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Charles Peirce
A GUESS AT THE RIDDLE MS 909; EP1, 245-279; 1887-1888.
(This file follows Essential Peirce 1 in capitalization, spelling, emendations of the manuscript etc. and includes /page numbers/ at each page break. There are slight differences in content from the version in Writings 6)
/246/
Chapter 1. One, Two, Three. Already written.
Chapter 2. The triad in reasoning. Not touched. It is to be made as follows. 1. Three kinds of signs; as best shown in my last paper in the Am. Jour. Math. 2. Term, proposition, and argument, mentioned in my paper on a new list of categories. 3. Three kinds of argument, deduction, induction, hypothesis, as shown in my paper in Studies in Logic. Also three figures of syllogism, as shown there and in my paper on the classification of arguments. 4. Three kinds of terms, absolute, relative, and conjugative, as shown in my first paper on Logic of Relatives. There are various other triads which may be alluded to. The dual /246/ divisions of logic result from a false way of looking at things absolutely. Thus, besides affirmative and negative, there are really probable enunciations, which are intermediate. So besides universal and particular there are all sorts of propositions of numerical quantity. For example, the particular proposition Some A is B, means At least one A is B. But we can also say At least 2 A's are B's. Also, All the A's but one are B's, etc., etc., ad infinitum. We pass from dual quantity, or a system of quantity such as that of Boolian algebra, where there are only two values, to plural quantity.
Chapter 3. The triad in metaphysics. This chapter one of the best, is to treat of the theory of cognition.
Chapter 4. The triad in psychology. The greater part is written.
Chapter 5. The triad in physiology. The greater part is written.
Chapter 6. The triad in biology. This is to show the true nature of the Darwinian hypothesis.
Chapter 7. The triad in physics. The germinal chapter. 1. The necessity of a natural history of the laws of nature, so that we may get some notion of what to expect. 2. The logical postulate for explanation forbids the assumption of any absolute. That is, it calls for the introduction of thirdness. 3. Metaphysics is an imitation of geometry; and mathematicians having declared against axioms, the metaphysical axioms are destined to fall too. 4. Absolute chance. 5. The universality of the principle of habit. 6. The whole theory stated. 7. Consequences.
Chapter 8. The triad in sociology or shall I say pneumatology. That the consciousness is a sort of public spirit among the nerve-cells. Man as a community of cells; compound animals and composite plants; society; nature. Feeling implied in Firstness.
Chapter 9. The triad in theology. Faith requires to be materialists without flinching.To erect a philosophical edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time, my care must be, not so much to set each brick with nicest accuracy, as to lay the foundations deep and massive. Aristotle builded upon a few deliberately chosen concepts—such as matter and form, act and power—very broad, and in their outlines vague and rough, but solid, unshakable, and not easily undermined; and thence it has come to pass that Aristotelianism is babbled in every nursery, that “English Common Sense,” for example, is thoroughly peripatetic, and that ordinary men live so completely within the house of the Stagyrite that whatever they see out of the windows appears to them incomprehensible and metaphysical. Long it has been only too manifest that, fondly habituated though we be to it, the old structure will not do for modern needs; and accordingly, under Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, and others, repairs, alterations, and partial demolitions have been carried on for /247/ the last three centuries. One system, also, stands upon its own ground; I mean the new Schelling-Hegel mansion, lately run up in the German taste, but with such oversights in its construction that, although brand new, it is already pronounced uninhabitable. The undertaking which this volume inaugurates is to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology, and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details. The first step toward this is to find simple concepts applicable to every subject.
But before all else, let me make the acquaintance of my reader, and express my sincere esteem for him and the deep pleasure it is to me to address one so wise and so patient. I know his character pretty well, for both the subject and the style of this book ensure his being one out of millions. He will comprehend that it has not been written for the purpose of confirming him in his preconceived opinions, and he would not take the trouble to read it if it had. He is prepared to meet with propositions that he is inclined at first to dissent from; and he looks to being convinced that some of them are true, after all. He will reflect, too, that the thinking and writing of this book has taken, I won't say how long, quite certainly more than a quarter of an hour, and consequently fundamental objections of so obvious a nature that they must strike everyone instantaneously will have occurred to the author, although the replies to them may not be of that kind whose full force can be instantly apprehended.
Chapter I. Trichotomy
Perhaps I might begin by noticing how different numbers have found their champions. Two was extolled by Peter Ramus, Four by Pythagoras, Five by Sir Thomas Browne, and so on. For my part, I am a determined foe of no innocent number; I respect and esteem them all in their several ways; but I am forced to confess to a leaning to the number Three in philosophy. In fact, I make so much use of threefold divisions in my speculations, that it seems best to commence by making a slight preliminary study of the conceptions upon which all such divisions must rest. I mean no more than the ideas of first, second, third—ideas so broad that they may be looked upon rather as moods or tones of thought, than as definite notions, but which have great significance for all that. Viewed as numerals, to be applied to what objects we like, they are indeed thin skeletons of thought, if not mere words. If we only wanted to make enumerations, it would be out of place to ask for the significations of the numbers we should have to use; /248/ but then the distinctions of philosophy are supposed to attempt something far more than that; they are intended to go down to the very essence of things, and if we are to make one single threefold philosophical distinction, it behooves us to ask beforehand what are the kinds of objects that are first, second, and third, not as being so counted, but in their own true characters. That there are such ideas of the really First, Second, and Third, we shall presently find reason to admit.
The First is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind anything. The second is that which is what it is by force of something to which it is second. The third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each other.
The idea of the absolutely First must be entirely separated from all conception of or reference to anything else; for what involves a second is itself a second to that second. The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence—that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.
Just as the first is not absolutely first if thought along with a second, so likewise to think the Second in its perfection we must banish every third. The Second is therefore the absolute last. But we need not, and must not, banish the idea of the first from the second; on the contrary, the Second is precisely that which cannot be without the first. It meets us in such facts as Another, Relation, Compulsion, Effect, Dependence, Independence, Negation, Occurrence, Reality, Result. A thing cannot be other, negative, or independent, without a first to or of which it shall be other, negative, or independent. Still, this is not a very deep kind of secondness; for the first might in these cases be destroyed yet leave the real character of the second absolutely unchanged. When the second suffers some change from the action of the first, and is dependent upon it, the secondness is more genuine. But the dependence must not go so far that the second is a mere accident or incident /249/ of the first; otherwise the secondness again degenerates. The genuine second suffers and yet resists, like dead matter, whose existence consists in its inertia. Note, too, that for the Second to have the Finality that we have seen belongs to it, it must be determined by the first immovably, and thenceforth be fixed; so that unalterable fixity becomes one of its attributes. We find secondness in occurrence, because an occurrence is something whose existence consists in our knocking up against it. A hard fact is of the same sort; that is to say, it is something which is there, and which I cannot think away, but am forced to acknowledge as an object or second beside myself, the subject or number one, and which forms material for the exercise of my will.
The idea of second must be reckoned as an easy one to comprehend. That of first is so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it; but that of second is eminently hard and tangible. It is very familiar, too; it is forced upon us daily; it is the main lesson of life. In youth, the world is fresh and we seem free; but limitation, conflict, constraint, and secondness generally, make up the teaching of experience. With what firstness
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay;
with what secondness
doth she return,
With overweathered ribs and ragged sails.
But familiar as the notion is, and compelled as we are to acknowledge it at every turn, still we never can realize it; we never can be immediately conscious of finiteness, or of anything but a divine freedom that in its own original firstness knows no bounds.
First and Second, Agent and Patient, Yes and No, are categories which enable us roughly to describe the facts of experience, and they satisfy the mind for a very long time. But at last they are found inadequate, and the Third is the conception which is then called for. The Third is that which bridges over the chasm between the absolute first and last, and brings them into relationship. We are told that every science has its Qualitative and its Quantitative stage; now its qualitative stage is when dual distinctions,—whether a given subject has a given predicate or not,—suffice; the quantitative stage comes when, no longer content with such rough distinctions, we require to insert a possible halfway between every two possible conditions of the subject in regard to its possession of the quality indicated by the predicate. Ancient mechanics recognized forces as causes which produced motions as their immediate effects, looking no further than the essentially /250/ dual relation of cause and effect. That was why it could make no progress with dynamics. The work of Galileo and his successors lay in showing that forces are accelerations by which a state of velocity is gradually brought about. The words cause and effect still linger, but the old conceptions have been dropped from mechanical philosophy; for the fact now known is that in certain relative positions bodies undergo certain accelerations. Now an acceleration, instead of being like a velocity a relation between two successive positions, is a relation between three; so that the new doctrine has consisted in the suitable introduction of the conception of Threeness. On this idea, the whole of modern physics is built. The superiority of modern geometry, too, has certainly been due to nothing so much as to the bridging over of the innumerable distinct cases with which the ancient science was encumbered; and we may go so far as to say that all the great steps in the method of science in every department have consisted in bringing into relation cases previously discrete.
