and made the basis of a
mathematical renaissance, by a German professor, who probably never
dreamed of any connection between himself and Zeno. Weierstrass,[13]
by strictly banishing from mathematics the use of infinitesimals, has
at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow
in its flight is truly at rest. Zeno's only error lay in inferring (if
he did infer) that, because there is no such thing as a state of
change, therefore the world is in the same state at any one time as at
any other. This is a consequence which by no means follows; and in
this respect, the German mathematician is more constructive than the
ingenious Greek. Weierstrass has been able, by embodying his views in
mathematics, where familiarity with truth eliminates the vulgar
prejudices of common sense, to invest Zeno's paradoxes with the
respectable air of platitudes; and if the result is less delightful to
the lover of reason than Zeno's bold defiance, it is at any rate more
calculated to appease the mass of academic mankind.
Zeno was concerned, as a matter of fact, with three problems, each
presented by motion, but each more abstract than motion, and capable
of a purely arithmetical treatment. These are the problems of the
infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. To state clearly the
difficulties involved, was to accomplish perhaps the hardest part of
the philosopher's task. This was done by Zeno. From him to our own
day, the finest intellects of each generation in turn attacked the
problems, but achieved, broadly speaking, nothing. In our own time,
however, three men--Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantor--have not merely
advanced the three problems, but have completely solved them. The
solutions, for those acquainted with mathematics, are so clear as to
leave no longer the slightest doubt or difficulty. This achievement is
probably the greatest of which our age has to boast; and I know of no
age (except perhaps the golden age of Greece) which has a more
convincing proof to offer of the transcendent genius of its great men.
Of the three problems, that of the infinitesimal was solved by
Weierstrass; the solution of the other two was begun by Dedekind, and
definitively accomplished by Cantor.
The infinitesimal played formerly a great part in mathematics. It was
introduced by the Greeks, who regarded a circle as differing
infinitesimally from a polygon with a very large number of very small
equal sides. It gradually grew in importance, until, when Leibniz
invented the Infinitesimal Calculus, it seemed to become the
fundamental notion of all higher mathematics. Carlyle tells, in his
_Frederick the Great_, how Leibniz used to discourse to Queen Sophia
Charlotte of Prussia concerning the infinitely little, and how she
would reply that on that subject she needed no instruction--the
behaviour of courtiers had made her thoroughly familiar with it. But
philosophers and mathematicians--who for the most part had less
acquaintance with courts--continued to discuss this topic, though
without making any advance. The Calculus required continuity, and
continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody
could discover what the infinitely little might be. It was plainly not
quite zero, because a sufficiently large number of infinitesimals,
added together, were seen to make up a finite whole. But nobody could
point out any fraction which was not zero, and yet not finite. Thus
there was a deadlock. But at last Weierstrass discovered that the
infinitesimal was not needed at all, and that everything could be
accomplished without it. Thus there was no longer any need to suppose
that there was such a thing. Nowadays, therefore, mathematicians are
more dignified than Leibniz: instead of talking about the infinitely
small, they talk about the infinitely great--a subject which, however
appropriate to monarchs, seems, unfortunately, to interest them even
less than the infinitely little interested the monarchs to whom
Leibniz discoursed.
The banishment of the infinitesimal has all sorts of odd consequences,
to which one has to become gradually accustomed. For example, there is
no such thing as the next moment. The interval between one moment and
the next would have to be infinitesimal, since, if we take two moments
with a finite interval between them, there are always other moments in
the interval. Thus if there are to be no infinitesimals, no two
moments are quite consecutive, but there are always other moments
between any two. Hence there must be an infinite number of moments
between any two; because if there were a finite number one would be
nearest the first of the two moments, and therefore next to it. This
might be thought to be a difficulty; but, as a matter of fact, it is
here that the philosophy of the infinite comes in, and makes all
straight.
The same sort of thing happens in space. If any piece of matter be cut
in two, and then each part be halved, and so on, the bits will become
smaller and smaller, and can theoretically be made as small as we
please. However small they may be, they can still be cut up and made
smaller still. But they will always have _some_ finite size, however
small they may be. We never reach the infinitesimal in this way, and
no finite number of divisions will bring us to points. Nevertheless
there _are_ points, only these are not to be reached by successive
divisions. Here again, the philosophy of the infinite shows us how
this is possible, and why points are not infinitesimal lengths.
As regards motion and change, we get similarly curious results. People
used to think that when a thing changes, it must be in a state of
change, and that when a thing moves, it is in a state of motion. This
is now known to be a mistake. When a body moves, all that can be said
is that it is in one place at one time and in another at another. We
must not say that it will be in a neighbouring place at the next
instant, since there is no next instant. Philosophers often tell us
that when a body is in motion, it changes its position within the
instant. To this view Zeno long ago made the fatal retort that every
body always is where it is; but a retort so simple and brief was not
of the kind to which philosophers are accustomed to give weight, and
they have continued down to our own day to repeat the same phrases
which roused the Eleatic's destructive ardour. It was only recently
that it became possible to explain motion in detail in accordance with
Zeno's platitude, and in opposition to the philosopher's paradox. We
may now at last indulge the comfortable belief that a body in motion
is just as truly where it is as a body at rest. Motion consists merely
in the fact that bodies are sometimes in one place and sometimes in
another, and that they are at intermediate places at intermediate
times. Only those who have waded through the quagmire of philosophic
speculation on this subject can realise what a liberation from antique
prejudices is involved in this simple and straightforward commonplace.
The philosophy of the infinitesimal, as we have just seen, is mainly
negative. People used to believe in it, and now they have found out
their mistake. The philosophy of the infinite, on the other hand, is
wholly positive. It was formerly supposed that infinite numbers, and
the mathematical infinite generally, were self-contradictory. But as
it was obvious that there were infinities--for example, the number of
numbers--the contradictions of infinity seemed unavoidable, and
philosophy seemed to have wandered into a "cul-de-sac. " This
difficulty led to Kant's antinomies, and hence, more or less
indirectly, to much of Hegel's dialectic method. Almost all current
philosophy is upset by the fact (of which very few philosophers are as
yet aware) that all the ancient and respectable contradictions in the
notion of the infinite have been once for all disposed of. The method
by which this has been done is most interesting and instructive. In
the first place, though people had talked glibly about infinity ever
since the beginnings of Greek thought, nobody had ever thought of
asking, What is infinity? If any philosopher had been asked for a
definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible
rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a
definition that had any meaning at all. Twenty years ago, roughly
speaking, Dedekind and Cantor asked this question, and, what is more
remarkable, they answered it. They found, that is to say, a perfectly
precise definition of an infinite number or an infinite collection of
things. This was the first and perhaps the greatest step. It then
remained to examine the supposed contradictions in this notion. Here
Cantor proceeded in the only proper way. He took pairs of
contradictory propositions, in which both sides of the contradiction
would be usually regarded as demonstrable, and he strictly examined
the supposed proofs. He found that all proofs adverse to infinity
involved a certain principle, at first sight obviously true, but
destructive, in its consequences, of almost all mathematics. The
proofs favourable to infinity, on the other hand, involved no
principle that had evil consequences. It thus appeared that common
sense had allowed itself to be taken in by a specious maxim, and that,
when once this maxim was rejected, all went well.
The maxim in question is, that if one collection is part of another,
the one which is a part has fewer terms than the one of which it is a
part. This maxim is true of finite numbers. For example, Englishmen
are only some among Europeans, and there are fewer Englishmen than
Europeans. But when we come to infinite numbers, this is no longer
true. This breakdown of the maxim gives us the precise definition of
infinity. A collection of terms is infinite when it contains as parts
other collections which have just as many terms as it has. If you can
take away some of the terms of a collection, without diminishing the
number of terms, then there are an infinite number of terms in the
collection. For example, there are just as many even numbers as there
are numbers altogether, since every number can be doubled. This may be
seen by putting odd and even numbers together in one row, and even
numbers alone in a row below:--
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, _ad infinitum_.
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, _ad infinitum_.
There are obviously just as many numbers in the row below as in the
row above, because there is one below for each one above. This
property, which was formerly thought to be a contradiction, is now
transformed into a harmless definition of infinity, and shows, in the
above case, that the number of finite numbers is infinite.
But the uninitiated may wonder how it is possible to deal with a
number which cannot be counted. It is impossible to count up _all_ the
numbers, one by one, because, however many we may count, there are
always more to follow. The fact is that counting is a very vulgar and
elementary way of finding out how many terms there are in a
collection. And in any case, counting gives us what mathematicians
call the _ordinal_ number of our terms; that is to say, it arranges
our terms in an order or series, and its result tells us what type of
series results from this arrangement. In other words, it is impossible
to count things without counting some first and others afterwards, so
that counting always has to do with order. Now when there are only a
finite number of terms, we can count them in any order we like; but
when there are an infinite number, what corresponds to counting will
give us quite different results according to the way in which we carry
out the operation. Thus the ordinal number, which results from what,
in a general sense may be called counting, depends not only upon how
many terms we have, but also (where the number of terms is infinite)
upon the way in which the terms are arranged.
The fundamental infinite numbers are not ordinal, but are what is
called _cardinal_. They are not obtained by putting our terms in order
and counting them, but by a different method, which tells us, to begin
with, whether two collections have the same number of terms, or, if
not, which is the greater. [14] It does not tell us, in the way in
which counting does, _what_ number of terms a collection has; but if
we define a number as the number of terms in such and such a
collection, then this method enables us to discover whether some other
collection that may be mentioned has more or fewer terms. An
illustration will show how this is done. If there existed some country
in which, for one reason or another, it was impossible to take a
census, but in which it was known that every man had a wife and every
woman a husband, then (provided polygamy was not a national
institution) we should know, without counting, that there were exactly
as many men as there were women in that country, neither more nor
less. This method can be applied generally. If there is some relation
which, like marriage, connects the things in one collection each with
one of the things in another collection, and vice versa, then the two
collections have the same number of terms. This was the way in which
we found that there are as many even numbers as there are numbers.
