Footnote QW73

QW73. The issue of spirit monism versus dualism remains an important religious and cultural theme.

In his (unflattering) portrait of Mary Baker Eddy, Martin Gardner writes:

The central idea of Christian Science, that Divine Mind is the sole reality, is an old one. It is found in the philosophy of ancient thinkers such as Plotinus and other Neoplatonists; in eastern religions such as Hinduism, which view the material universe as maya or illusion; and of course in the writings of idealists such as Bishop Berkeley, who called matter a "stupid, thoughtless somewhat," incapable of existing without being perceived. That matter is in some sense unreal was also a theme of New England's transcendentalist movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller.
Christian Science, however, is much more than just another form of metaphysical idealism. It also embraces the notion that sin, sickness, and death, being illusions created by false belief, can be conquered by a person's divine mind, an eternal part of God, if it learns to accept completely the nonexistence of matter with its attendant illusions of evil.

---

In Science and Health (chapter 6) she compares her discovery of Christian Science to the Copernican revolution. Our senses tell us that the earth is at rest, with the heavens going around it. The Copernican revolution reversed that belief. In a similar way, Mrs. Eddy writes, Christian Science reverses the role of mind and matter. Our senses tell us that matter is real and mind is the operation of a physical brain. For Mrs. Eddy, it is the other way around. Only immortal Mind is real, and matter is an illusion fabricated by what Mrs. Eddy called "mortal mind." This is a mind that really doesn't exist because it is made of unreal matter. Kant, by the way, had earlier characterized his metaphysics, in which Mind is made central, to a Copernican revolution in the history of philosophy. That could have been where Mrs. Eddy got the metaphor.
If matter is an illusion, then our body, including our brain, must also be illusory. "Man is not matter," Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, "he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements ... man is made in the image and likeness of God.

The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy
by Martin Gardner
(Prometheus 1993)

Curiously, in the 1930s Eddy was accused of plagiarizing a German American professor's unpublished manuscript on Hegel. In Mrs. Eddy Purloins from Hegel -- Newly Discovered Source Reveals Amazing Plagiarisms in Science and Health (A.A. Beauchamp 1936), Walter M. Haushalter nails down the case that Christian Science is an American brand of Gnosticism. This Gnostic theme, which is also found in the 19th Century New Thought movement and the 20th Century New Age movement, has been found to have been a substantial component of Hegel's background and philosophy, as detailed in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander Magee (Cornell 2001). (The evidence is overwhelming that Eddy incorporated, without attribution, passages from other writers into her published works.)

---

Footnote NP53

NP53. Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment by Ann Thomson (Oxford 2008) is a treasure trove of information on a little-known aspect of the Enlightenment.

---

Footnote hr39

Footnote hr39. In From Religion to Philosophy (Edward Arnold 1912), F.M. Cornford tells us of a formulation of such ideas among archaic Greeks:

Man in Homer has two souls. His eidolon or psyche escapes from his mouth at the moment of death; it is his recognisable shape, which may, for a time, revisit his survivors in dreams. It does not exist until the moment of death ; and it does not carry with it to the world of shades any of his vital force. This resides in the other soul (θυμός [=thymos]), whose visible vehicle is the blood ; and it is only by drinking blood that the eidolon can recover its 'wits ’ (φρένες [=phrenes]) or consciousness.

---

Footnote BV38

BV38. I tend to think of process as a word that covers a class of actualities. Process is also a word that covers a class of descriptions of the actualities, just as the word blueprint represents a whole array of distinct static designs or the term computer program covers a whole array of unique algorithms. In many cases, the word process implies a particular description which we may think of as having input values, an algorithm (or something like one) -- which is also a description -- and an output value.

That is to say, in many cases the word process stands for some complex set of motions, or changes, between time t_o and t_a. Though the motions may be complex, the input and output values, when they are well defined, tend to fall within specified ranges. In any case, we need to distinguish between a description and the actuality that it is intended to represent. To say that any process is only composed of its moving particles or changing units is to make a category mistake, or, anyway, a mistake. Reduction into parts does not prevent a process description from representing an actual process.

