A Lesson For Science

Any argument for or against belief in God, already assumes a system of God-level criterial statements that have the ability---and the authority---to decide the issue.

Invasion of the God Object

How many similarities with God does an object of thought have to have before I can no longer tell the difference between that object and God?

Background Music, Here and Yonder

The farther thought progresses, the more its system reveals a universal system that lies beyond.

Concrete Necessity and Human Insight

Of course we have not proved our view of the goal of thought. There can be no proof, or even a question about proof, if the nature of proof itself is already in question. All we can say is: Here is the standard and ideal that we actually use in thinking.

When we understand, it's always through a system. As our understanding grows more complete, it's always through a system of greater unity.

If the ideal seems unconvincing and artificial, consider its alternatives. Do they formulate better or worse what we mean by understanding? When we read a famous book called Ethics Geometically Demonstrated, most of us feel we are getting insight.

In the end this illumination is merely following associations.

But that explanation of understanding cannot itself be verified.

If we deny all degrees to necessity, and confine it to a set of the barest abstractions, not much insight remains. The genuineness of insight does not depend on ensuing changes in practice. Perhaps in a poem, a piece of music, or some religious experience an insight is gained that one hesitates to call understanding, because understanding has become so identified as something abstractly intellectual. But such insight is understanding, unique, limited in degree, but still with rights of its own. And to reject it as understanding on the ground of its concreteness is absurd.

If I accept the ideal of concrete necessity, these varying insights are legitimized, ordered, and appraised. If I accept any other, some insights must be excluded.

32.24

The Goal of Reflection

From it's beginning in perception, thought more or less unknowingly seeks a potential goal in every idea, the unified system implicitly at work at every stage of reflection, exercising its steady influence against irrelevant excursions and developing its fragmentary knowledge by the rules of an ideal system. The farther thought progresses, the more clearly does its system reveal the character of a system that lies beyond it.

Our study of reflection began with examples of the kind of unified system that governs reflection in ordinary thought. They were only provisional. Because the impulse of thought is toward self-revision, those examples become superseded by more complete systems. What is at the end of this process of continual self-revision is unknown, nor can we ever know what it is until we have attained it. But we can see the direction in which we must move if we want to attain it.

Thought tries to supersede all partial systems by a more developed overall system that will absorb and extend its earlier gains, and it can rest only when this process cannot be continued further. And thought is the potentiality of the object it seeks to know. Therefore, what fulfills the theoretic impulse must also bring about the most complete and immediate experience of the real.

32.23

Transcendence Realizes Immanence

The universe of existing things is a system in which all things are related internally. Let a and x be any two things in the universe. They are then related to each other causally. But if they are related to each other causally, then they are related to each other intrinsically. And if they are related intrinsically, then they are also related to each other necessarily in the sense that they causally act as they do in virtue of their nature or character, and that to deny such activity would entail denying them to be what they are. And to have this kind of relation to all other things is what being related to them internally means.

The immanent goal of thought is relevant to the experienced nature of things. To the best of our knowledge the immanent and transcendent goals coincide. The aim of thought from its very beginning is understanding. To understand anything means to apprehend it in a system that renders it necessary. The ideal of complete understanding would be achieved only when this system that rendered it necessary was not a system that itself was fragmentary and theorefore contingent, but one that was all-inclusive and so organized internally that every part was linked to every other by intelligible necessity.

But was this more than an ideal? Was there any reason to suppose that by its attainment thought would be nearer to its second end, the apprehension of things as they are? Such an ideal is remote from the world of actual experience, where we are met at every turn by seaming contingency and unintelligibility. At least it is thus remote at the first glance, and perhaps also at the second and third. But in the very nature of terms in relation, and in the nature of causality, there is ground for believing that such contingency is apparent only. In what we take as the real world, we can see the outlines of a necessary structure that is the counterpart of thought's ideal. There is nothing to stay our conclusion that with approximation to its immanent goal, the achievement of systematic necessity, thought is also approximating its transcendent goal, the apprehension of the real.

Consequently, I have reached the goal of my inquiry. I have sketched the ideal of thought, and shown that it is applicable to the real.

The idea of a completely coherent system is still obscure.

There are two kinds of obscurity. One is the obscurity that comes from relaxing logical tension in the face of ultimate difficulty, of letting all holds go, surrendering to wishful thinking, and plunging blindly into the mist. As one nears so high a conclusion, and one so much to be desired as the intelligibility of the world, the tendency to relapse into a murky mysticism is strong. But there has been no compromise with this kind of thing.

But there is a kind of vagueness whose condemnation, on such an issue, would be far less reasonable. If thought is the pursuit of a goal whose character can be realized only as the pursuit advances, a full and clear account of that goal must in the nature of the situation be impossible at any point along the journey. An account that was really adequate would not now be intelligible. An account that was quite simple, neat and plain could only be suspicious. The tale we have told of the concrete universal, and concrete necessity, and a system of parts such that none can be or be known without the others, cannot be rendered entirely clear from a logic of mosaics.

32.22

Conclusion

Everything is causally connected with everything else, directly or indirectly. Being causally connected involves being connected by the relation of logical necessity. Therefore, everything that exists is related internally to everything else, so that without this relation it would not be what it is.

Causality involves intelligible necessity in every case of inference. But can we say the same of causality generally? The principle can be extended to other mental processes, even though the presence of necessity is less discernible. But is there any evidence of intelligible connection among causal processes in physical nature?

There is nothing in causality but regularity of sequence or functional dependence. Between cause and effect there is some kind of intrinsic connection, and this is confirmed by the fact that ordinary inductive procedure involves an argument which without this intrinsic connection would be invalid.

This intrinsic connection is necessary, because when anything is said to have a consequent or a consequence because of its special nature, necessity is part of our meaning, and what follows can't be denied without self-contradiction. This is not to say that we can see why a specific hammer-stroke drives a particular nail. And without some core principle for this, the principle on which all practice is conducted and on which all causal argument is based, would be illusory.

32.21