Every number can be doubled, and every even number can be halved, and
each process gives just one number corresponding to the one that is
doubled or halved. And in this way we can find any number of
collections each of which has just as many terms as there are finite
numbers. If every term of a collection can be hooked on to a number,
and all the finite numbers are used once, and only once, in the
process, then our collection must have just as many terms as there are
finite numbers. This is the general method by which the numbers of
infinite collections are defined.
But it must not be supposed that all infinite numbers are equal. On
the contrary, there are infinitely more infinite numbers than finite
ones. There are more ways of arranging the finite numbers in different
types of series than there are finite numbers. There are probably more
points in space and more moments in time than there are finite
numbers. There are exactly as many fractions as whole numbers,
although there are an infinite number of fractions between any two
whole numbers. But there are more irrational numbers than there are
whole numbers or fractions. There are probably exactly as many points
in space as there are irrational numbers, and exactly as many points
on a line a millionth of an inch long as in the whole of infinite
space. There is a greatest of all infinite numbers, which is the
number of things altogether, of every sort and kind. It is obvious
that there cannot be a greater number than this, because, if
everything has been taken, there is nothing left to add. Cantor has a
proof that there is no greatest number, and if this proof were valid,
the contradictions of infinity would reappear in a sublimated form.
But in this one point, the master has been guilty of a very subtle
fallacy, which I hope to explain in some future work. [15]
We can now understand why Zeno believed that Achilles cannot overtake
the tortoise and why as a matter of fact he can overtake it. We shall
see that all the people who disagreed with Zeno had no right to do so,
because they all accepted premises from which his conclusion followed.
The argument is this: Let Achilles and the tortoise start along a road
at the same time, the tortoise (as is only fair) being allowed a
handicap. Let Achilles go twice as fast as the tortoise, or ten times
or a hundred times as fast. Then he will never reach the tortoise. For
at every moment the tortoise is somewhere and Achilles is somewhere;
and neither is ever twice in the same place while the race is going
on. Thus the tortoise goes to just as many places as Achilles does,
because each is in one place at one moment, and in another at any
other moment. But if Achilles were to catch up with the tortoise, the
places where the tortoise would have been would be only part of the
places where Achilles would have been. Here, we must suppose, Zeno
appealed to the maxim that the whole has more terms than the part. [16]
Thus if Achilles were to overtake the tortoise, he would have been in
more places than the tortoise; but we saw that he must, in any period,
be in exactly as many places as the tortoise. Hence we infer that he
can never catch the tortoise. This argument is strictly correct, if we
allow the axiom that the whole has more terms than the part. As the
conclusion is absurd, the axiom must be rejected, and then all goes
well. But there is no good word to be said for the philosophers of the
past two thousand years and more, who have all allowed the axiom and
denied the conclusion.
The retention of this axiom leads to absolute contradictions, while
its rejection leads only to oddities. Some of these oddities, it must
be confessed, are very odd. One of them, which I call the paradox of
Tristram Shandy, is the converse of the Achilles, and shows that the
tortoise, if you give him time, will go just as far as Achilles.
Tristram Shandy, as we know, employed two years in chronicling the
first two days of his life, and lamented that, at this rate, material
would accumulate faster than he could deal with it, so that, as years
went by, he would be farther and farther from the end of his history.
Now I maintain that, if he had lived for ever, and had not wearied of
his task, then, even if his life had continued as event fully as it
began, no part of his biography would have remained unwritten. For
consider: the hundredth day will be described in the hundredth year,
the thousandth in the thousandth year, and so on. Whatever day we may
choose as so far on that he cannot hope to reach it, that day will be
described in the corresponding year. Thus any day that may be
mentioned will be written up sooner or later, and therefore no part of
the biography will remain permanently unwritten. This paradoxical but
perfectly true proposition depends upon the fact that the number of
days in all time is no greater than the number of years.
Thus on the subject of infinity it is impossible to avoid conclusions
which at first sight appear paradoxical, and this is the reason why so
many philosophers have supposed that there were inherent
contradictions in the infinite. But a little practice enables one to
grasp the true principles of Cantor's doctrine, and to acquire new and
better instincts as to the true and the false. The oddities then
become no odder than the people at the antipodes, who used to be
thought impossible because they would find it so inconvenient to stand
on their heads.
The solution of the problems concerning infinity has enabled Cantor to
solve also the problems of continuity. Of this, as of infinity, he has
given a perfectly precise definition, and has shown that there are no
contradictions in the notion so defined. But this subject is so
technical that it is impossible to give any account of it here.
The notion of continuity depends upon that of _order_, since
continuity is merely a particular type of order. Mathematics has, in
modern times, brought order into greater and greater prominence. In
former days, it was supposed (and philosophers are still apt to
suppose) that quantity was the fundamental notion of mathematics. But
nowadays, quantity is banished altogether, except from one little
corner of Geometry, while order more and more reigns supreme. The
investigation of different kinds of series and their relations is now
a very large part of mathematics, and it has been found that this
investigation can be conducted without any reference to quantity, and,
for the most part, without any reference to number. All types of
series are capable of formal definition, and their properties can be
deduced from the principles of symbolic logic by means of the Algebra
of Relatives. The notion of a limit, which is fundamental in the
greater part of higher mathematics, used to be defined by means of
quantity, as a term to which the terms of some series approximate as
nearly as we please. But nowadays the limit is defined quite
differently, and the series which it limits may not approximate to it
at all. This improvement also is due to Cantor, and it is one which
has revolutionised mathematics. Only order is now relevant to limits.
Thus, for instance, the smallest of the infinite integers is the limit
of the finite integers, though all finite integers are at an infinite
distance from it. The study of different types of series is a general
subject of which the study of ordinal numbers (mentioned above) is a
special and very interesting branch. But the unavoidable
technicalities of this subject render it impossible to explain to any
but professed mathematicians.
Geometry, like Arithmetic, has been subsumed, in recent times, under
the general study of order. It was formerly supposed that Geometry was
the study of the nature of the space in which we live, and accordingly
it was urged, by those who held that what exists can only be known
empirically, that Geometry should really be regarded as belonging to
applied mathematics. But it has gradually appeared, by the increase of
non-Euclidean systems, that Geometry throws no more light upon the
nature of space than Arithmetic throws upon the population of the
United States. Geometry is a whole collection of deductive sciences
based on a corresponding collection of sets of axioms. One set of
axioms is Euclid's; other equally good sets of axioms lead to other
results.
Whether Euclid's axioms are true, is a question as to which
the pure mathematician is indifferent; and, what is more, it is a
question which it is theoretically impossible to answer with certainty
in the affirmative. It might possibly be shown, by very careful
measurements, that Euclid's axioms are false; but no measurements
could ever assure us (owing to the errors of observation) that they
are exactly true. Thus the geometer leaves to the man of science to
decide, as best he may, what axioms are most nearly true in the actual
world. The geometer takes any set of axioms that seem interesting, and
deduces their consequences. What defines Geometry, in this sense, is
that the axioms must give rise to a series of more than one dimension.
And it is thus that Geometry becomes a department in the study of
order.
In Geometry, as in other parts of mathematics, Peano and his disciples
have done work of the very greatest merit as regards principles.
Formerly, it was held by philosophers and mathematicians alike that
the proofs in Geometry depended on the figure; nowadays, this is known
to be false. In the best books there are no figures at all. The
reasoning proceeds by the strict rules of formal logic from a set of
axioms laid down to begin with. If a figure is used, all sorts of
things seem obviously to follow, which no formal reasoning can prove
from the explicit axioms, and which, as a matter of fact, are only
accepted because they are obvious. By banishing the figure, it becomes
possible to discover _all_ the axioms that are needed; and in this way
all sorts of possibilities, which would have otherwise remained
undetected, are brought to light.
One great advance, from the point of view of correctness, has been
made by introducing points as they are required, and not starting, as
was formerly done, by assuming the whole of space. This method is due
partly to Peano, partly to another Italian named Fano. To those
unaccustomed to it, it has an air of somewhat wilful pedantry. In this
way, we begin with the following axioms: (1) There is a class of
entities called _points_. (2) There is at least one point. (3) If _a_
be a point, there is at least one other point besides _a_. Then we
bring in the straight line joining two points, and begin again with
(4), namely, on the straight line joining _a_ and _b_, there is at
least one other point besides _a_ and _b_. (5) There is at least one
point not on the line _ab_. And so we go on, till we have the means of
obtaining as many points as we require. But the word _space_, as Peano
humorously remarks, is one for which Geometry has no use at all.
The rigid methods employed by modern geometers have deposed Euclid
from his pinnacle of correctness. It was thought, until recent times,
that, as Sir Henry Savile remarked in 1621, there were only two
blemishes in Euclid, the theory of parallels and the theory of
proportion. It is now known that these are almost the only points in
which Euclid is free from blemish. Countless errors are involved in
his first eight propositions. That is to say, not only is it doubtful
whether his axioms are true, which is a comparatively trivial matter,
but it is certain that his propositions do not follow from the axioms
which he enunciates. A vastly greater number of axioms, which Euclid
unconsciously employs, are required for the proof of his propositions.
Even in the first proposition of all, where he constructs an
equilateral triangle on a given base, he uses two circles which are
assumed to intersect. But no explicit axiom assures us that they do
so, and in some kinds of spaces they do not always intersect. It is
quite doubtful whether our space belongs to one of these kinds or not.
Thus Euclid fails entirely to prove his point in the very first
proposition. As he is certainly not an easy author, and is terribly
long-winded, he has no longer any but an historical interest. Under
these circumstances, it is nothing less than a scandal that he should
still be taught to boys in England. [17] A book should have either
intelligibility or correctness; to combine the two is impossible, but
to lack both is to be unworthy of such a place as Euclid has occupied
in education.