We can easily recognize the man whose thought is mainly in the dual stage by his unmeasured use of language. In former days, when he was natural, everything with him was unmitigated, absolute, ineffable, utter, matchless, supreme, unqualified, root and branch; but now that it is the fashion to be depreciatory, he is just as plainly marked by the ridiculous inadequacy of his expressions. The principle of contradiction is a shibboleth for such minds; to disprove a proposition they will always try to prove there lurks a contradiction in it, notwithstanding that it may be as clear and comprehensible as the day. Remark for your amusement the grand unconcern with which mathematics, since the invention of the calculus, has pursued its way, caring no more for the peppering of contradiction-mongers than an ironclad for an American fort.
We have seen that it is the immediate consciousness that is preeminently first, the external dead thing that is preeminently second. In like manner, it is evidently the representation mediating between these two that is preeminently third. Other examples, however, should not be neglected. The first is agent, the second patient, the third is the action by which the former influences the latter. Between the beginning as first, and the end as last, comes the process which leads from first to last.
According to the mathematicians, when we measure along a line, were our yardstick replaced by a yard marked off on an infinitely long rigid bar, then in all the shiftings of it which we make for the purpose of applying it to successive portions of the line to be measured, two points on that bar would remain fixed and unmoved. To that pair of points, the mathematicians accord the title of the absolute; they are the points that are at an infinite distance one way and the other as mea- /251/ sured by that yard. These points are either really distinct, coincident, or imaginary (in which case there is but a finite distance completely round the line), according to the relation of the mode of measurement to the nature of the line upon which the measurement is made. These two points are the absolute first and the absolute last or second, while every measurable point on the line is of the nature of a third. We have seen that the conception of the absolute first eludes every attempt to grasp it; and so in another sense does that of the absolute second; but there is no absolute third, for the third is of its own nature relative, and this is what we are always thinking, even when we aim at the first or second. The starting-point of the universe, God the Creator, is the Absolute First; the terminus of the universe, God completely revealed, is the Absolute Second; every state of the universe at a measurable point of time is the third. If you think the measurable is all there is, and deny it any definite tendency whence or whither, then you are considering the pair of points that makes the absolute to be imaginary and are an Epicurean. If you hold that there is a definite drift to the course of nature as a whole, but yet believe its absolute end is nothing but the nirvana from which it set out, you make the two points of the absolute to be coincident, and are a pessimist. But if your creed is that the whole universe is approaching in the infinitely distant future a state having a general character different from that toward which we look back in the infinitely distant past, you make the absolute to consist in two distinct real points and are an evolutionist.
[CSP footnote: The last view is essentially that of Christian theology, too. The theologians hold the physical universe to be finite, but considering that universe which they will admit to have existed from all time, it would appear to be in a different condition in the end from what it was in the beginning, the whole spiritual creation having been accomplished, and abiding.]This is one of the matters concerning which a man can only learn from his own reflections, but I believe that if my suggestions are followed out, the reader will grant that One, Two, Three, are more than mere count-words like “eeny, meeny, mony, mi,” but carry vast, though vague ideas.
But it will be asked, why stop at three? Why not go on to find a / / new conception in / distinct idea for / / Four, Five, and so on indefinitely? The reason is that while it is impossible to form a genuine three by any modification of the pair, without introducing something of a different nature from the unit and the pair, four, five, and every higher number can be formed by mere complications of threes. To make this clear, I will first show it in an example. The fact that A presents B with a gift C, is a triple relation, and as such cannot possibly be resolved into any combination of dual relations. Indeed, the very /252/ idea of a combination involves that of thirdness, for a combination is something which is what it is owing to the parts which it brings into mutual relationship. But we may waive that consideration, and still we cannot build up the fact that A presents C to B by any aggregate of dual relations between A and B, B and C, and C and A. A may enrich B, B may receive C, and A may part with C, and yet A need not necessarily give C to B. For that, it would be necessary that these three dual relations should not only coexist, but be welded into one fact. Thus we see that a triad cannot be analyzed into dyads. But now I will show by an example that a four can be analyzed into threes. Take the quadruple fact that A sells C to B for the price D. This is a compound of two facts: first, that A makes with C a certain transaction, which we may name E; and second, that this transaction E is a sale of B for the price D. Each of these two facts is a triple fact, and their combination makes up as genuine a quadruple fact as can be found. The explanation of this striking difference is not far to seek. A dual relative term, such as “lover” or “servant,” is a sort of blank form, where there are two places left blank. I mean that in building a sentence round “lover,” as the principal word of the predicate, we are at liberty to make anything we see fit the subject, and then, besides that, anything we please the object of the action of loving. But a triple relative term such as “giver” has two correlates, and is thus a blank form with three places left blank. Consequently, we can take two of these triple relatives and fill up one blank place in each with the same letter, X, which has only the force of a pronoun or identifying index, and then the two taken together will form a whole having four blank places; and from that we can go on in a similar way to any higher number. But when we attempt to imitate this proceeding with dual relatives, and combine two of them by means of an X, we find we only have two blank places in the combination, just as we had in either of the relatives taken by itself. A road with only three-way forkings may have any number of termini, but no number of straight roads put end on end will give more than two termini. Thus any number, however large, can be built out of triads; and consequently no idea can be involved in such a number, radically different from the idea of three. I do not mean to deny that the higher numbers may present interesting special configurations from which notions may be derived of more or less general applicability; but these cannot rise to the height of philosophical categories so fundamental as those that have been considered.
The argument of this book has been developed in the mind of the author, substantially as it is presented, as a following out of these three conceptions, in a sort of game of “"follow my leader" from one field of thought into another. Their importance was originally brought home to me in the study of logic, where they play so remarkable a part that I was led to look for them in psychology. Finding them there again, /253/ I could not help asking myself whether they did not enter into the physiology of the nervous system. By drawing a little on hypothesis, I succeeded in detecting them there; and then the question naturally came how they would appear in the theory of protoplasm in general. Here I seemed to break into an interesting avenue of reflections giving instructive aperçus both into the nature of protoplasm and into the conceptions themselves; though it was not till later that I mapped out my thoughts on the subject as they are presented in Chapter V. I had no difficulty in following the lead into the domain of natural selection; and once arrived at that point, I was irresistibly carried on to speculations concerning physics. One bold saltus landed me in a garden of fruitful and beautiful suggestions, the exploration of which long prevented my looking further. As soon, however, as I was induced to look further, and to examine the application of the three ideas to the deepest problems of the soul, nature, and God, I saw at once that they must carry me far into the heart of those primeval mysteries. That is the way the book has grown in my mind: it is also the order in which I have written it; and only this first chapter is more or less an afterthought, since at an earlier stage of my studies I should have looked upon the matter here set down as too vague to have any value. I should have discerned in it too strong a resemblance to many a crack-brained book that I had laughed over. A deeper study has taught me that even out of the mouths of babes and sucklings strength may be brought forth, and that weak metaphysical trash has sometimes contained the germs of conceptions capable of growing up into important and positive doctrines.
Thus, the whole book being nothing but a continual exemplification of the triad of ideas, we need linger no longer upon this preliminary exposition of them. There is, however, one feature of them upon which it is quite indispensable to dwell. It is that there are two distinct grades of Secondness and three grades of Thirdness. There is a close analogy to this in geometry. Conic sections are either the curves usually so called, or they are pairs of straight lines. A pair of straight lines is called a degenerate conic. So plane cubic curves are either the genuine curves of the third order, or they are conics paired with straight lines, or they consist of three straight lines; so that there are the two orders of degenerate cubics. Nearly in this same way, besides genuine Secondness, there is a degenerate sort which does not exist as such, but is only so conceived. The medieval logicians (following a hint of Aristotle) distinguished between real relations and relations of reason. A real relation subsists in virtue of a fact which would be totally impossible were either of the related objects destroyed; while a relation of reason subsists in virtue of two facts, one only of which would disappear on the annihilation of either of the relates. Such are all resemblances: for any two objects in nature resemble each other, and indeed in them- /254/ selves just as much as any other two; it is only with reference to our senses and needs that one resemblance counts for more than another. Rumford and Franklin resembled each other by virtue of being both Americans; but either would have been just as much an American if the other had never lived. On the other hand, the fact that Cain killed Abel cannot be stated as a mere aggregate of two facts, one concerning Cain and the other concerning Abel. Resemblances are not the only relations of reason, though they have that character in an eminent degree. Contrasts and comparisons are of the same sort. Resemblance is an identity of characters; and this is the same as to say that the mind gathers the resembling ideas together into one conception. Other relations of reason arise from ideas being connected by the mind in other ways; they consist in the relation between two parts of one complex concept, or, as we may say, in the relation of a complex concept to itself, in respect to two of its parts. This brings us to consider a sort of degenerate Secondness that does not fulfill the definition of a relation of reason. Identity is the relation that everything bears to itself: Lucullus dines with Lucullus. Again, we speak of allurements and motives in the language of forces, as though a man suffered compulsion from within. So with the voice of conscience: and we observe our own feelings by a reflective sense. An echo is my own voice coming back to answer itself. So also, we speak of the abstract quality of a thing as if it were some second thing that the first thing possesses. But the relations of reason and these self-relations are alike in this, that they arise from the mind setting one part of a notion into relation to another. All degenerate seconds may be conveniently termed internal, in contrast to external seconds, which are constituted by external fact, and are true actions of one thing upon another.