So granting that when one says process, one is speaking a name for a class of actualities. Also, the general term process is not an entity itself (except in a "higher order" semantic sense). Now we may admit that any perceived object is a construction of the observing apparatus, which selects out of the environmental input those data sets that are recognized as useful (perhaps) information (in the Shannon sense). That is to say, whatever stream of information is "found" in the environment, is taken to represent an entity or actuality associated with that information. Hence, on that basis, the concepts of river and mind both represent actualities.

These days we realize that probably most changes in the mental process correspond to patterns of neuron firings. The question is whether there are any changes going on in some immaterial substance or presence or whether, as John Locke argued, matter can think if God so rules.

---

Footnote gk63

gk63. Having made clear his position on reincarnation in his book Immortality, Paul Edwards goes on to ridicule the notion of resurrection as expressed in the philosopher John Hick's "cloud cuckoo land" fantasies. As an antidote, Edwards brings to bear The Future of an Illusion, a defense of atheism by Edwards's fellow Austrian, Sigmund Freud.

"What use to man is the illusion of a kingdom on the moon whose revenues have never yet been seen by anyone?" Let us leave the heavens (he then quotes his fellow skeptic Heinrich Heine) to the "angels and the sparrows."

---

In James Strachey's English translation of Freud's Illusion, the quotation reads:

Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow- unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret:

Den Himmel uberlassen wir
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.

Strachey footnote:

‘We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows.’ From Heine’s poem Deutschland (Caput I). The word which is here translated ‘fellow-unbelievers’ — in German ‘Unglaubensgenossen ’ — was applied by Heine himself to Spinoza... 

The words of Freud that Edwards omitted ring somewhat hollow in light of the atrocities and mass death of World War II, much of it instigated by people with little regard for heaven -- Nazis, communists and materialists of every sort, along with not-very-sincere churchmen.

We may note that in his introduction to his anthology, Edwards -- who signed the atheistic Humanist Manifesto II -- goes to great lengths to test spiritual concepts on the basis of materialist or "scientific" concepts, but rarely if ever considers using a converse test -- not that it is very clear how one would go about making a converse test. Yet, it may be observed that for centuries materialistic concepts were indeed weighed in accord with a spiritual (or spiritualized) scale.

In other words, why should the truth of a claim only be provable by the currently accepted set of assumptions? What if we were to test modern "facts" by a different set of assumptions -- say those of Thomas Aquinas? Who is to say which set of assumptions is correct?

Despite his admiration for Russell, Edwards had, I would say, the engineering outlook so prevalent among 20th Century intellectuals. I don't mean that he was an engineer or could do mathematics; I mean that he saw the world as based on a nuts-and-bolts no-nonsense materialist machinery. Much of his output -- he wrote or edited 16 books -- was focused on skewering those whom he saw as obscure or unscientific. As far as I know, nothing he wrote is regarded as a major contribution to philosophy, which is not to say that his work was not worthwhile.

While no doubt there is value in exposing some claims of popular parapsychologists; was that endeavor worth all the attention he gave it? I suppose something can be said in favor of his analysis of the work of Martin Heidegger, Heidegger's Confusions (Prometheus 2004), but one wonders how Edwards could do anything but debunk Heidegger, given Edwards's materialism.

---

Please see the anthology Immortality edited by Paul Edwards (Prometheus 1997) and James Strachey's translation of The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud (Norton 1962). Strachey based his translation on the translation of W.D. Robson-Scott, which was published in 1928 by Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psychoanalysis in London. Freud's book was first published as Zukunft einer Illusion (Internationaler Pyschoanalytischer Verlag. 1927).

---

For other footnoted information on Edwards, please see:

Footnote dh97
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-dh97.html
Footnote np54
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-np54.html
Footnote ds45
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-ds45.html
Footnote sf51
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-sf51.html

---

Footnote sf51

sf51. With respect to life after death and the problem of retention of individuality, Paul Edwards observes