The most remarkable result of modern methods in mathematics is the
importance of symbolic logic and of rigid formalism. Mathematicians,
under the influence of Weierstrass, have shown in modern times a care
for accuracy, and an aversion to slipshod reasoning, such as had not
been known among them previously since the time of the Greeks. The
great inventions of the seventeenth century--Analytical Geometry and
the Infinitesimal Calculus--were so fruitful in new results that
mathematicians had neither time nor inclination to examine their
foundations. Philosophers, who should have taken up the task, had too
little mathematical ability to invent the new branches of mathematics
which have now been found necessary for any adequate discussion. Thus
mathematicians were only awakened from their "dogmatic slumbers" when
Weierstrass and his followers showed that many of their most cherished
propositions are in general false. Macaulay, contrasting the certainty
of mathematics with the uncertainty of philosophy, asks who ever heard
of a reaction against Taylor's theorem? If he had lived now, he
himself might have heard of such a reaction, for this is precisely one
of the theorems which modern investigations have overthrown. Such rude
shocks to mathematical faith have produced that love of formalism
which appears, to those who are ignorant of its motive, to be mere
outrageous pedantry.
The proof that all pure mathematics, including Geometry, is nothing
but formal logic, is a fatal blow to the Kantian philosophy. Kant,
rightly perceiving that Euclid's propositions could not be deduced
from Euclid's axioms without the help of the figures, invented a
theory of knowledge to account for this fact; and it accounted so
successfully that, when the fact is shown to be a mere defect in
Euclid, and not a result of the nature of geometrical reasoning,
Kant's theory also has to be abandoned. The whole doctrine of _a
priori_ intuitions, by which Kant explained the possibility of pure
mathematics, is wholly inapplicable to mathematics in its present
form. The Aristotelian doctrines of the schoolmen come nearer in
spirit to the doctrines which modern mathematics inspire; but the
schoolmen were hampered by the fact that their formal logic was very
defective, and that the philosophical logic based upon the syllogism
showed a corresponding narrowness. What is now required is to give the
greatest possible development to mathematical logic, to allow to the
full the importance of relations, and then to found upon this secure
basis a new philosophical logic, which may hope to borrow some of the
exactitude and certainty of its mathematical foundation. If this can
be successfully accomplished, there is every reason to hope that the
near future will be as great an epoch in pure philosophy as the
immediate past has been in the principles of mathematics. Great
triumphs inspire great hopes; and pure thought may achieve, within our
generation, such results as will place our time, in this respect, on a
level with the greatest age of Greece. [18]
FOOTNOTES:
[11] This subject is due in the main to Mr. C. S. Peirce.
[12] I ought to have added Frege, but his writings were unknown to me
when this article was written. [Note added in 1917. ]
[13] Professor of Mathematics in the University of Berlin. He died in
1897.
[14] [Note added in 1917. ] Although some infinite numbers are greater
than some others, it cannot be proved that of any two infinite numbers
one must be the greater.
[15] Cantor was not guilty of a fallacy on this point. His proof that
there is no greatest number is valid. The solution of the puzzle is
complicated and depends upon the theory of types, which is explained
in _Principia Mathematica_, Vol. I (Camb. Univ. Press, 1910). [Note
added in 1917. ]
[16] This must not be regarded as a historically correct account of
what Zeno actually had in mind. It is a new argument for his
conclusion, not the argument which influenced him. On this point, see
e. g. C. D. Broad, "Note on Achilles and the Tortoise," _Mind_, N. S. ,
Vol. XXII, pp. 318-19. Much valuable work on the interpretation of
Zeno has been done since this article was written. [Note added in
1917. ]
[17] Since the above was written, he has ceased to be used as a
textbook. But I fear many of the books now used are so bad that the
change is no great improvement. [Note added in 1917. ]
[18] The greatest age of Greece was brought to an end by the
Peloponnesian War. [Note added in 1917. ]
VI
ON SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY
When we try to ascertain the motives which have led men to the
investigation of philosophical questions, we find that, broadly
speaking, they can be divided into two groups, often antagonistic, and
leading to very divergent systems. These two groups of motives are, on
the one hand, those derived from religion and ethics, and, on the
other hand, those derived from science. Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel may
be taken as typical of the philosophers whose interests are mainly
religious and ethical, while Leibniz, Locke, and Hume may be taken as
representatives of the scientific wing. In Aristotle, Descartes,
Berkeley, and Kant we find both groups of motives strongly present.
Herbert Spencer, in whose honour we are assembled to-day, would
naturally be classed among scientific philosophers: it was mainly from
science that he drew his data, his formulation of problems, and his
conception of method. But his strong religious sense is obvious in
much of his writing, and his ethical pre-occupations are what make him
value the conception of evolution--that conception in which, as a
whole generation has believed, science and morals are to be united in
fruitful and indissoluble marriage.
It is my belief that the ethical and religious motives in spite of
the splendidly imaginative systems to which they have given rise, have
been on the whole a hindrance to the progress of philosophy, and ought
now to be consciously thrust aside by those who wish to discover
philosophical truth. Science, originally, was entangled in similar
motives, and was thereby hindered in its advances. It is, I maintain,
from science, rather than from ethics and religion, that philosophy
should draw its inspiration.
But there are two different ways in which a philosophy may seek to
base itself upon science. It may emphasise the most general _results_
of science, and seek to give even greater generality and unity to
these results. Or it may study the _methods_ of science, and seek to
apply these methods, with the necessary adaptations, to its own
peculiar province. Much philosophy inspired by science has gone astray
through preoccupation with the _results_ momentarily supposed to have
been achieved. It is not results, but _methods_ that can be
transferred with profit from the sphere of the special sciences to the
sphere of philosophy. What I wish to bring to your notice is the
possibility and importance of applying to philosophical problems
certain broad principles of method which have been found successful in
the study of scientific questions.
The opposition between a philosophy guided by scientific method and a
philosophy dominated by religious and ethical ideas may be illustrated
by two notions which are very prevalent in the works of philosophers,
namely the notion of _the universe_, and the notion of _good and
evil_. A philosopher is expected to tell us something about the nature
of the universe as a whole, and to give grounds for either optimism or
pessimism. Both these expectations seem to me mistaken. I believe the
conception of "the universe" to be, as its etymology indicates, a
mere relic of pre-Copernican astronomy: and I believe the question of
optimism and pessimism to be one which the philosopher will regard as
outside his scope, except, possibly, to the extent of maintaining that
it is insoluble.
In the days before Copernicus, the conception of the "universe" was
defensible on scientific grounds: the diurnal revolution of the
heavenly bodies bound them together as all parts of one system, of
which the earth was the centre. Round this apparent scientific fact,
many human desires rallied: the wish to believe Man important in the
scheme of things, the theoretical desire for a comprehensive
understanding of the Whole, the hope that the course of nature might
be guided by some sympathy with our wishes. In this way, an ethically
inspired system of metaphysics grew up, whose anthropocentrism was
apparently warranted by the geocentrism of astronomy. When Copernicus
swept away the astronomical basis of this system of thought, it had
grown so familiar, and had associated itself so intimately with men's
aspirations, that it survived with scarcely diminished force--survived
even Kant's "Copernican revolution," and is still now the unconscious
premiss of most metaphysical systems.
The oneness of the world is an almost undiscussed postulate of most
metaphysics. "Reality is not merely one and self-consistent, but is a
system of reciprocally determinate parts"[19]--such a statement would
pass almost unnoticed as a mere truism. Yet I believe that it embodies
a failure to effect thoroughly the "Copernican revolution," and that
the apparent oneness of the world is merely the oneness of what is
seen by a single spectator or apprehended by a single mind. The
Critical Philosophy, although it intended to emphasise the subjective
element in many apparent characteristics of the world, yet, by
regarding the world in itself as unknowable, so concentrated attention
upon the subjective representation that its subjectivity was soon
forgotten. Having recognised the categories as the work of the mind,
it was paralysed by its own recognition, and abandoned in despair the
attempt to undo the work of subjective falsification. In part, no
doubt, its despair was well founded, but not, I think, in any absolute
or ultimate sense. Still less was it a ground for rejoicing, or for
supposing that the nescience to which it ought to have given rise
could be legitimately exchanged for a metaphysical dogmatism.
I
As regards our present question, namely, the question of the unity of
the world, the right method, as I think, has been indicated by William
James. [20] "Let us now turn our backs upon ineffable or unintelligible
ways of accounting for the world's oneness, and inquire whether,
instead of being a principle, the 'oneness' affirmed may not merely be
a name like 'substance' descriptive of the fact that certain _specific
and verifiable connections_ are found among the parts of the
experiential flux. . . . We can easily conceive of things that shall have
no connection whatever with each other. We may assume them to inhabit
different times and spaces, as the dreams of different persons do even
now. They may be so unlike and incommensurable, and so inert towards
one another, as never to jostle or interfere. Even now there may
actually be whole universes so disparate from ours that we who know
ours have no means of perceiving that they exist. We conceive their
diversity, however; and by that fact the whole lot of them form what
is known in logic as 'a universe of discourse. ' To form a universe of
discourse argues, as this example shows, no further kind of connexion.
The importance attached by certain monistic writers to the fact that
any chaos may become a universe by merely being named, is to me
incomprehensible. " We are thus left with two kinds of unity in the
experienced world; the one what we may call the epistemological unity,
due merely to the fact that my experienced world is what _one_
experience selects from the sum total of existence: the other that
tentative and partial unity exhibited in the prevalence of scientific
laws in those portions of the world which science has hitherto
mastered. Now a generalisation based upon either of these kinds of
unity would be fallacious. That the things which we experience have
the common property of being experienced by us is a truism from which
obviously nothing of importance can be deducible: it is clearly
fallacious to draw from the fact that whatever we experience is
experienced the conclusion that therefore everything must be
experienced. The generalisation of the second kind of unity, namely,
that derived from scientific laws, would be equally fallacious, though
the fallacy is a trifle less elementary. In order to explain it let us
consider for a moment what is called the reign of law. People often
speak as though it were a remarkable fact that the physical world is
subject to invariable laws. In fact, however, it is not easy to see
how such a world could fail to obey general laws. Taking any arbitrary
set of points in space, there is a function of the time corresponding
to these points, i. e. expressing the motion of a particle which
traverses these points: this function may be regarded as a general law
to which the behaviour of such a particle is subject. Taking all such
functions for all the particles in the universe, there will be
theoretically some one formula embracing them all, and this formula
may be regarded as the single and supreme law of the spatio-temporal
world. Thus what is surprising in physics is not the existence of
general laws, but their extreme simplicity. It is not the uniformity
of nature that should surprise us, for, by sufficient analytic
ingenuity, any conceivable course of nature might be shown to exhibit
uniformity. What should surprise us is the fact that the uniformity is
simple enough for us to be able to discover it. But it is just this
characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered
which it would be fallacious to generalise, for it is obvious that
simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can,
therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered
laws are equally simple.