Among thirds, there are two degrees of degeneracy. The first is where there is in the fact itself no thirdness or mediation, but where there is true duality; the second degree is where there is not even true secondness in the fact itself.
Consider, first, the thirds degenerate in the first degree. A pin fastens two things together by sticking through one and also through the other: either might be annihilated, and the pin would continue to stick through the one which remained. A mixture brings its ingredients together by containing each. We may term these accidental thirds. "How did I slay thy son?" asked the merchant, and the genie replied, "When thou threwest away the date-stone, it smote my son, who was passing at the time, on the breast, and he died forthright." Here there were two independent facts, first that the merchant threw away the date-stone, and second that the date-stone struck and killed the genie's son. Had it been aimed at him, the case would have been different; for then there would have been a relation of aiming which would have connected together the aimer, the thing aimed, and the object aimed /255/ at, in one fact. What monstrous injustice and inhumanity on the part of that genie to hold that poor merchant responsible for such an accident! I remember how I wept at it, as I lay in my father's arms and he first told me the story. It is certainly just that a man, even though he had no evil intention, should be held responsible for the immediate effects of his actions; but not for such as might result from them in a sporadic case here and there, but only for such as might have been guarded against by a reasonable rule of prudence. Nature herself often supplies the place of the intention of a rational agent in making a thirdness genuine and not merely accidental; as when a spark, as third, falling into a barrel of gunpowder, as first, causes an explosion, as second. But how does nature do this? By virtue of an intelligible law according to which she acts. If two forces are combined according to the parallelogram of forces, their resultant is a real third. Yet any force may, by the parallelogram of forces, be mathematically resolved into the sum of two others, in an infinity of different ways. Such components, however, are mere creations of the mind. What is the difference? As far as one isolated event goes, there is none; the real forces are no more present in the resultant than any components that the mathematician may imagine. But what makes the real forces really there is the general law of nature which calls for them, and not for any other components of the resultant. Thus, intelligibility, or reason objectified, is what makes thirdness genuine.
We now come to thirds degenerate in the second degree. The dramatist Marlowe had something of that character of diction in which Shakespeare and Bacon agree. This is a trivial example; but the mode of relation is important. In natural history, intermediate types serve to bring out the resemblance between forms whose similarity might otherwise escape attention, or not be duly appreciated. In portraiture, photographs mediate between the original and the likeness. In science, a diagram or analogue of the observed fact leads on to a further analogy. The relations of reason which go to the formation of such a triple relation need not be all resemblances. Washington was eminently free from the faults in which most great soldiers resemble one another. A centaur is a mixture of a man and a horse. Philadelphia lies between New York and Washington. Such thirds may be called Intermediate thirds or Thirds of comparison.
Nobody will suppose that I wish to claim any originality in reckoning the triad important in philosophy. Since Hegel, almost every fanciful thinker has done the same. Originality is the last of recommendations for fundamental conceptions. On the contrary, the fact that the minds of men have ever been inclined to threefold divisions is one of the considerations in favor of them. Other numbers have been objects of predilection to this philosopher and that, but three has been prominent at all times and with all schools. My whole method will be found /256/ to be in profound contrast with that of Hegel; I reject his philosophy in toto. Nevertheless, I have a certain sympathy with it, and fancy that if its author had only noticed a very few circumstances he would himself have been led to revolutionize his system. One of these is the double division or dichotomy of the second idea of the triad. He has usually overlooked external secondness, altogether. In other words, he has committed the trifling oversight of forgetting that there is a real world with real actions and reactions. Rather a serious oversight that. Then Hegel had the misfortune to be unusually deficient in mathematics. He shows this in the very elementary character of his reasoning. Worse still, while the whole burden of his song is that philosophers have neglected to take thirdness into account, which is true enough of the theological kind, with whom alone he was acquainted (for I do not call it acquaintance to look into a book without comprehending it), he unfortunately did not know, what it would have been of the utmost consequence for him to know, that the mathematical analysts had in great measure escaped this great fault, and that the thorough-going pursuit of the ideas and methods of the differential calculus would be sure to cure it altogether. Hegel's dialectical method is only a feeble and rudimentary application of the principles of the calculus to metaphysics. Finally Hegel's plan of evolving everything out of the abstractest conception by a dialectical procedure, though far from being so absurd as the experientialists think, but on the contrary representing one of the indispensable parts of the course of science, overlooks the weakness of individual man, who wants the strength to wield such a weapon as that.
Chapter III. The Triad in Metaphysics
I will run over all the conceptions that played an important [role] in the pre-Socratic philosophy and see how far they can be expressed in terms of one, two, three.
The first of all the conceptions of philosophy is that of a primal matter out of which the world is made. Thales and the early Ionian philosophers busied themselves mainly with this. They called it the arche, the beginning; so that the conception of first was the quintessence of it. Nature was a wonder to them, and they asked its explanation; from what did it come? That was a good question, but it was rather stupid to suppose that they were going to learn much even if they could find out from what sort of matter it was made. But to ask how it had been formed, as they doubtless did, was not an exhaustive question; it would only carry them back a little way. They wished to go to the very beginning at once, and in the beginning there must have been a homogeneous something, for where there was variety they /257/ supposed there must be always an explanation to be sought. The first must be indeterminate, and the indeterminate first of anything is the material of which it is formed. Besides, their idea was that they could not tell how the world was formed unless they knew from what to begin their account. The inductive [method] of explaining phenomena by tracing them back step by step to their causes was foreign not only to them but to all ancient and medieval philosophy; that is the Baconian idea. Indeterminacy is really a character of the first. But not the indeterminacy of homogeneity. The first is full of life and variety. Yet that variety is only potential; it is not definitely there. Still, the notion of explaining the variety of the world, which was what they mainly wondered at, by non-variety was quite absurd. How is variety to come out of the womb of homogeneity; only by a principle of spontaneity, which is just that virtual variety that is the First.
Chapter IV. The Triad in Psychology
The line of reasoning which I propose to pursue is peculiar and will need some careful study to estimate the strength of it. I shall review it critically in the last section, but meantime I desire to point out that the step I am about to take, which is analogous to others that will follow, is not so purely of the nature of a guess as might be supposed by persons expert in judging of scientific evidence. We have seen that the ideas of One, Two, Three, are forced upon us in logic, and really cannot be dispensed with. They meet us not once but at every turn. And we have found reason to think that they are equally important in metaphysics. How is the extraordinary prominence of these conceptions to be explained? Must it not be that they have their origin in the nature of the mind? This is the Kantian form of inference, which has been found so cogent in the hands of that hero of philosophy; and I do not know that modern studies have done anything to discredit it. It is true we no longer regard such a psychological explanation of a conception to be as final as Kant thought. It leaves further questions to be asked; but as far as it goes it seems to be satisfactory. We find the ideas of First, Second, Third, constant ingredients of our knowledge. It must then either be that they are continually given to us in the presentations of sense, or that it is the peculiar nature of the mind to mix them with our thoughts. Now we certainly cannot think that these ideas are given in sense. First, Second, and Third are not sensations. They can only be given in sense by things appearing labelled as first, second, and third, and such labels things do not usually bear. They ought therefore to have a psychological origin. A man must be a very uncompromising partisan of the theory of the tabula rasa to deny that the ideas of first, second, and third are due to congenital /258/ tendencies of the mind. So far there is nothing in my argument to distinguish it from that of many a Kantian. The noticeable thing is that I do not rest here, but seek to put the conclusion to the test by an independent examination of the facts of psychology, to see whether we can find any traces of the existence of three parts or faculties of the soul or modes of consciousness, which might confirm the result just reached.
Now, three departments of the mind have been generally recognized since Kant; they are: Feeling, Knowing, and Willing. The unanimity with which this trisection of the mind has been accepted is, indeed, quite surprising. The division did not have its genesis in the peculiar ideas of Kant. On the contrary, it was borrowed by him from dogmatic philosophers, and his acceptance of it was, as has been well remarked, a concession to dogmatism. It has been allowed even by psychologists to whose general doctrines it seems positively hostile. This evidence that there is something true in it, is strengthened by the fact that it is impossible to make a critical examination of it, with[out] coming to the conclusion that it is but a rough approsimation to the truth, at best; and this has generally been conceded.
Where did this three-fold division of the functions of the mind come from? Kant took it ready made from the Leibnitzian writer Tetens. He drew a suggestion from the rhetoricians of the sixteenth century and they found it in an imperfect form in their idolized Plato. In Plato, it appears under a poetical garb and distorted mien which we cannot believe to have been the original one; and it is easy to credit the statement of Diogenes Laertius that it came from the school of Pythagoras. Now in the doctrine of Pythagoras everything was connected with number, which was taken to be the foundation of the world. There is a hint in its history, then, that the three-fold division of the mind may be connected with the ideas of one, two, three.