The appeal to individuation does not prove that disembodied mental existence is impossible. It only shows that we would not be able to justify believing in a plurality of disembodied minds as opposed to a single such mind; and [H.D.] Lewis rightly observes that it does not rule out the kind of Absolute Mind or Consciousness postulated by post-Hegelian idealists and certain Indian religions, or the "ocean of consciousness" of William James, [Erwin] Schroedinger, and [Arthur] Koestler... It is true that the ocean of consciousness theory has nothing to fear from individuation, but two other very serious problems arise in connection with it. In the first place it is not clear that we are dealing with a genuine theory. We are given no more than a vague picture – individual minds are said to merge into the Absolute Mind after death, just as drops of water merge into the ocean. We certainly understand what is meant by an ocean composed of water. We also understand what would be meant by an ocean composed of some other liquid – milk, for example, or champagne. But what is an ocean composed of "mental stuff," to use an expression common among philosophers writing during the last decade of the nineteenth century [and later]? And even if this difficulty is waived and we concede that statements about an ocean of consciousness possess some literal significance, there are strong reasons for supposing that no such ocean exists.

(To learn more about those "strong reasons," please consult Edwards's anthology Immortality (Prometheus 1997). The above quotation is from his introduction to that anthology.)

This note may be of interest:
Of course, if one thinks of an individual as a stream, one sees that quite some while may elapse before the stream merges into a river and the river into the ocean. In other words, Edwards does not account for an in-between possibility. Such a possibility is given in the occasional testimonies of people who have experienced the merger of one "soul" with another. That is, such a person reports that, at least for short periods, there is an inability to distinguish the self – in the sense of who I am – from the other person (usually a lover). Many take such accounts to be poetic or metaphorical. But, if we regard the existence of spirits as just as plausible as the existence of matter, then such a possibility need not be regarded as a simple illusion.

---

On Edwards and his 'messiah'
Edwards saw Wilhelm Reich, a fellow Austrian Jew who had also escaped the Nazis, as a very important man, saying that on his arrival in New York in 1947, the "talk of the town" was Wilhelm Reich and that for years he and his friends regarded Reich as "something akin to a messiah."

"There was ... a widespread feeling that Reich had an original and penetrating insight into the troubles of the human race." Twenty years later, as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (published by Macmillan), Edwards wrote an article about Reich, comprising 11 pages as compared to the four devoted to Sigmund Freud. Edwards pointed out what is of interest to philosophers in Reich: his views concerning the origin of religious and metaphysical needs, the relation between the individual and society and the possibility of social progress, and, above all, the implications of his psychiatry for certain aspects of the mind-body problem. An abridged version of the article appeared in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief (ed. Gordon Stein, 1985).

Edwards omitted Reich's "orgone therapy" from the Encyclopedia article because, he said, "it is of no philosophical interest." But, in a BBC interview he said, "I concede that Reich had no real competence as a physicist... At the same time I am quite convinced that the orgone theory cannot be complete nonsense. For a number of years, largely out of curiosity, I sat in an orgone accumulator once a day."

One might wonder whether these irreligious men were seeking some way of fulfilling a religious impulse with orgone energy via the orgone accumulator.

Reich, who has been dubbed the "father of the sexual revolution," wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality.

Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 Reich reported discovery of a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud's idea of the libido. He called it "orgone energy" or "orgone radiation." His orgone accumulator supposedly cured cancer and effected other wonders.

Reich's scientific expertise was not as silly as has been widely claimed, according to James Strick. In 2015 Harvard University Press published Strick's Wilhelm Reich, Biologist, in which Strick writes that Reich's work in Oslo "represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography." Strick argues that the dominant narrative of Reich as a pseudoscientist is incorrect and that Reich's story is "much more complex and interesting."

Reich's updated book on fascism included a condemnation of Josef Stalin. Hence, he had few friends on the left when the federal government prosecuted him over sales of his orgone accumulator and "associated literature." Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic, headed by Stalin's former spy, Michael Straight, and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude." Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.

---

Much, but not all, information on this page is taken from two Wikipedia articles on Edwards and Reich.

---

For other footnoted information on Edwards, please see:

Footnote dh97
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-dh97.html
Footnote np54
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-np54.html
Footnote ds45
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-ds45.html
Footnote gk63
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-gk63.html

---

Footnote ds45

ds45. In his anthology of ancient and modern writers, Immortality (Prometheus 1997), Paul Edwards zeroes in on the mind/body problem. Edwards provides an excellent, lengthy introduction as well as a stimulating "Bibliographical Essay." Nothing from Ryle is excerpted nor, as far as I can tell, is Ryle even mentioned amid all the lively and wide-ranging discussion of the dualism issue. (We note that Edwards compiled Russell's late-career book, Why I am not a Christian (Allen and Unwin 1957) and that Russell and Ryle had had a furious row.)