The fallacies to which these two kinds of unity have given rise
suggest a caution as regards all use in philosophy of general
_results_ that science is supposed to have achieved. In the first
place, in generalising these results beyond past experience, it is
necessary to examine very carefully whether there is not some reason
making it more probable that these results should hold of all that has
been experienced than that they should hold of things universally. The
sum total of what is experienced by mankind is a selection from the
sum total of what exists, and any general character exhibited by this
selection may be due to the manner of selecting rather than to the
general character of that from which experience selects. In the second
place, the most general results of science are the least certain and
the most liable to be upset by subsequent research. In utilizing these
results as the basis of a philosophy, we sacrifice the most valuable
and remarkable characteristic of scientific method, namely, that,
although almost everything in science is found sooner or later to
require some correction, yet this correction is almost always such as
to leave untouched, or only slightly modified, the greater part of the
results which have been deduced from the premiss subsequently
discovered to be faulty. The prudent man of science acquires a certain
instinct as to the kind of uses which may be made of present
scientific beliefs without incurring the danger of complete and utter
refutation from the modifications likely to be introduced by
subsequent discoveries. Unfortunately the use of scientific
generalisations of a sweeping kind as the basis of philosophy is just
that kind of use which an instinct of scientific caution would avoid,
since, as a rule, it would only lead to true results if the
generalisation upon which it is based stood in _no_ need of
correction.
We may illustrate these general considerations by means of two
examples, namely, the conservation of energy and the principle of
evolution.
(1) Let us begin with the conservation of energy, or, as Herbert
Spencer used to call it, the persistence of force. He says:[21]
"Before taking a first step in the rational interpretation of
Evolution, it is needful to recognise, not only the facts that
Matter is indestructible and Motion continuous, but also the fact
that Force persists. An attempt to assign the _causes_ of
Evolution would manifestly be absurd if that agency to which the
metamorphosis in general and in detail is due, could either come
into existence or cease to exist. The succession of phenomena
would in such case be altogether arbitrary, and deductive Science
impossible. "
This paragraph illustrates the kind of way in which the philosopher is
tempted to give an air of absoluteness and necessity to empirical
generalisations, of which only the approximate truth in the regions
hitherto investigated can be guaranteed by the unaided methods of
science. It is very often said that the persistence of something or
other is a necessary presupposition of all scientific investigation,
and this presupposition is then thought to be exemplified in some
quantity which physics declares to be constant. There are here, as it
seems to me, three distinct errors. First, the detailed scientific
investigation of nature does not _presuppose_ any such general laws as
its results are found to verify. Apart from particular observations,
science need presuppose nothing except the general principles of
logic, and these principles are not laws of nature, for they are
merely hypothetical, and apply not only to the actual world but to
whatever is _possible_. The second error consists in the
identification of a constant quantity with a persistent entity. Energy
is a certain function of a physical system, but is not a thing or
substance persisting throughout the changes of the system. The same is
true of mass, in spite of the fact that mass has often been defined as
_quantity of matter_. The whole conception of quantity, involving, as
it does, numerical measurement based largely upon conventions, is far
more artificial, far more an embodiment of mathematical convenience,
than is commonly believed by those who philosophise on physics. Thus
even if (which I cannot for a moment admit) the persistence of some
entity were among the necessary postulates of science, it would be a
sheer error to infer from this the constancy of any physical quantity,
or the _a priori_ necessity of any such constancy which may be
empirically discovered. In the third place, it has become more and
more evident with the progress of physics that large generalisations,
such as the conservation of energy or mass, are far from certain and
are very likely only approximate. Mass, which used to be regarded as
the most indubitable of physical quantities, is now generally believed
to vary according to velocity, and to be, in fact, a vector quantity
which at a given moment is different in different directions. The
detailed conclusions deduced from the supposed constancy of mass for
such motions as used to be studied in physics will remain very nearly
exact, and therefore over the field of the older investigations very
little modification of the older results is required. But as soon as
such a principle as the conservation of mass or of energy is erected
into a universal _a priori_ law, the slightest failure in absolute
exactness is fatal, and the whole philosophic structure raised upon
this foundation is necessarily ruined. The prudent philosopher,
therefore, though he may with advantage study the methods of physics,
will be very chary of basing anything upon what happen at the moment
to be the most general results apparently obtained by those methods.
(2) The philosophy of evolution, which was to be our second example,
illustrates the same tendency to hasty generalisation, and also
another sort, namely, the undue preoccupation with ethical notions.
There are two kinds of evolutionist philosophy, of which both Hegel
and Spencer represent the older and less radical kind, while
Pragmatism and Bergson represent the more modern and revolutionary
variety. But both these sorts of evolutionism have in common the
emphasis on _progress_, that is, upon a continual change from the
worse to the better, or from the simpler to the more complex. It
would be unfair to attribute to Hegel any scientific motive or
foundation, but all the other evolutionists, including Hegel's modern
disciples, have derived their impetus very largely from the history of
biological development. To a philosophy which derives a law of
universal progress from this history there are two objections. First,
that this history itself is concerned with a very small selection of
facts confined to an infinitesimal fragment of space and time, and
even on scientific grounds probably not an average sample of events in
the world at large. For we know that decay as well as growth is a
normal occurrence in the world. An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who
had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never
come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the
nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an
indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would
be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base
upon the previous history of this planet. Apart, however, from this
scientific objection to evolutionism, there is another, derived from
the undue admixture of ethical notions in the very idea of progress
from which evolutionism derives its charm. Organic life, we are told,
has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and
this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance.
Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us
this assurance, and we can have no security that the impartial
outsider would agree with the philosopher's self-complacent
assumption. This point has been illustrated by the philosopher Chuang
Tz? in the following instructive anecdote:
"The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles
and thus addressed the pigs: 'How can you object to die? I shall
fatten you for three months. I shall discipline myself for ten
days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass, and place you
bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you? '
Then, speaking from the pigs' point of view, he continued: 'It is
better, perhaps, after all, to live on bran and escape the
shambles. . . . '
'But then,' added he, speaking from his own point of view, 'to
enjoy honour when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or
in the headsman's basket. '
So he rejected the pigs' point of view and adopted his own point
of view. In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs? "
I much fear that the evolutionists too often resemble the Grand Augur
and the pigs.
The ethical element which has been prominent in many of the most
famous systems of philosophy is, in my opinion, one of the most
serious obstacles to the victory of scientific method in the
investigation of philosophical questions. Human ethical notions, as
Chuang Tz? perceived, are essentially anthropocentric, and involve,
when used in metaphysics, an attempt, however veiled, to legislate for
the universe on the basis of the present desires of men. In this way
they interfere with that receptivity to fact which is the essence of
the scientific attitude towards the world. To regard ethical notions
as a key to the understanding of the world is essentially
pre-Copernican. It is to make man, with the hopes and ideals which he
happens to have at the present moment, the centre of the universe and
the interpreter of its supposed aims and purposes. Ethical metaphysics
is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative
force to our own wishes.
whole of Arithmetic and Algebra has been shown to require three
indefinable notions and five indemonstrable propositions. But without
a symbolism it would have been very hard to find this out. It is so
obvious that two and two are four, that we can hardly make ourselves
sufficiently sceptical to doubt whether it can be proved. And the same
holds in other cases where self-evident things are to be proved.
But the proof of self-evident propositions may seem, to the
uninitiated, a somewhat frivolous occupation. To this we might reply
that it is often by no means self-evident that one obvious proposition
follows from another obvious proposition; so that we are really
discovering new truths when we prove what is evident by a method which
is not evident. But a more interesting retort is, that since people
have tried to prove obvious propositions, they have found that many of
them are false. Self-evidence is often a mere will-o'-the-wisp, which
is sure to lead us astray if we take it as our guide. For instance,
nothing is plainer than that a whole always has more terms than a
part, or that a number is increased by adding one to it. But these
propositions are now known to be usually false. Most numbers are
infinite, and if a number is infinite you may add ones to it as long
as you like without disturbing it in the least. One of the merits of a
proof is that it instils a certain doubt as to the result proved; and
when what is obvious can be proved in some cases, but not in others,
it becomes possible to suppose that in these other cases it is false.
The great master of the art of formal reasoning, among the men of our
own day, is an Italian, Professor Peano, of the University of
Turin. [12] He has reduced the greater part of mathematics (and he or
his followers will, in time, have reduced the whole) to strict
symbolic form, in which there are no words at all. In the ordinary
mathematical books, there are no doubt fewer words than most readers
would wish. Still, little phrases occur, such as _therefore, let us
assume, consider_, or _hence it follows_. All these, however, are a
concession, and are swept away by Professor Peano. For instance, if we
wish to learn the whole of Arithmetic, Algebra, the Calculus, and
indeed all that is usually called pure mathematics (except Geometry),
we must start with a dictionary of three words. One symbol stands for
_zero_, another for _number_, and a third for _next after_. What these
ideas mean, it is necessary to know if you wish to become an
arithmetician. But after symbols have been invented for these three
ideas, not another word is required in the whole development. All
future symbols are symbolically explained by means of these three.
Even these three can be explained by means of the notions of
_relation_ and _class_; but this requires the Logic of Relations,
which Professor Peano has never taken up. It must be admitted that
what a mathematician has to know to begin with is not much. There are
at most a dozen notions out of which all the notions in all pure
mathematics (including Geometry) are compounded. Professor Peano, who
is assisted by a very able school of young Italian disciples, has
shown how this may be done; and although the method which he has
invented is capable of being carried a good deal further than he has
carried it, the honour of the pioneer must belong to him.
