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vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 229 |
Anticipations of Experience.
Mr. Podmore’s paper on “Miracles and Prophecy,” published in “Light” of April 1st, calls for some reply from those who maintain the intuitive character of the phenomenon which he considers to be wrongly designated Prevision. No doubt there is much that is too indiscriminately so-called. Anticipations not inferable by our ordinary reasoning powers and their data range from vague impressions to the most distinct pictures of scenes and events which are realised in future experience. It is only in regard to the latter, those presentations to an inner sense which apparently differ from objective experience only by removal from their total context therein, that I would defend the term Prevision against Mr. Podmore’s criticism, and in opposition to the alternative hypothesis he puts forward. Some of the difficulty besetting the latter he himself perceives, and states with his usual intelligence and candour. I think I am not too presumptuous in believing that the following additional considerations will clear it altogether out of our way, and leave us free to consider whether the philosophical objections urged by Mr. Podmore have any valid application to true Prevision.
Mr. Podmore supposes “certain higher reasoning faculties, working apart from and above the ordinary consciousness,” which infer the future in strict analogy to similar operations of our lower intelligence, and that this higher reason translates its results into visions “before it presents them for the comprehension of the understanding which we know.” We are further to suppose that there is “no limit to.... the range of the facts observed,” and that this higher reason “may survey in one extensive glance the whole of the past.” Given the totality of present conditions, it, of course, follows, according to the law of strict phenomenal determination, that the whole series of future experience can be completely and exactly represented. It only remains that the imagination should construct it, or some of it, in accordance with this clue, to present it to our lower consciousness as an “intuition.” But let us appreciate the concession required of us, and then see in what this “magnified counterpart of our known rational faculty” differs, if at all, from the noumenal consciousness which is exempt from the form of time.
Every intuition, as far as it extends, must be in exact accordance with the “there” and “thus” of phenomenal experience; that is to say, every perception is set in an empirical framework, or surrounding, which forms its context. Taken out of this context by the understanding, an event (the object in time) may be conceived to have its own regressive series of conditions adequate to its exact determination, without regard to any collateral series. It may be so conceived in abstraction, for in reality the understanding could not thus work the category of Causality without reference to the category of Reciprocal Determination. But apart from that, in the intuition the context is actually given. All the contextual data, involving regressive collateral series of the utmost complexity and multiplicity, must therefore be separately present to the understanding, which should translate logical anticipation into the concrete representation, or intuition. Mr. Podmore’s hypothesis, therefore, supposes at the base of our ordinary consciousness an understanding literally omniscient. But, says Mr. Podmore, the process supposed is at least analogous to known operations, and in accordance with experience, whereas “prevision,” strictly speaking, is in opposition* to it. Is it so? How has this transcendental understanding obtained its data—the knowledge of the totality of antecedent conditions, each of which is a “phenomenon”? “No limit to the range of the facts observed!” How observed? The only understanding we know anything about gets its data in objective experience—ultimately from intuition. Will Mr. Podmore say that the intuitive faculty also is raised to a higher power (though not in regard to time), and can survey the whole existing collocation of conditions? Mark the consequence. If the exalted understanding can translate a single logical result into a single intuition for our lower intuitive faculty, so surely it can translate its total logical result into a total intuition for the higher intuitive faculty. So that the whole of experience—the whole “future”—stands together already in its determinate, objective order, and that in intuition. But that is just the conception of a noumenal intuition: namely, that the determinate connection which we envisage as necessary succession is given without the form of time. And so we unavoidably get round to it, Mr. Podmore’s higher reasoning faculty being then quite unnecessary and superfluous. But, moreover, this faculty, by its supposed power of constructing an intuition for us from its own logical conclusions, is itself no other than a faculty of intuition. To talk of an intuition being constructed for us, and then put into our consciousness by some act of a different faculty, is contrary to the whole Kantian doctrine of Æsthetic. We construct our intuitions by a primitive act of synthesis, and nothing can be in fact more “contrary to experience,” or a more surprising suggestion from a student of Kant, than that the understanding (however raised), which is entirely formal, should give “content” to intuition. Mr. Podmore’s “higher reason” must stand condemned by every true follower of Kant as a “constitutive” instead of a merely “regulative” faculty.
On the other hand, I confidently contend that intuition of “the future,” though it cannot claim Kant’s authority, is not opposed to the principles of his philosophy. I hope to make this thoroughly apparent. What the unity of objective experience, which is also the order of nature, requires is that every given phenomenon shall have its determined connection in time with antecedent phenomena, that the order shall not be transposed “beliebig,” or at random. In accordance with the principle that the objective order among phenomena is the expression of a subjective rule, experience in time is regulated (indeed, as experience, is constituted), by connecting successive phenomena through the category of causality. I cannot represent the succession of phenomena in experience, except as determining and determined, a series in which the antecedent (condition) is necessarily antecedent, and the subsequent (conditioned) necessarily subsequent. To reverse this order is inconsistent with the possibility of experience. The reason of this is not, as commonly supposed, because the order is something independent of me, who only perceive it—a misconception which inevitably leads to Hume and scepticism. Connection in time is a synthesis of the Ego, and “the laws of nature are,” as Mr. Podmore well expresses it, “but projections of the form of our own understanding.” Let us be careful, then, not to assert a “miracle,” but let us be no less careful not to call that a miracle which is merely unusual, or for any other reason than that it contradicts the laws of our own understanding. Now the condition above stated does not require that the whole phenomenal series of determinations should so stand in connection in a single empirical consciousness. For that to be so, the individual consciousness must be itself the subjective counterpart of the universal objective order. And that not merely by virtue of its formal constitution (in which sense it is so indeed), but in actual experience. I cannot walk in the street, or look out of a window, without encountering the “miracle” which Mr. Podmore deprecates in such eloquent language. Every passing cab is a phenomenon which in my consciousness is cut off from all its antecedent conditions. And since I can, nay, must, view phenomena without their total context, my prevision of them would no more violate the order of nature than do the necessary limitations of my actual experience. If my prevision displaced the order of the phenomenal series in objective experience, then indeed it would be fatal to “science.” But then it would not be pre-vision. All that the rule exacts is that every phenomenon shall belong to a possible total experience (as Kant repeatedly expresses it). But as the whole successive order of phenomena in time is not given in any single empirical intuition, my individual cognition of any one of them belongs to a subjective, and not to an objective series, to my total experience, and not to the world order, save so far as that is present in my perception. My understanding is loyal to its own laws in not putting “the cart before the horse” in its fragmentary perceptions; but the fragments cannot be wholes. Yet the subjective order must be no less conformable to the law of determination than is the objective. We have to find the “condition” of prevision, just as we must acknowledge the condition of the objective experience which verifies it. But we are to seek that condition in the subjective series, not in the objective.
Unless we would abandon altogether the idealistic standpoint—so far as that is represented by Kant and his great successors in German philosophy—we must be careful not to mistake relative<... continues on page 13-82 >
* I wish Mr. Podmore would not use “opposition” in the thoroughly inaccurate sense of “non-accordance.” I have been at some trouble to expose the misleading character, in regard to judgment of evidence, of this abuse of language. What is really meant by experience, when we speak of contradictions to it, is negative induction from the absence of experience. See my Essay on “The Value of Testimony in Matters Extraordinary,” printed in App. A. of the translation of “Transcendental Physics.”
Editor's notes
- ↑ Anticipations of Experience. by unknown author (signed as C.C.M.), Light, v. 2, No. 68, April 22, 1882, pp. 187-88
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 68, April 22, 1882, pp. 187-88