By feelings, as constituting one of the great classes of mental activities, are meant according to Kant and most psychologists feelings of pleasure and pain. This is not, however, the original doctrine of Tetens, who includes under this head all that is immediately present, or at least the subjective element of it. Kant's modification suits his peculiar system better than the truth of nature. There is no good reason for giving such a peculiar place to pleasure and pain; as if they had no resemblance to anything else that we can feel. Pleasure and pain are nothing but secondary sensations, or feelings produced by feelings, whenever the latter reach a certain degree of subjective intensity, that is, produce a certain amount of commotion in the organism. If we could pay attention enough, we should probably recognize that every exertion and every cognition produces pleasure or pain. There is pleasure in the contemplation of a theorem of geometry. Pain is perhaps /259/ essential to the consciousness of exertion; what we do without pain we do without effort. But that peculiarity of feelings which makes them one of the great branches of mental phenomena is that they form the sum total of all of which we have in immediate and instantaneous consciousness; they are what is present. We cannot be immediately conscious of what is past and gone; we only remember it, though it be past by but the hundredth of a second. No more can we be immediately conscious of what is yet to come, however close at hand it may be. We can only infer it. Of nothing but the fleeting instant can [we] have absolutely immediate consciousness, or feeling, whether much or little; and this instant is no sooner present than it is gone. In it we can be conscious of no change; because we do that by making a little rehearsal of the process or imitation of it, and that occupies time. We can draw no inference in an instant, nor can we recognize any inferential conclusion. We can neither divide nor synthetise; we can only feel. When an instant has once past, that immediate consciousness can never be recovered. It is totally and absolutely gone. We cannot compare any subsequent feeling with it, as immediate feeling, because we cannot have the second in our mind until the first has utterly gone from us. We remember it; that is to say, we have another cognition which professes to reproduce it; but we know that there is no resemblance between the memory and the sensation, because, in the first place, nothing can resemble an immediate feeling, for resemblance supposes a dismemberment and recomposition which is totally foreign to the immediate, and in the second place, memory is an articulated complex and worked-over product which differs infinitely and immeasurably from feeling. Look at a red surface, and try to feel what the sensation is, and then shut your eyes and remember it. No doubt different persons are different in this respect; to some the experiment will seem to yield an opposite result, but I have convinced myself that there is nothing in my memory that is in the least like the vision of the red. When red is not before my eyes, I do not see it at all. Some people tell me they see it faintly;—a most inconvenient kind of memory, which would lead to remembering bright red as pale or dingy. I remember colors with unusual accuracy, because I have had much training in observing them; but my memory does not consist in any vision but in a habit by virtue of which I can recognize a newly presented color as like or unlike one I had seen before. But even if the memory of some persons is of the nature of an hallucination, enough arguments remain to show that immediate consciousness or feeling is absolutely unlike anything else.
There are grave objections to making a whole third of the mind of the will alone. One great psychologist has said that the will is nothing but the strongest desire. I cannot grant that; it seems to me to over- /260/ look that fact which of all that we observe is quite the most obtrusive, namely, the difference between dreaming and doing. This is not a question of defining, but of noticing what we experience; and surely he who can confound desiring with doing must be a day-dreamer. The evidence, however, seems to be pretty strong that the consciousness of willing does not differ, at least not very much, from a sensation. The sense of hitting and of getting hit are nearly the same, and should be classed together. The common element is the sense of an actual occurrence, of actual action and reaction. There is an intense reality about this kind of experience, a sharp sundering of subject and object. While I am seated calmly in the dark, the lights are suddenly turned on, and at that instant I am conscious, not of a process of change, but yet of something more than can be contained in an instant. I have a sense of a saltus, of there being two sides to that instant. A consciousness of polarity would be a tolerably good phrase to describe what occurs. For will, then, as one of the great types of consciousness, we ought to substitute the polar sense.
But by far the most confused of the three members of the division, in its ordinary statement, is Cognition. In the first place every kind of consciousness enters into cognition. Feelings, in the sense in which alone they can be admitted as a great branch of mental phenomena, form the warp and woof of cognition, and even in the objectionable sense of pleasure and pain, they are constituents of cognition. The will, in the form of attention, constantly enters, and the sense of reality or objectivity, which is what we have found ought to take the place of will, in the division of consciousness, is even more essential yet, if possible. But that element of cognition which is neither feeling nor the polar sense, is the consciousness of a process, and this in the form of the sense of learning, of acquiring, of mental growth is eminently characteristic of cognition. This is a kind of consciousness which cannot be immediate, because it covers a time, and that not merely because it continues through every instant of that time, but because it cannot be contracted into an instant. It differs from immediate consciousness, as a melody does from one prolonged note. Neither can the consciousness of the two sides of an instant, of a sudden occurrence, in its individual reality, possibly embrace the consciousness of a process. This is the consciousness that binds our life together. It is the consciousness of synthesis.
Here then, we have indubitably three radically different elements of consciousness, these and no more. And they are evidently connected with the ideas of one-two-three. Immediate feeling is the consciousness of the first; the polar sense is the consciousness of the second; and synthetical consciousness is the consciousness of a Third or medium.
Note, too, that just as we have seen that there are two orders of /261/ secondness, so the polar sense splits into two, and that in two ways, for first, there is an active and a passive kind, or Will and Sense, and second, there are External Will and Sense, in opposition to Internal Will (self-control, inhibitory will) and Internal Sense (introspection). In like manner, just as there are three orders of thirdness, so there are three kinds of synthetical consciousness. The undegenerate and really typical form has not been made so familiar to us as the others, which have been more completely studied by psychologists; I shall therefore mention that last. Synthetical consciousness degenerate in the first degree, corresponding to accidental thirdness, is where there is an external compulsion upon us to think things together. Association by contiguity is an instance of this; but a still better instance is that in our first apprehension of our experiences, we cannot choose how we will arrange our ideas in reference to time and space, but are compelled to think certain things as nearer together than others. It would be putting the cart before the horse to say that we are compelled to think certain things together because they are together in time and space; the true way of stating it is that there is an exterior compulsion upon us to put them together in our construction of time and space, in our perspective. Synthetical consciousness degenerate in the second degree, corresponding to intermediate thirds, is where we think different feelings to be alike or different, which, since feelings in themselves cannot be compared and therefore cannot be alike, so that to say they are alike is merely to say that the synthetical consciousness regards them so, comes to this, that we are internally compelled to synthetize them or to sunder them. This kind of synthesis appears in a secondary form in association by resemblance. But the highest kind of synthesis is what the mind is compelled to make neither by the inward attractions of the feelings or representations themselves, nor by a transcendental force of haecceity, but in the interest of intelligibility, that is, in the interest of the synthetizing “I think” itself; and this it does by introducing an idea not contained in the data, which gives connections which they would not otherwise have had. This kind of synthesis has not been sufficiently studied, and especially the intimate relationship of its different varieties has not been duly considered. The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man. The artist introduces a fiction; but it is not an arbitrary one; it exhibits affinities to which the mind accords a certain approval in pronouncing them beautiful, which if it is not exactly the same as saying that the synthesis is true, is something of the same general kind. The geometer draws a diagram, which if not exactly a fiction, is at least a creation, and by means of observation of that diagram he is able to synthetize and show relations between elements which before seemed to have no necessary connection. The realities compel us to put some things into /262/ very close relation and others less so, in a highly complicated, and in the sense itself unintelligible manner; but it is the genius of the mind, that takes up all these hints of sense, adds immensely to them, makes them precise, and shows them in intelligible form in the intuitions of space and time. Intuition is the regarding of the abstract in a concrete form, by the realistic hypostatization of relations; that is the one sole method of valuable thought. Very shallow is the prevalent notion that this is something to be avoided. You might as well say at once that reasoning is to be avoided because it has led to so much error; quite in the same philistine line of thought would that be and so well in accord with the spirit of nominalism that I wonder some one does not put it forward. The true precept is not to abstain from hypostatization, but to do it intelligently.
Chapter V. The Triad in Physiology
Granted that there are three fundamentally different kinds of consciousness, it follows as a matter of course that there must be something threefold in the physiology of the nervous system to account for them. No materialism is implied in this, further than that intimate dependence of the action of the mind upon the body, which every student of the subject must and does now acknowledge. Once more a prediction, as it were, is made by the theory; that is to say, certain consequences, not contemplated in the construction thereof, necessarily result from it; and these are of such a character that their truth or falsehood can be independently investigated. Were we to find them strikingly and certainly true, a remarkable confirmation of the theory would be afforded. So much as this, however, I cannot promise; I can only say that they are not certainly false; and we must be content to trace out these consequences, and see what they are, and leave them to the future judgment of physiologists.