Two hundred years ago, Leibniz foresaw the science which Peano has
perfected, and endeavoured to create it. He was prevented from
succeeding by respect for the authority of Aristotle, whom he could
not believe guilty of definite, formal fallacies; but the subject
which he desired to create now exists, in spite of the patronising
contempt with which his schemes have been treated by all superior
persons. From this "Universal Characteristic," as he called it, he
hoped for a solution of all problems, and an end to all disputes. "If
controversies were to arise," he says, "there would be no more need of
disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For
it would suffice to take their pens in their hands, to sit down to
their desks, and to say to each other (with a friend as witness, if
they liked), 'Let us calculate. '" This optimism has now appeared to be
somewhat excessive; there still are problems whose solution is
doubtful, and disputes which calculation cannot decide. But over an
enormous field of what was formerly controversial, Leibniz's dream has
become sober fact. In the whole philosophy of mathematics, which used
to be at least as full of doubt as any other part of philosophy, order
and certainty have replaced the confusion and hesitation which
formerly reigned. Philosophers, of course, have not yet discovered
this fact, and continue to write on such subjects in the old way. But
mathematicians, at least in Italy, have now the power of treating the
principles of mathematics in an exact and masterly manner, by means of
which the certainty of mathematics extends also to mathematical
philosophy. Hence many of the topics which used to be placed among the
great mysteries--for example, the natures of infinity, of continuity,
of space, time and motion--are now no longer in any degree open to
doubt or discussion. Those who wish to know the nature of these things
need only read the works of such men as Peano or Georg Cantor; they
will there find exact and indubitable expositions of all these quondam
mysteries.
In this capricious world, nothing is more capricious than posthumous
fame. One of the most notable examples of posterity's lack of judgment
is the Eleatic Zeno. This man, who may be regarded as the founder of
the philosophy of infinity, appears in Plato's Parmenides in the
privileged position of instructor to Socrates. He invented four
arguments, all immeasurably subtle and profound, to prove that motion
is impossible, that Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, and that
an arrow in flight is really at rest. After being refuted by
Aristotle, and by every subsequent philosopher from that day to our
own, these arguments were reinstated, and made the basis of a
mathematical renaissance, by a German professor, who probably never
dreamed of any connection between himself and Zeno. Weierstrass,[13]
by strictly banishing from mathematics the use of infinitesimals, has
at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow
in its flight is truly at rest. Zeno's only error lay in inferring (if
he did infer) that, because there is no such thing as a state of
change, therefore the world is in the same state at any one time as at
any other. This is a consequence which by no means follows; and in
this respect, the German mathematician is more constructive than the
ingenious Greek. Weierstrass has been able, by embodying his views in
mathematics, where familiarity with truth eliminates the vulgar
prejudices of common sense, to invest Zeno's paradoxes with the
respectable air of platitudes; and if the result is less delightful to
the lover of reason than Zeno's bold defiance, it is at any rate more
calculated to appease the mass of academic mankind.
Zeno was concerned, as a matter of fact, with three problems, each
presented by motion, but each more abstract than motion, and capable
of a purely arithmetical treatment. These are the problems of the
infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. To state clearly the
difficulties involved, was to accomplish perhaps the hardest part of
the philosopher's task. This was done by Zeno. From him to our own
day, the finest intellects of each generation in turn attacked the
problems, but achieved, broadly speaking, nothing. In our own time,
however, three men--Weierstrass, Dedekind, and Cantor--have not merely
advanced the three problems, but have completely solved them. The
solutions, for those acquainted with mathematics, are so clear as to
leave no longer the slightest doubt or difficulty. This achievement is
probably the greatest of which our age has to boast; and I know of no
age (except perhaps the golden age of Greece) which has a more
convincing proof to offer of the transcendent genius of its great men.
Of the three problems, that of the infinitesimal was solved by
Weierstrass; the solution of the other two was begun by Dedekind, and
definitively accomplished by Cantor.
The infinitesimal played formerly a great part in mathematics. It was
introduced by the Greeks, who regarded a circle as differing
infinitesimally from a polygon with a very large number of very small
equal sides. It gradually grew in importance, until, when Leibniz
invented the Infinitesimal Calculus, it seemed to become the
fundamental notion of all higher mathematics. Carlyle tells, in his
_Frederick the Great_, how Leibniz used to discourse to Queen Sophia
Charlotte of Prussia concerning the infinitely little, and how she
would reply that on that subject she needed no instruction--the
behaviour of courtiers had made her thoroughly familiar with it. But
philosophers and mathematicians--who for the most part had less
acquaintance with courts--continued to discuss this topic, though
without making any advance. The Calculus required continuity, and
continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody
could discover what the infinitely little might be. It was plainly not
quite zero, because a sufficiently large number of infinitesimals,
added together, were seen to make up a finite whole. But nobody could
point out any fraction which was not zero, and yet not finite. Thus
there was a deadlock. But at last Weierstrass discovered that the
infinitesimal was not needed at all, and that everything could be
accomplished without it. Thus there was no longer any need to suppose
that there was such a thing. Nowadays, therefore, mathematicians are
more dignified than Leibniz: instead of talking about the infinitely
small, they talk about the infinitely great--a subject which, however
appropriate to monarchs, seems, unfortunately, to interest them even
less than the infinitely little interested the monarchs to whom
Leibniz discoursed.
The banishment of the infinitesimal has all sorts of odd consequences,
to which one has to become gradually accustomed. For example, there is
no such thing as the next moment. The interval between one moment and
the next would have to be infinitesimal, since, if we take two moments
with a finite interval between them, there are always other moments in
the interval. Thus if there are to be no infinitesimals, no two
moments are quite consecutive, but there are always other moments
between any two. Hence there must be an infinite number of moments
between any two; because if there were a finite number one would be
nearest the first of the two moments, and therefore next to it. This
might be thought to be a difficulty; but, as a matter of fact, it is
here that the philosophy of the infinite comes in, and makes all
straight.
The same sort of thing happens in space. If any piece of matter be cut
in two, and then each part be halved, and so on, the bits will become
smaller and smaller, and can theoretically be made as small as we
please. However small they may be, they can still be cut up and made
smaller still. But they will always have _some_ finite size, however
small they may be. We never reach the infinitesimal in this way, and
no finite number of divisions will bring us to points. Nevertheless
there _are_ points, only these are not to be reached by successive
divisions. Here again, the philosophy of the infinite shows us how
this is possible, and why points are not infinitesimal lengths.
As regards motion and change, we get similarly curious results. People
used to think that when a thing changes, it must be in a state of
change, and that when a thing moves, it is in a state of motion. This
is now known to be a mistake. When a body moves, all that can be said
is that it is in one place at one time and in another at another. We
must not say that it will be in a neighbouring place at the next
instant, since there is no next instant. Philosophers often tell us
that when a body is in motion, it changes its position within the
instant. To this view Zeno long ago made the fatal retort that every
body always is where it is; but a retort so simple and brief was not
of the kind to which philosophers are accustomed to give weight, and
they have continued down to our own day to repeat the same phrases
which roused the Eleatic's destructive ardour. It was only recently
that it became possible to explain motion in detail in accordance with
Zeno's platitude, and in opposition to the philosopher's paradox. We
may now at last indulge the comfortable belief that a body in motion
is just as truly where it is as a body at rest. Motion consists merely
in the fact that bodies are sometimes in one place and sometimes in
another, and that they are at intermediate places at intermediate
times. Only those who have waded through the quagmire of philosophic
speculation on this subject can realise what a liberation from antique
prejudices is involved in this simple and straightforward commonplace.
The philosophy of the infinitesimal, as we have just seen, is mainly
negative. People used to believe in it, and now they have found out
their mistake. The philosophy of the infinite, on the other hand, is
wholly positive. It was formerly supposed that infinite numbers, and
the mathematical infinite generally, were self-contradictory. But as
it was obvious that there were infinities--for example, the number of
numbers--the contradictions of infinity seemed unavoidable, and
philosophy seemed to have wandered into a "cul-de-sac. " This
difficulty led to Kant's antinomies, and hence, more or less
indirectly, to much of Hegel's dialectic method. Almost all current
philosophy is upset by the fact (of which very few philosophers are as
yet aware) that all the ancient and respectable contradictions in the
notion of the infinite have been once for all disposed of. The method
by which this has been done is most interesting and instructive. In
the first place, though people had talked glibly about infinity ever
since the beginnings of Greek thought, nobody had ever thought of
asking, What is infinity? If any philosopher had been asked for a
definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible
rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a
definition that had any meaning at all. Twenty years ago, roughly
speaking, Dedekind and Cantor asked this question, and, what is more
remarkable, they answered it. They found, that is to say, a perfectly
precise definition of an infinite number or an infinite collection of
things. This was the first and perhaps the greatest step. It then
remained to examine the supposed contradictions in this notion. Here
Cantor proceeded in the only proper way. He took pairs of
contradictory propositions, in which both sides of the contradiction
would be usually regarded as demonstrable, and he strictly examined
the supposed proofs. He found that all proofs adverse to infinity
involved a certain principle, at first sight obviously true, but
destructive, in its consequences, of almost all mathematics. The
proofs favourable to infinity, on the other hand, involved no
principle that had evil consequences. It thus appeared that common
sense had allowed itself to be taken in by a specious maxim, and that,
when once this maxim was rejected, all went well.
The maxim in question is, that if one collection is part of another,
the one which is a part has fewer terms than the one of which it is a
part. This maxim is true of finite numbers. For example, Englishmen
are only some among Europeans, and there are fewer Englishmen than
Europeans. But when we come to infinite numbers, this is no longer
true. This breakdown of the maxim gives us the precise definition of
infinity. A collection of terms is infinite when it contains as parts
other collections which have just as many terms as it has. If you can
take away some of the terms of a collection, without diminishing the
number of terms, then there are an infinite number of terms in the
collection. For example, there are just as many even numbers as there
are numbers altogether, since every number can be doubled. This may be
seen by putting odd and even numbers together in one row, and even
numbers alone in a row below:--
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, _ad infinitum_.