In any case, for an excellent survey of the mind/body problem, see Edwards's Immortality.

---

For other footnoted information on Edwards, please see:

Footnote dh97
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-dh97.html
Footnote np54
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-np54.html
Footnote sf51
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-sf51.html
Footnote gk63
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-gk63.html

---

Footnote np54

np54. Neitzsche, as quoted by Paul Edwards in Immortality (Prometheus 1997):

Behind the doing, acting, becoming, there is no agent, no "being." The "doer" has simply been added to the deed by the imagination -- the doing is everything. [Only the] snare of language ... blinds us to this fact.

Well, does not that make the imagination an agent?

Similarly, Russell, in spite of all his labors, was in the end a bundle theorist. Edwards cites Russell's My Philosophical Development (Allen and Unwin 1959), urging that "Russell always thought of the spiritual substance as well as its material counterpart as 'grammatical illusions'." Further, said Russell,

The subject appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation requires it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar.

Edwards points out that Nietzsche and Russell sound very similar to the fifth-century Buddhist scholastic Buddha Ghosa, who opined:

For there is suffering, but none who suffer.
Doing exists although there is no doer.
Extinction is but no extinguished person.
Although there is a path, there is no goer.

(I don't know the circumstances of the translation of those words from Pali.)

The "bundle" issue, I suggest, in part arises from the nature of perception as a negative feedback system, a subject I discuss in my paper

Toward a signal model of perception
https://footnotestoplato1.blogspot.com/2020/05/toward-signal-model-of-perception_88.html

I do not in that paper attempt to address many of the philosophical issues raised by it.

---

For other footnoted information on Edwards, please see:

Footnote dh97
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-dh97.html
Footnote ds45
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-ds45.html
Footnote sf51
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-sf51.html
Footnote gk63
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-gk63.html

---

Footnote dh97

dh97. In his introduction to Immortality (Prometheus 1997), Paul Edwards tells us that William James

speaks of the Absolute Mind as "the mother sea" and "the great reservoir of consciousness." He does not explicitly endorse this position, but he writes about it with sympathy and respect. Among Western writers who have endorsed it are the physicist Erwin Schroedinger (1887-1961), known for his momentous contributions to quantum theory, and the influential novelist and political commentator Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). Schroedinger argued that contemporary physical theory which has abandoned the notion that particles are "identifiable individuals" naturally leads to the view taught in the Upanishads that the separation of individual minds is mere appearance and that "in truth there is only one mind." He suggests that at death "the veil of Maya," the deception of which makes us believe in the multiplicity of minds, will be lifted and we will realize that we are part of Brahman, the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self of Hinduism. Koestler believed that not only modern physics but also, and especially, the evidence of parapsychology support the view that there is a "psychic substratum," and "all-pervading mind stuff," a "cosmic cosciousness" out of which the "individual consciousnesses are formed and into which they dissolve again after threescore years and ten."

Note that belief in a cosmic mind-matter stuff need not entail belief in God or cosmic consciousness, as we know from Buddhism -- depending on how cosmic consciousness is defined -- and Bertrand Russell in his neutral monism period.

---

For other footnoted information on Edwards, please see:

Footnote np54
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-np54.html
Footnote ds45
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-ds45.html
Footnote sf51
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-sf51.html
Footnote gk63
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-gk63.html

---

Footnote YT29

YT29.  We have a dash of ancient Greek Pragmatism from Laws by Plato (Benjamin Jowett translation):

Athenian stranger

The view which identifies the pleasant and the pleasant and the just and the good and the noble has an excellent moral and religious tendency. And the opposite view is most at variance with the designs of the legislator, and is, in his opinion, infamous; for no one, if he can help, will be persuaded to do that which gives him more pain than pleasure. But as distant prospects are apt to make us dizzy, especially in childhood, the legislator will try to purge away the darkness and exhibit the truth; he will persuade the citizens, in some way or other, by customs and praises and words, that just and unjust are shadows only, and that injustice, which seems opposed to justice, when contemplated by the unjust and evil man appears pleasant and the just most unpleasant; but that from the just man's point of view, the very opposite is the appearance of both of them.

