A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The
entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own
collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon, and planet; so must
the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the
consciousness of our earth plays one part. So has the entire starry
system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the
sum of all that _is_, materially considered, then that whole system,
along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely
totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of
God.
Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology; but there is
room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man
and the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positive
content of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets his
imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order. The
earth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the earth as our
special human guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to
their saints; but I think that in his system, as in so many of the
actual historic theologies, the supreme God marks only a sort of limit
of enclosure of the worlds above man. He is left thin and abstract in
his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions
with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom
the divine order provides.
I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's
speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have
been required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the
detail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning he
employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions
can be written on a single page, the _power_ of the man is due
altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the
multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the
cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the
ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the
sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he
gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who _sees_, who in
fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the
common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account