Two of the three kinds of consciousness, indeed, the simple and dual, receive an instant physiological explanation. We know that the protoplasmic content of every nerve-cell has its active and passive conditions, and argument is unnecessary to show that feeling, or immediate consciousness, arises in an active state of nerve-cells. Experiments on the effects of cutting the nerves show that there is no feeling after communication with the central nerve-cells is severed, so that the phenomenon has certainly some connection with the nerve-cells; and feeling is excited by just such stimuli as would be likely to throw protoplasm into an active condition. Thus, though we cannot say that every nerve-cell in its active condition has feeling (which we cannot deny, however) there is scarce room to doubt that the activity of nerve-cells is the main physiological requisite for consciousness. On the other hand, the sense of action and reaction, or the polar sense, as /263/ we agreed to call it, is plainly connected with the discharge of nervous energy through the nerve-fibres. External volition, the most typical case of it, involves such a discharge into muscle cells. In external sensation, where the polar sense enters in a lower intensity, there is a discharge from the terminal nerve-cell through the afferent nerve upon a cell or cells in the brain. In internal volition, or self-control, there is some inhibitory action of the nerves, which is also known to involve the movement of nervous force; and in internal observation, or visceral sensation, there are doubtless transfers of energy from one central cell to another. Remembering that the polar sense is the sense of the difference between what was before and what is after a dividing instant, or the sense of an instant as having sides, we see clearly that the physiological concomitant of it must be some event which happens very quickly and leaves a more abiding effect, and this description suits the passage of a nervous discharge over a nerve-fibre so perfectly, that I do not think we need hesitate to set this phenomenon down as the condition of dual consciousness.
Synthetical consciousness offers a more difficult problem. Yet the explanation of the genuine form of that consciousness, the sense of learning, is easy enough; it is only the degenerate modes, the sense of similarity, and the sense of real connection, which oblige us to hesitate. With regard to these two degenerate forms, I am driven to make hypotheses.
When two ideas resemble one another, we say that they have something in common; part of the one is said to be identical with a part of the other. In what does that identity consist? Having closed both eyes, I open first one and then shut it and open the other, and I say that the two sensations are alike. How can the impressions of two nerves be judged to be alike? It appears to me that in order that that should become possible, the two nerve-cells must probably discharge themselves into one common nerve-cell. In any case, it seems to me that the first supposition to make, for scientific observation to confirm or reject, is that two ideas are alike so far as the same nerve-cells have been concerned in the production of them. In short, the hypothesis is that resemblance consists in the identity of a common element, and that that identity lies in a part of the one idea and a part of the other idea being the feeling peculiar to the excitation of one or more nerve-cells.
When we find ourselves under a compulsion to think that two elements of experience which do not particularly resemble one another are, nevertheless, really connected, that connection must, I think, be due in some way to a discharge of nerve-energy; for the whole sense of reality is a determination of polar consciousness, which is itself due to such discharges. For example, I recognize that a certain surface on one side of a certain boundary is red, and on the other side /264/ is blue; or that any two qualities are immediately contiguous in space or time. If the contiguity is in time, it is by the polar sense directly that we are conscious of a dividing instant with its difference on the two sides. If the contiguity is in space, I think we have at first a completely confused feeling of the whole, as yet unanalyzed and unsynthesized, but afterward, when the analysis has been made, we find ourselves compelled, in recomposing the elements, to pass directly from what is on one side of the boundary to what is on the other. I suppose then that we are compelled to think the two feelings as contiguous because the nerve-cell whose excitation produces the feeling of one recalled sensation discharges itself into the nerve-cell whose excitation makes the feeling of the other recalled sensation.
The genuine synthetic consciousness, or the sense of the process of learning, which is the preeminent ingredient and quintessence of the reason, has its physiological basis quite evidently in the most characteristic property of the nervous system, the power of taking habits. This depends on five principles, as follows. First, when a stimulus or irritation is continued for some time, the excitation spreads from the cells directly affected to those that are associated with it, and from those to others, and so on, and at the same time increases in intensity. Second, after a time fatigue begins to set in. Now besides the utter fatigue which consists in the cell's losing all excitability, and the nervous system refusing to react to the stimulus at all, there is a gentler fatigue, which plays a very important part in adapting the brain to serving as an organ of reason, this form of fatigue consisting in the reflex action or discharge of the nerve-cell ceasing to go on one path and either beginning on a path where there had been no discharge, or increasing the intensity of the discharge along a path on which there had been previously only a slight discharge. For example, one may sometimes see a frog whose cerebrum or brain has been removed, and whose hind leg has been irritated by putting a drop of acid upon it, after repeatedly rubbing the place with the other foot, as if to wipe off the acid, may at length be observed to give several hops, the first avenue of nervous discharge having become fatigued. Third, when, from any cause the stimulus to a nerve-cell is removed, the excitation quickly subsides. That it does not do so instantly is well known, and the phenomenon goes among physicists by the name of persistence of sensation. All noticeable feeling subsides in a fraction of a second, but a very small remnant continues for a much longer time. Fourth, if the same cell which was once excited, and which by some chance had happened to discharge itself along a certain path or paths, comes to get excited a second time, it is more likely to discharge itself the second time along some or all of those paths along which it had previously discharged itself than it would have been had it not so discharged itself before. This is the central principle of habit; and the striking contrast of its modality to that of any mechanical law /265/ is most significant. The laws of physics know nothing of tendencies or probabilities; whatever they require at all they require absolutely and without fail, and they are never disobeyed. Were the tendency to take habits replaced by an absolute requirement that the cell should discharge itself always in the same way, or according to any rigidly fixed condition whatever, all possibility of habit developing into intelligence would be cut off at the outset; the virtue of thirdness would be absent. It is essential that there should be an element of chance in some sense as to how the cell shall discharge itself; and then that this chance or uncertainty shall not be entirely obliterated by the principle of habit, but only somewhat affected. Fifth, when a considerable time has elapsed without a nerve having reacted in any particular way, there comes in a principle of forgetfulness or negative habit rendering it the less likely to react in that way. Now let us see what will be the result of these five principles taken in combination. When a nerve is stimulated, if the reflex activity is not at first of the right sort to remove the source of irritation, it will change its character again and again until the cause of irritation is removed, when the activity will quickly subside. When the nerve comes to be stimulated a second time in the same way, probably some of the other movements which had been made on the first occasion will be repeated; but, however this may be, one of them must ultimately be repeated, for the activity will continue until this does happen, I mean that movement which removes the source of irritation. On a third occasion, the process of forgetfulness will have been begun in regard to any tendency to repeat any of the actions of the first occasion which were not repeated on the second. Of those which were repeated, some will probably be repeated again, and some not; but always there remains that one which must be repeated before the activity comes to an end. The ultimate effect of this will inevitably be that a habit gets established of at once reacting in the way which removes the source of irritation; for this habit alone will be strengthened at each repetition of the experiment, while every other will tend to become weakened at an accelerated rate.
I have invented a little game or experiment with playing cards to illustrate the working of these principles; and I can promise the reader that if he will try it half a dozen times he will be better able to estimate the value of the account of habit here proposed. The rules of this game are as follows: take a good many cards of four suits, say a pack of fifty-two, though fewer will do. The four suits are supposed to represent four modes in which a cell may react. Let one suit, say spades, represent that mode of reaction which removes the source of irritation and brings the activity to an end. In order readily to find a card of any suit as wanted, you had better lay all the cards down face up and distribute into four packets, each containing the cards of one suit only. Now take 2 spades, 2 diamonds, 2 clubs, and 2 hearts, to represent the /266/ original disposition of the nerve-cell, which is supposed to be equally likely to react in any of the four ways. You turn these 8 cards face down and shuffle them with extreme thoroughness.
[CSP footnote: Cards are almost never shuffled enough to illustrate fairly the principles of probabilities; but if after being shuffled in any of the usual ways, they are dealt into three packs and taken up again, and then passed from one hand into the other one by one, every other one going to the top and every other to the bottom of the pack that thus accumulates in the second hand, and finally cut, the shuffling may be considered as sufficient for the purpose of this game. Whenever the direction is to shuffle, shuffling as thorough as this is meant.]
Then turn up cards from the top of this pack, one by one until a spade is reached. This process represents the reaction of the cell. Take up the cards just dealt off, and add to the pack held in the hand one card of each of those suits that have just been turned up (for habit) and remove from the pack one card of each suit not turned up (for forgetfulness). Shuffle, and go through with this operation 13 times or until the spades are exhausted. It will then generally be found that you hold nothing but spades in your hand.Thus we see how these principles not only lead to the establishment of habits, but to habits directed to definite ends, namely the removal of sources of irritation. Now it is precisely action according to final causes which distinguishes mental from mechanical action; and the general formula of all our desires may be taken as this: to remove a stimulus. Every man is busily working to bring to an end that state of things which now excites him to work.
