I

IN my last lecture but one I dwelt upon the interplay of causes and reasons in one special case—the case of our immediate experiences of the external world, the world in which we move, the world investigated by the physical sciences. No case can indeed be more important; for these immediate experiences are deemed by every man to be his guide through all the hours of his waking life, and by every man of science to supply the evidence on which depends all our knowledge of natural laws.

Yet this very statement suggests the existence of another series of problems not less important and not less closely connected with my general argument. For, how do we get from particular experiences to general laws—from beliefs about individual occurrences to beliefs about the ordering of the universe? These beliefs, looked at from the scientific point of view, are, as I have so often observed, a natural product. They have a history like other natural products. They are the effects of a long train of causes; and among those causes are some which claim, rightly or wrongly, to be reasons, an uncounted multitude which make no such claim, and others, again, which occupy a doubtful position between the two.

Imagine an external intelligence studying the methods by which earth-born creatures of various types adjust themselves to future circumstances. The most primitive method is, I suppose, no more than simple nervous reaction. The most developed method involves reasoned expectation. And between these two extremes our supposed observer would see a long series of intermediate forms melting into one another by insensible gradation.

From the point of view of the argument I am endeavouring to present to you, this development is of the greatest interest. The creation of a capacity for expectation, and of an inclination to expect a future similar to the past, must be deemed one of the most remarkable triumphs of selection—if to selection it indeed be due. Here we have this irrational mimic of reason, starting from the simplest forms of response to external stimulus, improving them into such excellent imitations of inductive reasoning as those which lead a chick, no more than a few hours old, to reject food which it has once found nasty1; and finally evolving out of these humble beginnings a mode of inference which, according to empirical philosophy, is the true and only source of all our general knowledge, whether of nature or of man.

It must be owned, indeed, that the attempt to treat instinctive expectation as a form of rational inference has been a lamentable failure, By no exercise of ingenuity can beliefs about what is not experienced be logically extracted from particular experiences, multiply them as you will. It is in vain that empirical philosophers attempt to give an air of rationality to this leap from the known to the unknown by the use of high-sounding logical titles. “Induction by simple enumeration” is doubtless an imposing name. But those who practise the thing are in no wise improving on their predecessor, the chick. Indeed they lag behind it. For the chick expects—but gives no reason; the empirical philosopher expects—and gives a bad one.

II

Expectation, then, if it is to be rational, can only be rationally extracted from experiences by the aid of one or more general principles. What principles are they?

One of them, at all events, must be the regularity of nature. In some form or other, and to some degree or other, this is assumed in every scientific speculation and in every purposeful action reflectively performed. It is, as you may recollect, one of the “inevitable beliefs of common sense” to which I referred in my first lecture.

But you may also recollect that in the same lecture I pointed out that inevitable beliefs, though we cannot avoid holding them in some shape, are, and have been, held in many shapes; shapes which vary with the changes in our general outlook on men and things. In what shape, then, should our belief in regularity now be held?

The shape in which it is very commonly formulated is something of this kind: “everything is caused; and the same causes are always followed by the same effects.” This is the so-called “law of universal causation.” It has been treated as an assured truth by philosophers of many different schools, though not always for the same reasons; and, so far as the physical universe is concerned, the modern world accepts it without demur. It is, nevertheless, open to criticism from two points of view. It asserts somewhat more about the course of nature than experience suggests, and somewhat less than science requires. Let me take the two points separately.

When I was dealing with ethics I had occasion to point out that if the primitive manifestations of loyalty and love are products of selection, they have developed by a kind of internal momentum, to a point far beyond that to which selection can possibly have carried them. Something of the same kind has happened in the case of the causal postulate. Selection, we must suppose, has produced the capacity for acquiring habitual expectations; and habitual expectation is induction without reasoning. Like induction, it would not only be useless, but harmful, if no regularity existed; if at any moment the future ceased to bear some resemblance to the past. But the regularity asserted by the law of universal causation is far in excess of this requirement. The law applies to regions which never come within the range of finite experience; and, as regards regions which do come within that range, experience hardly confirms it. We may, of course, attribute the apparent irregularities in nature to our ignorance or our errors; and this, in fact, is what we always do. We must (we think) have observed wrongly or insufficiently; or it may be that a clearer insight would show how apparent aberrations really illustrate some larger law, or depend on conditions at present beyond our ken. Such explanations are easy; and, what is more, they are true. There is no complaint to be made of a verdict in favour of absolute uniformity except that it outruns the evidence. None surely, who understand the meaning of the words they use, will dare to assert that nature appears regular. What they may assert is, that the more you examine it, the more regular it appears. The reign of law is always extending. New provinces are always being added to its domains. Anomalies vanish as knowledge grows; and the absolute uniformity which we now only know by faith, we may some day know by sight.

To this “credo” (with reservations) I readily subscribe. But it sounds a little strange in the mouths of some who preach it. Does it not imply that we interpret our experiences in the light of a preconceived scheme of things; that we force our observations into a mould which they do not naturally fit? If, in unravelling a cypher, I come across passages which are unintelligible, I attribute the check to my own ignorance or dullness. Why? Because I know independently that the cypher has a meaning, if only I could find it. But the empirical agnostic professes to know nothing about the world, except what he has observed himself or what other people have observed for him. Why, then, should he suppose perfect regularity to exist when no perfect regularity appears? Why is he not content to accept what he finds, namely, a regularity which is real but incomplete?