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, _ad infinitum_.
There are obviously just as many numbers in the row below as in the
row above, because there is one below for each one above. This
property, which was formerly thought to be a contradiction, is now
transformed into a harmless definition of infinity, and shows, in the
above case, that the number of finite numbers is infinite.
But the uninitiated may wonder how it is possible to deal with a
number which cannot be counted. It is impossible to count up _all_ the
numbers, one by one, because, however many we may count, there are
always more to follow. The fact is that counting is a very vulgar and
elementary way of finding out how many terms there are in a
collection. And in any case, counting gives us what mathematicians
call the _ordinal_ number of our terms; that is to say, it arranges
our terms in an order or series, and its result tells us what type of
series results from this arrangement. In other words, it is impossible
to count things without counting some first and others afterwards, so
that counting always has to do with order. Now when there are only a
finite number of terms, we can count them in any order we like; but
when there are an infinite number, what corresponds to counting will
give us quite different results according to the way in which we carry
out the operation. Thus the ordinal number, which results from what,
in a general sense may be called counting, depends not only upon how
many terms we have, but also (where the number of terms is infinite)
upon the way in which the terms are arranged.
The fundamental infinite numbers are not ordinal, but are what is
called _cardinal_. They are not obtained by putting our terms in order
and counting them, but by a different method, which tells us, to begin
with, whether two collections have the same number of terms, or, if
not, which is the greater. [14] It does not tell us, in the way in
which counting does, _what_ number of terms a collection has; but if
we define a number as the number of terms in such and such a
collection, then this method enables us to discover whether some other
collection that may be mentioned has more or fewer terms. An
illustration will show how this is done. If there existed some country
in which, for one reason or another, it was impossible to take a
census, but in which it was known that every man had a wife and every
woman a husband, then (provided polygamy was not a national
institution) we should know, without counting, that there were exactly
as many men as there were women in that country, neither more nor
less. This method can be applied generally. If there is some relation
which, like marriage, connects the things in one collection each with
one of the things in another collection, and vice versa, then the two
collections have the same number of terms. This was the way in which
we found that there are as many even numbers as there are numbers.
Every number can be doubled, and every even number can be halved, and
each process gives just one number corresponding to the one that is
doubled or halved. And in this way we can find any number of
collections each of which has just as many terms as there are finite
numbers. If every term of a collection can be hooked on to a number,
and all the finite numbers are used once, and only once, in the
process, then our collection must have just as many terms as there are
finite numbers. This is the general method by which the numbers of
infinite collections are defined.
But it must not be supposed that all infinite numbers are equal. On
the contrary, there are infinitely more infinite numbers than finite
ones. There are more ways of arranging the finite numbers in different
types of series than there are finite numbers. There are probably more
points in space and more moments in time than there are finite
numbers. There are exactly as many fractions as whole numbers,
although there are an infinite number of fractions between any two
whole numbers. But there are more irrational numbers than there are
whole numbers or fractions. There are probably exactly as many points
in space as there are irrational numbers, and exactly as many points
on a line a millionth of an inch long as in the whole of infinite
space. There is a greatest of all infinite numbers, which is the
number of things altogether, of every sort and kind. It is obvious
that there cannot be a greater number than this, because, if
everything has been taken, there is nothing left to add. Cantor has a
proof that there is no greatest number, and if this proof were valid,
the contradictions of infinity would reappear in a sublimated form.
But in this one point, the master has been guilty of a very subtle
fallacy, which I hope to explain in some future work. [15]
We can now understand why Zeno believed that Achilles cannot overtake
the tortoise and why as a matter of fact he can overtake it. We shall
see that all the people who disagreed with Zeno had no right to do so,
because they all accepted premises from which his conclusion followed.
The argument is this: Let Achilles and the tortoise start along a road
at the same time, the tortoise (as is only fair) being allowed a
handicap. Let Achilles go twice as fast as the tortoise, or ten times
or a hundred times as fast. Then he will never reach the tortoise. For
at every moment the tortoise is somewhere and Achilles is somewhere;
and neither is ever twice in the same place while the race is going
on. Thus the tortoise goes to just as many places as Achilles does,
because each is in one place at one moment, and in another at any
other moment. But if Achilles were to catch up with the tortoise, the
places where the tortoise would have been would be only part of the
places where Achilles would have been. Here, we must suppose, Zeno
appealed to the maxim that the whole has more terms than the part. [16]
Thus if Achilles were to overtake the tortoise, he would have been in
more places than the tortoise; but we saw that he must, in any period,
be in exactly as many places as the tortoise. Hence we infer that he
can never catch the tortoise. This argument is strictly correct, if we
allow the axiom that the whole has more terms than the part. As the
conclusion is absurd, the axiom must be rejected, and then all goes
well. But there is no good word to be said for the philosophers of the
past two thousand years and more, who have all allowed the axiom and
denied the conclusion.
The retention of this axiom leads to absolute contradictions, while
its rejection leads only to oddities. Some of these oddities, it must
be confessed, are very odd. One of them, which I call the paradox of
Tristram Shandy, is the converse of the Achilles, and shows that the
tortoise, if you give him time, will go just as far as Achilles.
Tristram Shandy, as we know, employed two years in chronicling the
first two days of his life, and lamented that, at this rate, material
would accumulate faster than he could deal with it, so that, as years
went by, he would be farther and farther from the end of his history.
Now I maintain that, if he had lived for ever, and had not wearied of
his task, then, even if his life had continued as event fully as it
began, no part of his biography would have remained unwritten. For
consider: the hundredth day will be described in the hundredth year,
the thousandth in the thousandth year, and so on. Whatever day we may
choose as so far on that he cannot hope to reach it, that day will be
described in the corresponding year. Thus any day that may be
mentioned will be written up sooner or later, and therefore no part of
the biography will remain permanently unwritten. This paradoxical but
perfectly true proposition depends upon the fact that the number of
days in all time is no greater than the number of years.
Thus on the subject of infinity it is impossible to avoid conclusions
which at first sight appear paradoxical, and this is the reason why so
many philosophers have supposed that there were inherent
contradictions in the infinite. But a little practice enables one to
grasp the true principles of Cantor's doctrine, and to acquire new and
better instincts as to the true and the false. The oddities then
become no odder than the people at the antipodes, who used to be
thought impossible because they would find it so inconvenient to stand
on their heads.
The solution of the problems concerning infinity has enabled Cantor to
solve also the problems of continuity. Of this, as of infinity, he has
given a perfectly precise definition, and has shown that there are no
contradictions in the notion so defined. But this subject is so
technical that it is impossible to give any account of it here.
The notion of continuity depends upon that of _order_, since
continuity is merely a particular type of order. Mathematics has, in
modern times, brought order into greater and greater prominence. In
former days, it was supposed (and philosophers are still apt to
suppose) that quantity was the fundamental notion of mathematics. But
nowadays, quantity is banished altogether, except from one little
corner of Geometry, while order more and more reigns supreme. The
investigation of different kinds of series and their relations is now
a very large part of mathematics, and it has been found that this
investigation can be conducted without any reference to quantity, and,
for the most part, without any reference to number. All types of
series are capable of formal definition, and their properties can be
deduced from the principles of symbolic logic by means of the Algebra
of Relatives. The notion of a limit, which is fundamental in the
greater part of higher mathematics, used to be defined by means of
quantity, as a term to which the terms of some series approximate as
nearly as we please. But nowadays the limit is defined quite
differently, and the series which it limits may not approximate to it
at all. This improvement also is due to Cantor, and it is one which
has revolutionised mathematics. Only order is now relevant to limits.
Thus, for instance, the smallest of the infinite integers is the limit
of the finite integers, though all finite integers are at an infinite
distance from it. The study of different types of series is a general
subject of which the study of ordinal numbers (mentioned above) is a
special and very interesting branch. But the unavoidable
technicalities of this subject render it impossible to explain to any
but professed mathematicians.
Geometry, like Arithmetic, has been subsumed, in recent times, under
the general study of order. It was formerly supposed that Geometry was
the study of the nature of the space in which we live, and accordingly
it was urged, by those who held that what exists can only be known
empirically, that Geometry should really be regarded as belonging to
applied mathematics. But it has gradually appeared, by the increase of
non-Euclidean systems, that Geometry throws no more light upon the
nature of space than Arithmetic throws upon the population of the
United States. Geometry is a whole collection of deductive sciences
based on a corresponding collection of sets of axioms. One set of
axioms is Euclid's; other equally good sets of axioms lead to other
results.
Whether Euclid's axioms are true, is a question as to which
the pure mathematician is indifferent; and, what is more, it is a
question which it is theoretically impossible to answer with certainty
in the affirmative. It might possibly be shown, by very careful
measurements, that Euclid's axioms are false; but no measurements
could ever assure us (owing to the errors of observation) that they
are exactly true. Thus the geometer leaves to the man of science to
decide, as best he may, what axioms are most nearly true in the actual
world. The geometer takes any set of axioms that seem interesting, and
deduces their consequences. What defines Geometry, in this sense, is
that the axioms must give rise to a series of more than one dimension.
And it is thus that Geometry becomes a department in the study of
order.
In Geometry, as in other parts of mathematics, Peano and his disciples
have done work of the very greatest merit as regards principles.
Formerly, it was held by philosophers and mathematicians alike that
the proofs in Geometry depended on the figure; nowadays, this is known
to be false. In the best books there are no figures at all. The
reasoning proceeds by the strict rules of formal logic from a set of
axioms laid down to begin with. If a figure is used, all sorts of
things seem obviously to follow, which no formal reasoning can prove
from the explicit axioms, and which, as a matter of fact, are only
accepted because they are obvious. By banishing the figure, it becomes
possible to discover _all_ the axioms that are needed; and in this way
all sorts of possibilities, which would have otherwise remained
undetected, are brought to light.