Cleinius, a Cretan

True.

Athenian

And which may be supposed to be the truer judgment -- that of the inferior or of the better soul?

Cleinus

Surely, that of the better soul.

Athenian

Then the unjust life must not only be more base and depraved, but also more unpleasant than the just and holy life?

Cleinius

That seems to be implied in the present argument.

Athenian

And even supposing this were otherwise, and not as the argument has proven, still the lawgiver, who is worth anything, if he ever ventures to tell a lie to the young for their good, could not invent a more useful lie than this, or one which will have a better effect in making them do what is right, not on compulsion but voluntarily.

---

Footnote vp57

vp57. A footnote appearing in The Evolution of the Soul by Richard Swinburne (Oxford 1986) reads:

That the human soul (the rational or intellectual soul as the medievals called it) comes into being (connected to the body) sometime between conception and birth is the traditional Catholic doctrine. The human soul is present when there is specifically human functioning. In the last century or two it has become normal for Catholic writers and pronouncements to assume that the soul comes into being at conception. St. Thomas Aquinas on the other hand held that the fertilized egg began to grow first as an animal (or, alternatively, first as a living non-conscious thing and then as an animal), and later as a human; that is, it was animated first by a sensitive soul (or first by a vegetative soul and then by a sensitive soul) and only later by an intellectual soul (see Summa Theologiea, Ia, 76. ad 3 and IIa, IIae, 64. 1). Aquinas owed this view to Aristotle. It was listed as an error by Pope Leo XIII in 1887 (H. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 1910). Aquinas would not have denied that abortion was wrong, even when (because done soon after conception) it was not the killing of a human being and so murder. He would have said it was still wrong owing to it being the destruction of a potential human being, or the frustration of a natural process. Aquinas's view that the human foetus is animated by a human soul only at some time much later than conception, seems to have been the general view of the Western Church until the nineteenth century -- see G.R. Dunstan, 'The Moral Status of the Human Embryo -- a Tradition Recalled', Journal of Medical Ethics, 1984, I, 38-44.

---

Footnote FT11

FT11. E.R. Dodds tells of how Greece's Classical Age "inherited a whole series of inconsistent pictures of the 'soul' or 'self' -- the living corpse in the grave, the shadowy image in Hades, the perishable breath that is spilt in the air or absorbed in the aether, the daemon that is reborn in other bodies." In other words, the Greeks went from the Stone Age theory of the corpse as continuing some form of life, to the idea of the breath/spirit to the spirit/soul with a potential for immortality. Dodds conjectured that the spirit/soul theory was borrowed from Asian shamanism when the Greeks settled along the coasts of the Black Sea in the seventh century b.c.

The Greeks and the Irrational (UCal Press 1951) by Dodds is a brilliant analytical survey of the irrational side(s) of the Greek mind.

---

Footnote ce71

ce71. Facts, argued F.H. Bradley, are founded on fallible human perception. Hence any human-perceived fact or truth is subject to the possibility of error.

The absolute indispensable fact is in my view the mere creature of false theory. Facts are valid so far as, when taken otherwise than as real, they bring disorder into my world. And there are to-day for me facts such that, if I take them as mistakes, my known world is damaged and, it is possible, ruined. But how does it follow that I cannot to-morrow on the strength of new facts gain a wider order in which these old facts can take a place as errors? The supposition may be improbable, but what you have got to show is that it is in principle impossible. A foundation used at the beginning does not in short mean something fundamental at the end, and there is no single fact which in the end can be called fundamental absolutely. It is all a question of relative contribution to my known world-order.

'Then no judgement of perception will be more than probable?'  Certainly that is my contention. Facts are justified because and as far as, while taking them as real, I am better able to deal with the incoming new facts and in general to make my world wider and more harmonious. The higher and wider my structure, and the more that any particular fact or set of facts is implied in that structure, the more certain are the structure and the facts. And, if we could reach an all-embracing ordered whole, then our certainty would be absolute. But, since we cannot do this, we have to remain content with relative probability.

So here Bradley not only reveals himself as a probabilist, we also see that he insists on the relativity of truth despite his strong disagreement with Pragmatism. Bradley was writing in "On Truth and Coherence," which first appeared in Mind, July 1909, and which was republished in Bradley's Essays on Truth and Reality  (Oxford 1914).