But we are led yet deeper into physiology. The three fundamental functions of the nervous system, namely, first, the excitation of cells; second, the transfer of excitation over fibres; third, the fixing of definite tendencies under the influence of habit, are plainly due to three properties of the protoplasm or life-slime itself. Protoplasm has its active and its passive condition, its active state is transferred from one part of it to another, and it also exhibits the phenomena of habit. But these three facts do not seem to sum up the main properties of protoplasm, as our theory would lead us to expect them to do. Still, this may be because the nature of this strange substance is so little understood; and if we had the true secret of its constitution we might see that qualities that now appear unrelated really group themselves into one, so that it may be after all that it accords with our theory better than it seems to do. There have been at least two attempts to explain the properties of protoplasm by means of chemical suppositions; but inasmuch as chemical forces are as far as possible themselves from being understood, such hypotheses, even if they were known to be correct, would be of little avail. As for what a physicist would understand by a molecular explanation of protoplasm, such a thing seems hardly to have been thought of; yet I cannot see that it is any more difficult than the /267/ constitution of inorganic matter. The properties of protoplasm are enumerated as follows: contractility, irritability, automatism, nutrition, metabolism, respiration, and reproduction; but these can all be summed up under the heads of sensibility, motion, and growth. These three properties are respectively first, second, and third. Let us, however, draw up a brief statement of the facts which a molecular theory of protoplasm would have to account for. In the first place, then, protoplasm is a definite chemical substance, or class of substances, recognizable by its characteristic relations. “We do not at present,” says Dr. Michael Foster (1879), “know anything definite about the molecular composition of active living protoplasm; but it is more than probable that its molecule is a large and complex one in which a proteid substance is peculiarly associated with a complex fat and with some representative of the carbohydrate group, i.e., that each molecule of protoplasm contains residues of each of these three great classes. The whole animal body is modified protoplasm.” The chemical complexity of the protoplasm molecule must be amazing. A proteid is only one of its constituents, and doubtless very much simpler. Yet chemists do not attempt to infer from their analyses the ultimate atomic constitution of any of the proteids, the number of atoms entering into them being so great as almost to nullify the law of multiple proportions. I do find in the book just quoted the following formula for nuclein, a substance allied to the proteids. It is C29H49N9P3O22. But as the sum of the numbers of atoms of hydrogen, nitrogen, and phosphorus ought to be even, this formula must be multiplied by some even number; so that the number of atoms in nuclein must be 224 at the very least. We can hardly imagine, then, that the number of atoms in protoplasm is much less than a thousand, and if one considers the very minute proportions of some necessary ingredients of animal and vegetable organisms, one is somewhat tempted to suspect that 50000 might do better, or even come to [be] looked upon in the future as a ridiculously small guess. Protoplasm combines with water in all proportions, the mode of combination being apparently intermediate between solution and mechanical mixture. According to the amount of water it contains, it passes from being brittle to being pliable, then gelatinous, then slimy, then liquid. Generally, it has the character of being elastico-viscous; that is to say, it springs back partially after a long strain, and wholly after a short one; but its viscosity is much more marked than its elasticity. It is generally full of granules, by which we can see slow streaming motions in it, continuing for some minutes in one way and then generally reversed. The effect of this streaming is to cause protuberances in the mass, often very long and slender. They occasionally stick up against gravity; and their various forms are characteristic of the different kinds of protoplasm. When a mass of it is disturbed by a jar, a poke, an electric shock, heat, etc., the streams are arrested and /268/ the whole contracts into a ball; or if it were very much elongated, sometimes breaks up into separate spheres. When the external excitation is removed, the mass sinks down into something like its former condition. Protoplasm also grows; it absorbs material and converts it into the like of its own substance; and in all its growth and reproduction, it preserves its specific characters.
Such are the properties that have to be accounted for. What first arrests our attention, as likely to afford the key to the problem, is the contraction of the mass of protoplasm on being disturbed. This is obviously due to a vast and sudden increase of what the physicists call "surface tension," or the pulling together of the outer parts, which phenomenon is always observed in liquids, and is the cause of their making drops. This surface tension is due to the cohesion, or attraction between neighboring molecules. The question is, then, how can a body, on having its equilibrium deranged, suddenly increase the attractions between its neighboring molecules? These attractions must increase rapidly as the distance is diminished; and thus the answer suggests itself that the distance between neighboring molecules is diminished. True, the average distance must remain nearly the same, but if the distances which had previously been nearly equal are rendered unequal, the attractions between the molecules that are brought nearer to one another will be much more increased than those between those that are removed from one another will be diminished. We are thus led to the supposition that in the ordinary state of the substance, its particles are moving for the most part in complicated orbital or quasi-orbital systems, instead of in the chemical molecules or more definite systems of atoms of less complex substances, these particles thus moving in orbits not being, however, atoms, but chemical molecules. But we must suppose that the forces between these particles are just barely sufficient to hold them in their orbits, and that in fact, as long as the protoplasm is in an active condition, they are not all so held, but that one and another get occasionally thrown out of their orbits and wander about until they are drawn in to some other system. We must suppose that these systems have some approximate composition, about so many of one kind of particles and so many of another kind, etc., entering into them. This is necessary to account for the nearly constant chemical composition of the whole. On the other hand, we cannot suppose that the number of the different kinds is rigidly exact; for in that case we should not know how to account for the power of assimilation. We must suppose then that there is considerable range in the numbers of particles that go to form an orbital system, and that the somewhat exact chemical composition of the whole is the exactitude of a statistical average; just as there is a close equality between the proportions of the two sexes in any nation or province, though there is considerable inequality in each of the different households. Owing /269/ to the complexity of this arrangement, the moment that there is any molecular disturbance, producing perturbations, large numbers of the particles are thrown out of their orbits, the systems are more or less deranged in the immediate neighborhood of the disturbance, and the harmonic relations between the different revolutions are somewhat broken up. In consequence of this, the distances between neighboring particles, which had presented a systematic regularity, now become extremely unequal, and their average attractions, upon which the cohesion depends, is increased. At the same time, the particles thrown out of their systems shoot into other systems and derange these in their turn, and so the disturbance is propagated throughout the entire mass. The source of disturbance, however, being removed, interchanges of energy take place, in which there is a tendency to equalize the vis viva of the different particles, and they consequently tend to sink down into orbital motions again, and gradually something very like the original state of things is reestablished, the original orbital systems remaining, for the most part, and the wandering particles in large proportion finding places in these systems or forming new ones. Some of these particles will not find any places, and thus there will be a certain amount of wasting of the protoplasmic mass. If the same disturbance is repeated, so far as the orbital systems remain the same as they were before, there will [be] a repetition of almost exactly the same events. The same kinds of particles (the same I mean in mass, velocities, directions of movement, attractions, etc.) which were thrown out of the different systems before will generally get thrown out again, until, if the disturbance is repeated several times, there gets to be rather a deficiency of those kinds of particles in the different systems, when some new kinds will begin to be thrown out. These new kinds will differently perturb the systems into which they fly, tending to cause classes of particles like themselves to be thrown out, and, in that way, the direction of propagation of the disturbance, as well as its velocity and intensity, may be altered, and, in short, the phenomenon of fatigue will be manifested. Even when the protoplasmic mass is left to itself, there will be some wandering of particles, producing regions of slight disturbance, and so inequalities of tension; and thus, streams will be set up, movements of the mass will take place, and slender processes will be formed. If, however, the mass be left to itself for a very long time, all the particles that are readily thrown out will, in all the changes that are rung on the combinations of situations and velocities in the orbital systems, get thrown out; while the others will constantly tend to settle down into more stable relations; and so the protoplasm will gradually take a passive state from which its orbital systems are not easily deranged. The food for those kinds of protoplasm that are capable of marked reaction has to be presented in chemically complex form. It must doubtless present particles just like those that revolve in /270/ the orbital systems of the protoplasm. In order to be drawn into an orbital system, a particle, whether of food matter or just thrown off from some other system, must have the right mass, must present itself at the right point, and move with the right velocity in the right direction and be subject to the right attractions. It will be right in all these respects, if it comes to take the place of a particle which has just been thrown off; and thus, particles taken in are particularly likely to be of the same material and masses and to take the same places in the orbits as those that have been shortly before thrown off. Now these particles being the exact representatives of those thrown off, will be likely to be thrown off by the same disturbances, in the same directions, and with the same results, as those which were thrown off before; and this accounts for the principle of habit. All the higher kinds of protoplasm, those for example which have any marked power of contraction, are fed with matter chemically highly complex.
Chapter VI. The Triad in Biological Development
Whether the part played by natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the production of species be large or small, there remains little doubt that the Darwinian theory indicates a real cause, which tends to adapt animal and vegetable forms to their environment. A very remarkable feature of it is that it shows how merely fortuitous variations of individuals together with merely fortuitous mishaps to them would, under the action of heredity, result, not in mere irregularity, nor even in a statistical constancy, but in continual and indefinite progress toward a better adaptation of means to ends. How can this be? What, abstractly stated, is the peculiar factor in the conditions of the problem which brings about this singular consequence?