One great advance, from the point of view of correctness, has been
made by introducing points as they are required, and not starting, as
was formerly done, by assuming the whole of space. This method is due
partly to Peano, partly to another Italian named Fano. To those
unaccustomed to it, it has an air of somewhat wilful pedantry. In this
way, we begin with the following axioms: (1) There is a class of
entities called _points_. (2) There is at least one point. (3) If _a_
be a point, there is at least one other point besides _a_. Then we
bring in the straight line joining two points, and begin again with
(4), namely, on the straight line joining _a_ and _b_, there is at
least one other point besides _a_ and _b_. (5) There is at least one
point not on the line _ab_. And so we go on, till we have the means of
obtaining as many points as we require. But the word _space_, as Peano
humorously remarks, is one for which Geometry has no use at all.
The rigid methods employed by modern geometers have deposed Euclid
from his pinnacle of correctness. It was thought, until recent times,
that, as Sir Henry Savile remarked in 1621, there were only two
blemishes in Euclid, the theory of parallels and the theory of
proportion. It is now known that these are almost the only points in
which Euclid is free from blemish. Countless errors are involved in
his first eight propositions. That is to say, not only is it doubtful
whether his axioms are true, which is a comparatively trivial matter,
but it is certain that his propositions do not follow from the axioms
which he enunciates. A vastly greater number of axioms, which Euclid
unconsciously employs, are required for the proof of his propositions.
Even in the first proposition of all, where he constructs an
equilateral triangle on a given base, he uses two circles which are
assumed to intersect. But no explicit axiom assures us that they do
so, and in some kinds of spaces they do not always intersect. It is
quite doubtful whether our space belongs to one of these kinds or not.
Thus Euclid fails entirely to prove his point in the very first
proposition. As he is certainly not an easy author, and is terribly
long-winded, he has no longer any but an historical interest. Under
these circumstances, it is nothing less than a scandal that he should
still be taught to boys in England. [17] A book should have either
intelligibility or correctness; to combine the two is impossible, but
to lack both is to be unworthy of such a place as Euclid has occupied
in education.
The most remarkable result of modern methods in mathematics is the
importance of symbolic logic and of rigid formalism. Mathematicians,
under the influence of Weierstrass, have shown in modern times a care
for accuracy, and an aversion to slipshod reasoning, such as had not
been known among them previously since the time of the Greeks. The
great inventions of the seventeenth century--Analytical Geometry and
the Infinitesimal Calculus--were so fruitful in new results that
mathematicians had neither time nor inclination to examine their
foundations. Philosophers, who should have taken up the task, had too
little mathematical ability to invent the new branches of mathematics
which have now been found necessary for any adequate discussion. Thus
mathematicians were only awakened from their "dogmatic slumbers" when
Weierstrass and his followers showed that many of their most cherished
propositions are in general false. Macaulay, contrasting the certainty
of mathematics with the uncertainty of philosophy, asks who ever heard
of a reaction against Taylor's theorem? If he had lived now, he
himself might have heard of such a reaction, for this is precisely one
of the theorems which modern investigations have overthrown. Such rude
shocks to mathematical faith have produced that love of formalism
which appears, to those who are ignorant of its motive, to be mere
outrageous pedantry.
The proof that all pure mathematics, including Geometry, is nothing
but formal logic, is a fatal blow to the Kantian philosophy. Kant,
rightly perceiving that Euclid's propositions could not be deduced
from Euclid's axioms without the help of the figures, invented a
theory of knowledge to account for this fact; and it accounted so
successfully that, when the fact is shown to be a mere defect in
Euclid, and not a result of the nature of geometrical reasoning,
Kant's theory also has to be abandoned. The whole doctrine of _a
priori_ intuitions, by which Kant explained the possibility of pure
mathematics, is wholly inapplicable to mathematics in its present
form. The Aristotelian doctrines of the schoolmen come nearer in
spirit to the doctrines which modern mathematics inspire; but the
schoolmen were hampered by the fact that their formal logic was very
defective, and that the philosophical logic based upon the syllogism
showed a corresponding narrowness. What is now required is to give the
greatest possible development to mathematical logic, to allow to the
full the importance of relations, and then to found upon this secure
basis a new philosophical logic, which may hope to borrow some of the
exactitude and certainty of its mathematical foundation. If this can
be successfully accomplished, there is every reason to hope that the
near future will be as great an epoch in pure philosophy as the
immediate past has been in the principles of mathematics. Great
triumphs inspire great hopes; and pure thought may achieve, within our
generation, such results as will place our time, in this respect, on a
level with the greatest age of Greece. [18]
FOOTNOTES:
[11] This subject is due in the main to Mr. C. S. Peirce.
[12] I ought to have added Frege, but his writings were unknown to me
when this article was written. [Note added in 1917. ]
[13] Professor of Mathematics in the University of Berlin. He died in
1897.
[14] [Note added in 1917. ] Although some infinite numbers are greater
than some others, it cannot be proved that of any two infinite numbers
one must be the greater.
[15] Cantor was not guilty of a fallacy on this point. His proof that
there is no greatest number is valid. The solution of the puzzle is
complicated and depends upon the theory of types, which is explained
in _Principia Mathematica_, Vol. I (Camb. Univ. Press, 1910). [Note
added in 1917. ]
[16] This must not be regarded as a historically correct account of
what Zeno actually had in mind. It is a new argument for his
conclusion, not the argument which influenced him. On this point, see
e. g. C. D. Broad, "Note on Achilles and the Tortoise," _Mind_, N. S. ,
Vol. XXII, pp. 318-19. Much valuable work on the interpretation of
Zeno has been done since this article was written. [Note added in
1917. ]
[17] Since the above was written, he has ceased to be used as a
textbook. But I fear many of the books now used are so bad that the
change is no great improvement. [Note added in 1917. ]
[18] The greatest age of Greece was brought to an end by the
Peloponnesian War. [Note added in 1917. ]
VI
ON SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY
When we try to ascertain the motives which have led men to the
investigation of philosophical questions, we find that, broadly
speaking, they can be divided into two groups, often antagonistic, and
leading to very divergent systems. These two groups of motives are, on
the one hand, those derived from religion and ethics, and, on the
other hand, those derived from science. Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel may
be taken as typical of the philosophers whose interests are mainly
religious and ethical, while Leibniz, Locke, and Hume may be taken as
representatives of the scientific wing. In Aristotle, Descartes,
Berkeley, and Kant we find both groups of motives strongly present.
Herbert Spencer, in whose honour we are assembled to-day, would
naturally be classed among scientific philosophers: it was mainly from
science that he drew his data, his formulation of problems, and his
conception of method. But his strong religious sense is obvious in
much of his writing, and his ethical pre-occupations are what make him
value the conception of evolution--that conception in which, as a
whole generation has believed, science and morals are to be united in
fruitful and indissoluble marriage.
It is my belief that the ethical and religious motives in spite of
the splendidly imaginative systems to which they have given rise, have
been on the whole a hindrance to the progress of philosophy, and ought
now to be consciously thrust aside by those who wish to discover
philosophical truth. Science, originally, was entangled in similar
motives, and was thereby hindered in its advances. It is, I maintain,
from science, rather than from ethics and religion, that philosophy
should draw its inspiration.
But there are two different ways in which a philosophy may seek to
base itself upon science. It may emphasise the most general _results_
of science, and seek to give even greater generality and unity to
these results. Or it may study the _methods_ of science, and seek to
apply these methods, with the necessary adaptations, to its own
peculiar province. Much philosophy inspired by science has gone astray
through preoccupation with the _results_ momentarily supposed to have
been achieved. It is not results, but _methods_ that can be
transferred with profit from the sphere of the special sciences to the
sphere of philosophy. What I wish to bring to your notice is the
possibility and importance of applying to philosophical problems
certain broad principles of method which have been found successful in
the study of scientific questions.
The opposition between a philosophy guided by scientific method and a
philosophy dominated by religious and ethical ideas may be illustrated
by two notions which are very prevalent in the works of philosophers,
namely the notion of _the universe_, and the notion of _good and
evil_. A philosopher is expected to tell us something about the nature
of the universe as a whole, and to give grounds for either optimism or
pessimism. Both these expectations seem to me mistaken. I believe the
conception of "the universe" to be, as its etymology indicates, a
mere relic of pre-Copernican astronomy: and I believe the question of
optimism and pessimism to be one which the philosopher will regard as
outside his scope, except, possibly, to the extent of maintaining that
it is insoluble.
In the days before Copernicus, the conception of the "universe" was
defensible on scientific grounds: the diurnal revolution of the
heavenly bodies bound them together as all parts of one system, of
which the earth was the centre. Round this apparent scientific fact,
many human desires rallied: the wish to believe Man important in the
scheme of things, the theoretical desire for a comprehensive
understanding of the Whole, the hope that the course of nature might
be guided by some sympathy with our wishes. In this way, an ethically
inspired system of metaphysics grew up, whose anthropocentrism was
apparently warranted by the geocentrism of astronomy. When Copernicus
swept away the astronomical basis of this system of thought, it had
grown so familiar, and had associated itself so intimately with men's
aspirations, that it survived with scarcely diminished force--survived
even Kant's "Copernican revolution," and is still now the unconscious
premiss of most metaphysical systems.
The oneness of the world is an almost undiscussed postulate of most
metaphysics. "Reality is not merely one and self-consistent, but is a
system of reciprocally determinate parts"[19]--such a statement would
pass almost unnoticed as a mere truism. Yet I believe that it embodies
a failure to effect thoroughly the "Copernican revolution," and that
the apparent oneness of the world is merely the oneness of what is
seen by a single spectator or apprehended by a single mind. The
Critical Philosophy, although it intended to emphasise the subjective
element in many apparent characteristics of the world, yet, by
regarding the world in itself as unknowable, so concentrated attention
upon the subjective representation that its subjectivity was soon
forgotten. Having recognised the categories as the work of the mind,
it was paralysed by its own recognition, and abandoned in despair the
attempt to undo the work of subjective falsification. In part, no
doubt, its despair was well founded, but not, I think, in any absolute
or ultimate sense. Still less was it a ground for rejoicing, or for
supposing that the nescience to which it ought to have given rise
could be legitimately exchanged for a metaphysical dogmatism.