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Footnote hp35

 

hp35. F.H. Bradley argued that pluralism, as advocated by James, is flawed.

For, if in change something really is altered, and, if the alteration can consist merely in difference of position, and if in this difference the terms and the relations are neither of them altered then either we have an alteration where nothing is changed, or else our premisses have been wrong. Something, if so (we shall have to allow), is concerned in the change, which something is more than and other than the elements admitted by Pluralism. If (to repeat) you hold to reality in the form of external terms and relations, you must deny the ultimate reality of change as actually given. If, on the other hand, you affirm this latter, you must insist that the experience of change is a non-relational totality. And, if so, terms and relations become, as such, abstractions, constructions, true perhaps or perhaps vicious, but assuredly in neither case things, as such, actually experienced. How it is possible to avoid this dilemma and simply to maintain both theses at once, I myself do not know, but apparently nothing less is required for the position taken by Prof. James.

Bradley's criticism also applied to another pluralist, Russell, with whom he held a long-running controversy over the reality of relations. Bradley's remark above appeared in "Appendix III to Chapter V" in his Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford 1914). Bradley was challenging James's views as expressed in Essays in Radical Empiricism, "Essay III"  (published posthumously by Longmans, Green in 1912) and in A Pluralistic Universe (Longmans, Green 1909).

Bradley went on to say,

The doctrine which Prof. James would, I think, have preferred is the view that given experience is non-relational, that it is an unbroken fluid totality containing in one now an undivided lapse, and is in itself foreign to any terms or relations as such. This I also have taken to be the true account of the matter; and what I would notice here is the fact, that, while urging this view as a fatal objection ignored by Absolutism and Idealism, Prof. James might, like others, have himself learnt it at the very source where according to him it is most unknown. The doctrine in question, Prof. James stated very candidly, has been advocated by myself since 1883. He seems even to give me the credit of having broken away here from the tradition of my school, and of having, conjointly with M. Bergson though at perhaps an earlier date, originated in modern times the true view ignored by and fatal to idealistic Monism. Now for myself (I am of course not concerned with M. Bergson's attitude) I at once, in the same journal, disclaimed, and I now again emphatically disclaim any such originality.

---

Footnote sb81

sb81. I strongly suspect that James's difficulty with Christian doctrine is reflected in the Pragmatist idea of relative truth. If truth is relative, then there is no need to worry that God will judge you by an absolute standard of truth. The same idea very likely occurred to Dewey, who was so strongly influenced by the Darwinian paradigm.

---

Footnote kg97

kg97. The reader will notice that this essay pays a great deal of attention to Russell. Why, you say, so much fuss about Russell's efforts to see beyond the veil into the mystery of human existence? After all, this essay is supposed to be a critique of Ryle, not Russell. I reply that one may well doubt that Ryle could have ever solved the alleged mind-body problem, given the earnest, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts of a philosopher of Russell's stature. In addition, I found it very useful, in in my examination of Ryle's case, to follow the course of Russell's thinking over the decades.

The number of times Russell's name appears in the revised essay rivals that of Ryle's name, with about 170 for the former and 200 for the latter.

Footnote ug76

ug76. F.H. Bradley has a sharp retort to the correspondence theory of truth, which he dubs the "copying theory."

...the whole theory goes to wreck in principle and at once on a fatal objection. Truth has to copy facts, but on the other side the facts to be copied show already in their nature the work of truth-making. The merely given facts are, in other words, the imaginary creatures of false theory. They are manufactured by a mind which abstracts one aspect of the concrete known whole, and sets this abstracted aspect out by itself as a real thing. If, on the other hand, we exaggerate when we maintain that all facts are inferences, yet undeniably much of given fact is inferential. And if we cannot demonstrate that every possible piece of fact is modified by apperception, the outstanding residue may at least perhaps be called insignificant. Or (to put it from the other side) if there really is any datum, outward or inward, which, if you remove the work of the mind, would in its nature remain the same, yet there seems no way of our getting certainly to know of this. And, if truth is to copy fact, then truth at least seems to be in fact unattainable. ¹

In other words, we have a circular definition here. I believe that Russell said the circularity was "harmless," as no infinite regress is apparent. I see Bradley's observation as pointing to the "negative feedback" of the brain's contact with "the other," something I discuss in

Toward a Signal Model of Perception
https://web.archive.org/web/20200430052605/http://www.angelfire.com/ult/znewz1/qball.html .