Suppose a million persons, each provided with one dollar, to sit down to play a simple and fair game of chance, betting for example on whether a die turns up an odd or even number. The players are supposed to make their bets independently of one another, and each to bet on the result of each throw one dollar against a dollar on the part of the bank. Of course, at the very first bet, one half of them would lose their only dollar and go out of the game, for it is supposed that no credit is allowed, while the other half would win each a dollar and so come to be worth $2. Of these 500000 players, after the second throw, 250000 would have lost, and so be worth only $1 each, while the other 250000 would have won, and so be worth $3. After the third throw, 125000, or one-half of those who had had $1 each, would be ruined; 250000 would be worth $2 (namely one half the 250000 who had had $1 each, and one-half the 250000 who had had $3 each) and 125000 would be worth $4 each. The further progress of the game is illustrated by /271/ the following table, where the numbers of players are given having each possible sum after the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. throws.
[Formatter's note: fractional values have been rounded off here.]
1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 16th $1 250000 125000 78125 54688 41016 21820 2 500000 250000 156250 109375 82031 3 250000 187500 140625 109375 87891 52368 4 125000 125000 109375 93750 5 62500 78125 78125 73242 55542 6 31250 46875 52734 7 15625 27344 34180 38880 8 7813 15625 9 3906 8789 19226 10 1953 11 977 6714 12 13 1587 14 15 229 16 17 15
It will be seen by the table, that at the end of the 4th throw, the most usual fortune is $3, at the end of the 9th $4, at the end of the 16th $5, and in like manner at the end of the 25th it would be $6, at the end of the 36th $7, and so forth. Here, then, would be a continual increase of wealth, which is a sort of “adaptation to one's environment,” produced by a survival of the fittest, that is, by the elimination from the game of every player who has lost his last dollar. It is easy to see that the increase of average and usual wealth comes about by the subtraction of all those small fortunes which would be in the hands of men who had once been bankrupt had they been allowed to continue betting.
Now the adaptation of a species to its environment consists, for the purposes of natural selection, in a power of continuing to exist, that is to say, in the power of one generation to bring forth another; for as long as another generation is brought forth the species will continue and as soon as this ceases it is doomed after one lifetime. This reproductive faculty, then, depending partly on direct fecundity, and partly /272/ on the animal's living through the age of procreation, is precisely what the Darwinian theory accounts for. This character plainly is one of those which has an absolute minimum, for no animal can produce fewer offspring than none at all and it has no apparent upper limit, so that it is quite analogous to the wealth of those players. It is to be remarked that the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the formula of the principle does not mean the survival of the fittest individuals, but the survival of the fittest types; for the theory does not at all require that individuals ill-adapted to their environment should die at an earlier age than others, so long only as they do not reproduce so many offspring as others; and indeed it is not necessary that this should go so far as to extinguish the line of descent, provided there be some reason why the offspring of ill-adapted parents are less likely than others to inherit those parents' characteristics. It seems likely that the process, as a general rule, is something as follows. A given individual is in some respect ill-adapted to his environment, that is to say, he has characters which are generally unfavorable to the production of numerous offspring. These characters will be apt to weaken the reproductive system of that individual, for various reasons, so that its offspring are not up to the average strength of the species. This second generation will couple with other individuals, but owing to their weakness, their offspring will be more apt to resemble the other parent, and so the unfavorable character will gradually be eliminated, not merely by diminished numbers of offspring, but also by the offspring more resembling the stronger parent. There are other ways in which the unfavorable characters will disappear. When the procreative power is weakened, there are many examples to show that the principle of heredity becomes relaxed, and the race shows more tendency to sporting. This sporting will go on until in the course of it the unfavorable character has become obliterated. The general power of reproduction thereupon becomes strengthened, with it the direct procreative force is reinforced, the hereditary transmission of characters again becomes more strict, and the improved type is hardened.
But all these different cases are but so many different modes of one and the same principle, which is, the elimination of unfavorable characters. We see then that there are just three factors in the process of natural selection; to wit: 1st, the principle of individual variation or sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission, which wars against the first principle; and 3rd, the principle of the elimination of unfavorable characters.
Let us see how far these principles correspond with the triads that we have already met with. The principle of sporting is the principle of irregularity, indeterminacy, chance. It corresponds with the irregular and manifold wandering of particles in the active state of the protoplasm. It [is] the bringing in of something fresh and first. The /273/ principle of heredity is the principle of the determination of something by what went before, the principle of compulsion, corresponding to will and sense. The principle of the elimination of unfavorable characters is the principle of generalization by casting out of sporadic cases, corresponding particularly to the principle of forgetfulness in the action of the nervous system. We have, then, here, a somewhat imperfect reproduction of the same triad as before. Its imperfection may be the imperfection of the theory of development.
Chapter VII. The Triad in Physics
Metaphysical philosophy may almost be called the child of geometry. Of the three schools of early Greek philosophers, two, the Ionic and the Pythagorean, were all geometers, and the interest of the Eleatics in geometry is often mentioned. Plato was a great figure in the history of both subjects; and Aristotle derived from the study of space some of his most potent conceptions. Metaphysics depends in great measure on the idea of rigid demonstration from first principles; and this idea, as well in regard to the process as the axioms from which it sets out, bears its paternity on its face. Moreover, the conviction that any metaphysical philosophy is possible has been upheld at all times, as Kant well says, by the example in geometry of a similar science.
The unconditional surrender, then, by the mathematicians of our time of the absolute exactitude of the axioms of geometry cannot prove an insignificant event for the history of philosophy. Gauss, the greatest of geometers, declares that "there is no reason to think that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is exactly equal to two right angles." It is true, experience shows that the deviation of that sum from that amount is so excessively small that language must be ingeniously used to express the degree of approximation: but experience never can show any truth to be exact, nor so much as give the least reason to think it to be so, unless it be supported by some other considerations. We can only say that the sum of the three angles of any given triangle cannot be much greater or less than two right angles; but that exact value is only one among an infinite number of others each of which is as possible as that. So say the mathematicians with unanimity.
The absolute exactitude of the geometrical axioms is exploded; and the corresponding belief in the metaphysical axioms, considering the dependence of metaphysics on geometry, must surely follow it to the tomb of extinct creeds. The first to go must be the proposition that every event in the universe is precisely determined by causes according to inviolable law. We have no reason to think that this is absolutely exact. Experience shows that it is so to a wonderful degree of approximation, and that is all. This degree of approximation will be a value for future scientific investigation to determine; but we have no more /274/ reason to think that the error of the ordinary statement is precisely zero, than any one of an infinity of values in that neighborhood. The odds are infinity to one that it is not zero; and we are bound to think of it as a quantity of which zero is only one possible value. Phoenix, in his Lectures on Astronomy, referring to Joshua's commanding the sun to stand still, said that he could not help suspecting that it might have wiggled a very little when Joshua was not looking directly at it. We know that when we try to verify any law of nature by experiment, we always find discrepancies between the observations and the theory. These we rightly refer to errors of observation; but why may there not be similar aberrations due to the imperfect obedience of the facts to law?
Grant that this is conceivable and there can be nothing in experience to negative it. Strange to say, there are many people who will have a difficulty in conceiving of an element of lawlessness in the universe, and who may perhaps be tempted to reckon the doctrine of the perfect rule of causality as one of the original instinctive beliefs, like that of space having three dimensions. Far from that, it is historically altogether a modern notion, a loose inference from the discoveries of science. Aristotle often lays it down that some things are determined by causes while others happen by chance. Lucretius, following Democritus, supposes his primordial atoms to deviate from their rectilinear trajectories just fortuitously, and without any reason at all. To the ancients, there was nothing strange in such notions; they were matters of course; the strange thing would have been to have said that there was no chance. So we are under no inward necessity of believing [in] perfect causality if we do not find any facts to bear it out.
I am very far from holding that experience is our only light; Whewell's views of scientific method seem to me truer than Mill's; so much so that I should pronounce the known principles of physics to be but a development of original instinctive beliefs. Yet I cannot help acknowledging that the whole history of thought shows that our instinctive beliefs, in their original condition, are so mixed up with error that they can never be trusted till they have been corrected by experiment. Now the only thing that the inference from experience can ever teach us is the approximate value of a ratio. It all rests on the principle of sampling; we take a handful of coffee from a bag, and we judge that there is about the same proportion of sound beans in the whole bag that there is in that sample. At this rate, every proposition which we can be entitled to make about the real world must be an approximate one; we never can have the right to hold any truth to be exact. Approximation must be the fabric out of which our philosophy has to be built.