I
As regards our present question, namely, the question of the unity of
the world, the right method, as I think, has been indicated by William
James. [20] "Let us now turn our backs upon ineffable or unintelligible
ways of accounting for the world's oneness, and inquire whether,
instead of being a principle, the 'oneness' affirmed may not merely be
a name like 'substance' descriptive of the fact that certain _specific
and verifiable connections_ are found among the parts of the
experiential flux. . . . We can easily conceive of things that shall have
no connection whatever with each other. We may assume them to inhabit
different times and spaces, as the dreams of different persons do even
now. They may be so unlike and incommensurable, and so inert towards
one another, as never to jostle or interfere. Even now there may
actually be whole universes so disparate from ours that we who know
ours have no means of perceiving that they exist. We conceive their
diversity, however; and by that fact the whole lot of them form what
is known in logic as 'a universe of discourse. ' To form a universe of
discourse argues, as this example shows, no further kind of connexion.
The importance attached by certain monistic writers to the fact that
any chaos may become a universe by merely being named, is to me
incomprehensible. " We are thus left with two kinds of unity in the
experienced world; the one what we may call the epistemological unity,
due merely to the fact that my experienced world is what _one_
experience selects from the sum total of existence: the other that
tentative and partial unity exhibited in the prevalence of scientific
laws in those portions of the world which science has hitherto
mastered. Now a generalisation based upon either of these kinds of
unity would be fallacious. That the things which we experience have
the common property of being experienced by us is a truism from which
obviously nothing of importance can be deducible: it is clearly
fallacious to draw from the fact that whatever we experience is
experienced the conclusion that therefore everything must be
experienced. The generalisation of the second kind of unity, namely,
that derived from scientific laws, would be equally fallacious, though
the fallacy is a trifle less elementary. In order to explain it let us
consider for a moment what is called the reign of law. People often
speak as though it were a remarkable fact that the physical world is
subject to invariable laws. In fact, however, it is not easy to see
how such a world could fail to obey general laws. Taking any arbitrary
set of points in space, there is a function of the time corresponding
to these points, i. e. expressing the motion of a particle which
traverses these points: this function may be regarded as a general law
to which the behaviour of such a particle is subject. Taking all such
functions for all the particles in the universe, there will be
theoretically some one formula embracing them all, and this formula
may be regarded as the single and supreme law of the spatio-temporal
world. Thus what is surprising in physics is not the existence of
general laws, but their extreme simplicity. It is not the uniformity
of nature that should surprise us, for, by sufficient analytic
ingenuity, any conceivable course of nature might be shown to exhibit
uniformity. What should surprise us is the fact that the uniformity is
simple enough for us to be able to discover it. But it is just this
characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered
which it would be fallacious to generalise, for it is obvious that
simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can,
therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered
laws are equally simple.
The fallacies to which these two kinds of unity have given rise
suggest a caution as regards all use in philosophy of general
_results_ that science is supposed to have achieved. In the first
place, in generalising these results beyond past experience, it is
necessary to examine very carefully whether there is not some reason
making it more probable that these results should hold of all that has
been experienced than that they should hold of things universally. The
sum total of what is experienced by mankind is a selection from the
sum total of what exists, and any general character exhibited by this
selection may be due to the manner of selecting rather than to the
general character of that from which experience selects. In the second
place, the most general results of science are the least certain and
the most liable to be upset by subsequent research. In utilizing these
results as the basis of a philosophy, we sacrifice the most valuable
and remarkable characteristic of scientific method, namely, that,
although almost everything in science is found sooner or later to
require some correction, yet this correction is almost always such as
to leave untouched, or only slightly modified, the greater part of the
results which have been deduced from the premiss subsequently
discovered to be faulty. The prudent man of science acquires a certain
instinct as to the kind of uses which may be made of present
scientific beliefs without incurring the danger of complete and utter
refutation from the modifications likely to be introduced by
subsequent discoveries. Unfortunately the use of scientific
generalisations of a sweeping kind as the basis of philosophy is just
that kind of use which an instinct of scientific caution would avoid,
since, as a rule, it would only lead to true results if the
generalisation upon which it is based stood in _no_ need of
correction.
We may illustrate these general considerations by means of two
examples, namely, the conservation of energy and the principle of
evolution.
(1) Let us begin with the conservation of energy, or, as Herbert
Spencer used to call it, the persistence of force. He says:[21]
"Before taking a first step in the rational interpretation of
Evolution, it is needful to recognise, not only the facts that
Matter is indestructible and Motion continuous, but also the fact
that Force persists. An attempt to assign the _causes_ of
Evolution would manifestly be absurd if that agency to which the
metamorphosis in general and in detail is due, could either come
into existence or cease to exist. The succession of phenomena
would in such case be altogether arbitrary, and deductive Science
impossible. "
This paragraph illustrates the kind of way in which the philosopher is
tempted to give an air of absoluteness and necessity to empirical
generalisations, of which only the approximate truth in the regions
hitherto investigated can be guaranteed by the unaided methods of
science. It is very often said that the persistence of something or
other is a necessary presupposition of all scientific investigation,
and this presupposition is then thought to be exemplified in some
quantity which physics declares to be constant. There are here, as it
seems to me, three distinct errors. First, the detailed scientific
investigation of nature does not _presuppose_ any such general laws as
its results are found to verify. Apart from particular observations,
science need presuppose nothing except the general principles of
logic, and these principles are not laws of nature, for they are
merely hypothetical, and apply not only to the actual world but to
whatever is _possible_. The second error consists in the
identification of a constant quantity with a persistent entity. Energy
is a certain function of a physical system, but is not a thing or
substance persisting throughout the changes of the system. The same is
true of mass, in spite of the fact that mass has often been defined as
_quantity of matter_. The whole conception of quantity, involving, as
it does, numerical measurement based largely upon conventions, is far
more artificial, far more an embodiment of mathematical convenience,
than is commonly believed by those who philosophise on physics. Thus
even if (which I cannot for a moment admit) the persistence of some
entity were among the necessary postulates of science, it would be a
sheer error to infer from this the constancy of any physical quantity,
or the _a priori_ necessity of any such constancy which may be
empirically discovered. In the third place, it has become more and
more evident with the progress of physics that large generalisations,
such as the conservation of energy or mass, are far from certain and
are very likely only approximate. Mass, which used to be regarded as
the most indubitable of physical quantities, is now generally believed
to vary according to velocity, and to be, in fact, a vector quantity
which at a given moment is different in different directions. The
detailed conclusions deduced from the supposed constancy of mass for
such motions as used to be studied in physics will remain very nearly
exact, and therefore over the field of the older investigations very
little modification of the older results is required. But as soon as
such a principle as the conservation of mass or of energy is erected
into a universal _a priori_ law, the slightest failure in absolute
exactness is fatal, and the whole philosophic structure raised upon
this foundation is necessarily ruined. The prudent philosopher,
therefore, though he may with advantage study the methods of physics,
will be very chary of basing anything upon what happen at the moment
to be the most general results apparently obtained by those methods.
(2) The philosophy of evolution, which was to be our second example,
illustrates the same tendency to hasty generalisation, and also
another sort, namely, the undue preoccupation with ethical notions.
There are two kinds of evolutionist philosophy, of which both Hegel
and Spencer represent the older and less radical kind, while
Pragmatism and Bergson represent the more modern and revolutionary
variety. But both these sorts of evolutionism have in common the
emphasis on _progress_, that is, upon a continual change from the
worse to the better, or from the simpler to the more complex. It
would be unfair to attribute to Hegel any scientific motive or
foundation, but all the other evolutionists, including Hegel's modern
disciples, have derived their impetus very largely from the history of
biological development. To a philosophy which derives a law of
universal progress from this history there are two objections. First,
that this history itself is concerned with a very small selection of
facts confined to an infinitesimal fragment of space and time, and
even on scientific grounds probably not an average sample of events in
the world at large. For we know that decay as well as growth is a
normal occurrence in the world. An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who
had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never
come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the
nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an
indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would
be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base
upon the previous history of this planet. Apart, however, from this
scientific objection to evolutionism, there is another, derived from
the undue admixture of ethical notions in the very idea of progress
from which evolutionism derives its charm. Organic life, we are told,
has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and
this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance.
Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us
this assurance, and we can have no security that the impartial
outsider would agree with the philosopher's self-complacent
assumption. This point has been illustrated by the philosopher Chuang
Tz? in the following instructive anecdote:
"The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles
and thus addressed the pigs: 'How can you object to die? I shall
fatten you for three months. I shall discipline myself for ten
days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass, and place you
bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you? '
Then, speaking from the pigs' point of view, he continued: 'It is
better, perhaps, after all, to live on bran and escape the
shambles. . . . '
'But then,' added he, speaking from his own point of view, 'to
enjoy honour when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or
in the headsman's basket. '
So he rejected the pigs' point of view and adopted his own point
of view. In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs? "
I much fear that the evolutionists too often resemble the Grand Augur
and the pigs.
The ethical element which has been prominent in many of the most
famous systems of philosophy is, in my opinion, one of the most
serious obstacles to the victory of scientific method in the
investigation of philosophical questions. Human ethical notions, as
Chuang Tz? perceived, are essentially anthropocentric, and involve,
when used in metaphysics, an attempt, however veiled, to legislate for
the universe on the basis of the present desires of men. In this way
they interfere with that receptivity to fact which is the essence of
the scientific attitude towards the world. To regard ethical notions
as a key to the understanding of the world is essentially
pre-Copernican. It is to make man, with the hopes and ideals which he
happens to have at the present moment, the centre of the universe and
the interpreter of its supposed aims and purposes. Ethical metaphysics
is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative
force to our own wishes.