This is an old page, which I am anxious to update but thus far have not found the time to do so.

---

1. First appeared in Mind, April 1908, and reprinted in  Bradley's Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford 1914).

Footnote wp35

wp35. A useful summary of the idealist point of view is F.H. Bradley's article "On Floating Ideas" published in 1908.¹

Bradley spotlights "the mistakes which follow from any attempt to sunder the human world, to divide things from ideas, to identify the real with matter of fact, or to set apart somewhere by itself a superior realm of earnest."

Also, "The world of reality, we may say in a word, is the world of values, and values are not judged absolutely but are everywhere measured by degree."

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1. First appeared in Mind, April 1908, and reprinted in  Bradley's Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford 1914).

Footnote ub15

ub15. According to Johann Eduard Erdmann's interpretation, the redoubtable Aristotle fell short of resolving the dualism inherent in the competing strains of previous philosophy. That could not be helped, said Erdmann, because it takes the Christian outlook to resolve dualism.¹

But though in all these points his advance upon Plato is indisputable, [Aristotle] nevertheless in one respect remains too close to him to be able to free himself from inconsistencies. For it was only in virtue of the material element he included in the Platonic Ideas, that these became effective forces. And yet this element is excluded from that which is intended to be the most real of real things, viz., the Deity. This was unavoidable, for the time had not yet come for the Deity to be conceived as taking pounos [hardship and toil] upon himself, without which God lives in heartless enjoyment, troubled about nothing, and through which alone He is love and the Creator. What Plato in the Parmenides had beheld only in a passing flash ἑξαιφνης [suddenly] ... viz. the union of rest and motion, enjoyment and labour, is a conception grasped only by the Christian spirit. In common with the whole of antiquity, Aristotle also fails to transcend dualism, because he excludes matter from the Deity, to which it therefore remains opposed, even though reduced to a mere potentiality.

Erdmann's History of Philosophy, which appeared in the 19th Century, is even today rather well regarded. Erdmann obtained a doctoral degree in from the University of Kiel with the treatise, Quidnam sit discrimen philosophiam inter et theologiam (What is the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology?), written in 1830, in which he argued that philosophy and religion converge to a common truth, even though they differ in form of approach, an idea he obtained from Hegel, whose lectures Erdmann rarely if ever missed.

We may consider the probability that the apostle Paul would have viewed Hegelianism as a distraction from the gospel truth.

Colossians 2:8

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

Though Paul was speaking here about some strange occultic brew, it is hard to imagine that he would have accepted Hegel's doctrine as of any use to believers. I can agree with that caution, while at the same time accepting that when Christ is discussed, something useful is likely to come of it. Christ has long been grist for the philosophical mills.

Nevertheless, I do not agree with Hegel or Erdmann that philosophy and theology are two paths to the same (Christian) truth or that they can be two representations of the same truth. In my opinion, no amount of "book learning" (or intellectual knowledge) is equivalent to a direct, personal contact with Jesus Christ, nor can I regard the "World Mind" or "World Spirit" of these gentlemen as being anything like the Holy Spirit (God's mind) that infuses the mind of real followers of Jesus. I also agree with Kierkegaard that the watered-down doctrines of "Christendom" do not in general point the way to an encounter with Christ.

Erdmann was well aware of the opposition to philosophy among such men of faith as Paul of Tarsus and Martin Luther.