I come now to another point. Most systems of philosophy maintain certain facts or principles as ultimate. In truth, any fact is in one sense ultimate,—that is to say, in its isolated aggressive stubbornness and /275/ individual reality. What Scotus calls the haecceities of things, the hereness and nowness of them, are indeed ultimate. Why this which is here is such as it is, how, for instance, if it happens to be a grain of sand it came to be so small and so hard, we can ask; we can also ask how it got carried here, but the explanation in this case merely carries us back to the fact that it was once in some other place, where similar things might naturally be expected to be. Why IT, independently of its general characters, comes to have any definite place in the world, is not a question to be asked; it is simply an ultimate fact. There is also another class of facts of which it is not reasonable to expect an explanation, namely, facts of indeterminacy or variety. Why one definite kind of event is frequent and another rare, is a question to be asked, but a reason for the general fact that of events some kinds are common and some rare, it would be unfair to demand. If all births took place on a given day of the week, or if there were always more on Sundays than on Mondays, that would be a fact to be accounted for, but that they happen in about equal proportions on all the days requires no particular explanation. If we were to find that all the grains of sand on a certain beach separated themselves into two or more sharply discrete classes, as spherical and cubical ones, there would be something to be explained, but that they are of various sizes and shapes, of no definable character, can only be referred to the general manifoldness of nature. Indeterminacy, then, or pure firstness, and haecceity, or pure secondness, are facts not calling for and not capable of explanation. Indeterminacy affords us nothing to ask a question about; haecceity is the ultima ratio, the brutal fact that will not be questioned. But every fact of a general or orderly nature calls for an explanation; and logic forbids us to assume in regard to any given fact of that sort that it is of its own nature absolutely inexplicable. This is what Kant* calls a regulative principle, that is to say, an intellectual hope.
*[CSP footnote: After the scholastics. See Eckius in Petr. Hisp. 48 b nota 1.]
The sole immediate purpose of thinking is to render things intelligible; and to think and yet in that very act to think a thing unintelligible is a self-stultification. It is as though a man furnished with a pistol to defend himself against an enemy were, on finding that enemy very redoubtable, to use his pistol to blow his own brains out to escape being killed by his enemy. Despair is insanity. True, there may be facts that will never get explained; but that any given fact is of the number, is what experience can never give us reason to think; far less can it show that any fact is of its own nature unintelligible. We must therefore be guided by the rule of hope, and consequently we must reject every philosophy or general conception of the universe, which could ever lead to the conclusion that any given general fact is an ultimate one. We must look /276/ forward to the explanation, not of all things, but of any given thing whatever. There is no contradiction here, any more than there is in our holding each one of our opinions, while we are ready to admit that it is probable that not all are true; or any more than there is in saying that any future time will sometime be passed, though there never will be a time when all time is past.Among other regular facts that have to be explained is Law or regularity itself. We enormously exaggerate the part that law plays in the universe. It is by means of regularities that we understand what little we do understand of the world, and thus there is a sort of mental perspective which brings regular phenomena to the foreground. We say that every event is determined by causes according to law. But apart from the fact that this must not be regarded as absolutely true, it does not mean so much as it seems to do. We do not mean, for example, that if a man and his antipode both sneeze at the same instant, that that event comes under any general law. That is merely what we call a coincidence. But what we mean is there was a cause for the first man's sneezing, and another cause for the second man's sneezing; and the aggregate of these two events make up the first event about which we began by inquiring. The doctrine is that the events of the physical universe are merely motions of matter, and that these obey the laws of dynamics. But this only amounts to saying that among the countless systems of relationship existing among things we have found one that is universal and at the same time is subject to law. There is nothing except this singular character which makes this particular system of relationship any more important than the others. From this point of view, uniformity is seen to be really a highly exceptional phenomenon. But we pay no attention to irregular relationships, as having no interest for us.
We are brought, then, to this: conformity to law exists only within a limited range of events and even there is not perfect, for an element of pure spontaneity or lawless originality mingles, or at least must be supposed to mingle, with law everywhere. Moreover, conformity with law is a fact requiring to be explained; and since Law in general cannot be explained by any law in particular, the explanation must consist in showing how law is developed out of pure chance, irregularity, and indeterminacy.
To this problem we are bound to address ourselves; and it is particularly needful to do so in the present state of science. The theory of the molecular constitution of matter has now been carried as far as there are clear indications to direct us, and we are now in the mists. To develope the mathematical consequences of any hypothesis as to the nature and laws of the minute parts of matter, and then to test it by physical experiment, will take fifty years; and out of the innumerable hypotheses that might be framed, there seems to be nothing to /277/ make one more antecedently probable than another. At this rate how long will it take to make any decided advance? We need some hint as to how molecules may be expected to behave; whether, for instance, they would be likely to attract or repel one another inversely as the fifth power of the distance, so that we may be saved from many false suppositions, if we are not at once shown the way to the true one. Tell us how the laws of nature came about, and we may distinguish in some measure between laws that might and laws that could not have resulted from such a process of development.
To find that out is our task. I will begin the work with this guess. Uniformities in the modes of action of things have come about by their taking habits. At present, the course of events is approximately determined by law. In the past that approximation was less perfect; in the future it will be more perfect. The tendency to obey laws has always been and always will be growing. We look back toward a point in the infinitely distant past when there was no law but mere indeterminacy; we look forward to a point in the infinitely distant future when there will be no indeterminacy or chance but a complete reign of law. But at any assignable date in the past, however early, there was already some tendency toward uniformity; and at any assignable date in the future there will be some slight aberrancy from law. Moreover, all things have a tendency to take habits. For atoms and their parts, molecules and groups of molecules, and in short every conceivable real object, there is a greater probability of acting as on a former like occasion than otherwise. This tendency itself constitutes a regularity, and is continually on the increase. In looking back into the past we are looking toward periods when it was a less and less decided tendency. But its own essential nature is to grow. It is a generalizing tendency; it causes actions in the future to follow some generalization of past actions; and this tendency is itself something capable of similar generalizations; and thus, it is self-generative. We have therefore only to suppose the smallest spur of it in the past, and that germ would have been bound to develope into a mighty and over-ruling principle, until it supersedes itself by strengthening habits into absolute laws regulating the action of all things in every respect in the indefinite future.
According to this, three elements are active in the world, first, chance; second, law; and third, habit-taking.
Such is our guess of the secret of the sphynx. To raise it from the rank of philosophical speculation to that of a scientific hypothesis, we must show that consequences can be deduced from it with more or less probability which can be compared with observation. We must show that there is some method of deducing the characters of the laws which could result in this way by the action of habit-taking on purely fortuitous occurrences, and a method of ascertaining whether such characters belong to the actual laws of nature. /278/
The existence of things consists in their regular behavior. If an atom had no regular attractions and repulsions, if its mass was at one instant nothing, at another a ton, at another a negative quantity, if its motion instead of being continuous, consisted in a series of leaps from one place to another without passing through any intervening places, and if there were no definite relations between its different positions, velocities and directions of displacement, if it were at one time in one place and at another time in a dozen, such a disjointed plurality of phenomena would not make up any existing thing. Not only substances, but events, too, are constituted by regularities. The flow of time, for example, in itself is a regularity. The original chaos, therefore, where there was no regularity, was in effect a state of mere indeterminacy, in which nothing existed or really happened.
Our conceptions of the first stages of the development, before time yet existed, must be as vague and figurative as the expressions of the first chapter of Genesis. Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something by the principle of firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow. We have no reason to think that even now time is quite perfectly continuous and uniform in its flow. The quasi-flow which would result would, however, differ essentially from time in this respect, that it would not necessarily be in a single stream. Different flashes might start different streams, between which there should be no relations of contemporaneity or succession. So one stream might branch into two, or two might coalesce. But the further result of habit would inevitably be to separate utterly those that were long separated, and to make those which presented frequent common points coalesce into perfect union. Those that were completely separated would be so many different worlds which would know nothing of one another; so that the effect would be just what we actually observe.
But secondness is of two types. Consequently, besides flashes genuinely second to others, so as to come after them, there will be pairs of flashes, or, since time is now supposed to be developed, we had better say pairs of states, which are reciprocally second, each member of the pair to the other. This is the first germ of spatial extension. These states will undergo changes; and habits will be formed of passing from certain states to certain others, and of not passing from certain states to certain others. Those states to which a state will immediately pass will be adjacent to it; and thus habits will be formed which will /279/ constitute a spatial continuum, but differing from our space by being very irregular in its connections, having one number of dimensions in one place and another number in another place, and being different for one moving state from what it is for another.
Pairs of states will also begin to take habits, and thus each state having different habits with reference to the different other states, will give rise to bundles of habits, which will be substances.
[CSP footnote: I use substance, here, in the old sense of a thing, not in the modern chemical sense.]
Some of these states will chance to take habits of persistency, and will get to be less and less liable to disappear; while those that fail to take such habits will fall out of existence. Thus, substances will get to be permanent.In fact, habits, from the mode of their formation necessarily consist in the permanence of some relation, and therefore on this theory, each law of nature would consist in some permanence, such as the permanence of mass, momentum, and energy. In this respect, the theory suits the facts admirably.
The substances carrying their habits with them in their motions through space, will tend to render the different parts of space alike. Thus, the dimensionality of space will tend gradually to uniformity; and multiple connections, except at infinity, where substances never go, will be obliterated. At the outset, the connections of space were probably different for one substance and part of a substance from what they were for another; that is to say, points adjacent or near one another for the motions of one body would not be so for another; and this may possibly have contributed to break substances into little pieces or atoms. But the mutual actions of bodies would have tended to reduce their habits to uniformity in this respect; and besides there must have arisen conflicts between the habits of bodies and the habits of parts of space, which would never have ceased till they were brought into conformity.
End: Peirce's "A Guess at the Riddle" (formatted by Gary Fuhrman)
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