If the consciousness of reconciliation with God is the peculiar principle of the Christian spirit, or of Christianity, every age in which this idea agitates men's minds will have to be regarded as coloured with this spirit, or designated as Christian. The same thing must be said of philosophy, when the idea of reconciliation wins a place in it, and when the conception of sin at the same time gains importance, a conception which points back on its part to that of creation. Every philosophy in which this takes place is an expression of the Christian age, and can no longer be reckoned among the systems of antiquity. At the same time it is not only possible, but antecedently probable, that the first who philosophize in this new spirit will be not at all, or at least not very closely, connected with the Christian community. Those members of the com- munity who possess mental endowments great enough to become philosophers, are busied with the proclamation of salvation. And again, the cool reflection, without which a philosophical system cannot be produced, is a proof of lukewarmness in a time when only reckless and fiery zeal (divine foolishness) is considered a sign of the true Christian. In its early days a congregation must be hostile to philosophy; and apostolic natures always will be. Therefore

Paul and Luther

were its antagonists, and the opinion, originally Jewish, that philosophy is a work of evil demons, found favour in the early Church even among the most highly educated, as, for instance, the "Satire" of Hermias proves. Centuries later, Descartes and Spinoza (vid. 266, 267, 271), that is, a Catholic and a Jew, were the first to introduce the spirit of Protestantism into philosophy. For the same reason, heretics and heathen were the first whose philosophy betrays the influence of the Christian spirit.

On this theme, we note J.N. Findlay's observation that Hegel's "whole system may in fact be regarded as an attempt to see the Christian mysteries in everything whatever, every natural process, every form of human activity, and every logical transition." [ Hegel: A Re-Examination by J.N. Findlay (Humanities Press 1970).]

In Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornell 2001), Glenn Alexander states a case for Hegel as an exponent of a mystic/occult view. If that portrayal is accurate, we may assume that both Luther and Paul would have disfavored such Hegelianism (or any brand of hermeticism), because works rather than grace alone are required for the attainment of a hermetic/gnostic form of reputed divine enlightenment. On the other hand, the doctrine of grace certainly does not preclude the honest believer "working out" his own salvation with Christ's leading.

Philippians 2:12 (King James)

Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

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1. History of Philosophy by J.E. Erdmann (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan English trans. of 4th ed. 1890; Berlin: William Hertz 1866, 1st ed.). Originally published as Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, or "Outline of the History of Philosophy." German "outlines" were meant as aids for university students who would use them as backgrounds for more detailed lectures.

Erdmann's History was a big hit in Germany and later in Britain and America.

I find his observations quite stimulating and not, in general, dated.

This is my web page

Footnote Gh19

Gh19. We may safely say that a great many of the major philosophers have sought the nexus point between what the Greeks saw as an opposition of The One versus The Many. The cosmic dichotmomy has also been characterized as Being versus Becoming and Monism versus Pluralism (including Dualism). This hunt, as pursued by Plato, Leibniz, Hegel, Russell, and a legion of others, has never been successful, at least not to the point of consensus. Even Descartes sought the nexus point -- in the pineal gland!

Footnote BT36

BT36. Hegel's dialectical method owes much to the Sophists, Socrates and, in particular, Plato, who saw dialectic as synonymous with philosophy. Hegel of course thought to deal with Kant's antinomies by the idea that contradictories merge in a higher truth -- somewhat like the yin-yang or two-sides-of-the-same-coin idea. But, argued Hegel, Plato's dialectic yields a simplistic reductio ad absurdum argument which in general resolves nothing.

Were not, by modern standards, Hegel so long-winded, he would doubtless get more respect than he does.

In any case, we have J.E. Erdmann's¹ take on Platonic dialectics:

It is only when it has been trained in dialectic that the philosophic instinct becomes true philosophy; and hence to philosophize dialectically is also to philosophize truly and rightly (Soph.). It is not therefore the Eros alone that produces the result. If, then, we remember, that in the Symposium Socrates is extolled as the very incarnation of the Eros, this must be considered a proof that Plato regarded the continuation and justification of Socratism by means of Dialectic as the essential advance he had to make. This also explains how Plato could come to regard the dialectical method as equivalent to true knowledge, to use dialectic and philosophy sometimes as synonymous terms, and again employ the word Dialectic to designate that portion of his doctrine which contained the logical basis of the rest. The last is the sense we shall henceforth give to the word.

In passing, one may note Freud's theory of sexual sublimation forecast by Plato.

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1. History of Philosophy by J.E. Erdmann (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan English trans. of 4th ed. 1890; Berlin: William Hertz 1866, 1st ed.). Originally published as Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, or "Outline of the History of Philosophy." German "outlines" were meant as aids for university students who would use them as backgrounds for more detailed lectures.

Erdmann's History was a big hit in Germany and later in Britain and America.

I find his observations quite stimulating and not, in general, dated.