It is no reply to say that patient genius is constantly detecting order in apparent chaos. So it is. And when this happens, by all means rearrange your map of the universe accordingly. But do not argue that chaos is therefore non-existent. The belief in universal causation is not based on argument, nor yet on observation. It depends on what I have described as intuitive probability. And if we refuse to regard nature as liable to lapses from perfect uniformity, this is not because such a theory is unthinkable, not because it is contrary to experience, not because it is incompatible with knowledge, not because it is fatal to purposeful action; for it is none of these things. We reject it because it is out of harmony with the ideal we have formed of what the material universe ought to be and is: and so strong is this speculative prepossession that there is no experimental evidence which would convince a man of science that, when physical causes were the same, physical consequences could be different.

III

But this observation brings me to my second commentary on the formula of universal causation. If, as I have contended, it goes beyond what mere experience suggests, it also falls short of what scientific inference requires. The uniformity it postulates lacks a certain kind of “structure” which is absolutely necessary if the past is to be explained and the future foreseen. It is not enough for this purpose that the course of Nature should be determined. It must be determined after a particular pattern; its uniformity must conform to a particular type.

At first sight this statement may seem rather obscure. What (you will ask) is this “structure” or pattern whose absence would be so disastrous to knowledge? It is a structure (I reply) which makes it possible to break up the flow of events into intelligible repetitions. It is not enough that the condition of the world at any moment should be strictly determined by its condition at the preceding moment. Such a world would, I suppose, completely conform to the doctrine of uniformity, and obey both in spirit and in letter the law of universal causation. Yet, unless it also conformed to the additional canon I have just laid down, it would provide no basis either for scientific knowledge or for practical decision. The same consequent would always succeed the same antecedent, if and when it recurred. But, unless we accept the cyclic theories of the Stoics, it never would recur. The completest knowledge of the past would tell us nothing about the future; not because the succession of events was arbitrary or (as the word is commonly misused) miraculous; but because each cross-section of the stream of Time (that is to say, the sum of all contemporaneous facts and events) had to he considered as a single cause, completely determining the whole cross-section immediately in front of it; and, as a single effect, completely determined by the whole cross-section immediately behind it. Such a world might have a history, but it could never have a science.

The reason is plain. Science requires uniformities even more than uniformity; and a universe such as I have just described has uniformity but no uniformities. The very phrase “laws of nature” shows that it is these subordinate uniformities for which we look. The whole efforts of the skilled investigator are directed towards so isolating the sequences he is examining that his experiments shall become (as the phrase goes) crucial. If no such isolation could he effected, it would never be possible to point to some “phenomenon” and say of it “Here is a cause,” and to some other “phenomenon” and say of it “Here is its effect.” The world, in short, must have a structure which connects its successive phases in such a way that definite parts of all that exists or happens are knit with peculiar closeness to definite parts of what existed or happened before. It is on these connecting strands that we mainly fix our gaze; they are often difficult to trace, they are sometimes hopelessly entangled; but when we can bring them into clear vision, then, and not till then, we triumphantly say that we have discovered a law of nature.

We are so familiar with this “fibrous” structure of the natural world that it seems almost a matter of course. Mill, for example, assumes it, unconsciously no doubt, through all his exposition of inductive methods; and if he had not assumed it, these methods would have come tumbling about his ears in irreparable ruin. But assuredly neither he nor any other logician has a right to make such an assumption in silence. In spite of many speculative difficulties, there is no principle more vital to knowledge, practical and theoretical, than the principle of “negligibility”; the principle which asserts that sequences can be isolated and repeated, and that vast bodies of contemporaneous facts and happenings may be wholly neglected. It is much more important than the principle of causation, if by causation is meant, not a working, though possibly imperfect, regularity, but the speculative completeness implied by the phrase “universal causation” as commonly interpreted.

It may be said, and I think with truth, that these observations scarcely apply to a material world conceived in a purely mechanical fashion. In such a world negligibility is theoretically measurable. The mass of Sirius, without doubt, modifies the weight of the pen with which I am writing. But the effect is demonstrably infinitesimal, and negligibility is not assumed, but proved. Laplace's calculator, surveying the universe, would have no difficulty either in fixing his attention on particular repetitions which exemplify the “laws of nature,” or in regarding them as integral parts of a single mechanical whole, whose successive phases (if the law of energy dissipation be universal) can never be repeated.

But this does not lighten the difficulty. The world may, or may not, be a single mechanical system; but, if it is, the fact can only be empirically known to us through induction: and induction assumes negligibility, and cannot, so far as I can see, move a step without it. Choose the most perfect experiment on record, idealise its conditions to your heart's content; for greater security, suppose it repeated even to weariness, how will you be advanced? There are, I suppose, millions of circumstances, for the most part utterly unknown, which have co-existed with all the experiments already tried, hut will have vanished before the next experiment is undertaken. Does this disturb you? Do you ask yourself whether, among the unnumbered circumstances in which the world of to-day differs from the world of yesterday, there may not be one which is necessary to the expected effect? Not at all. You brush them aside. You say they may be neglected. And doubtless you do well. But why? Not on any grounds which observation or reasoning can supply, not on any grounds formulated in the logic of induction, or the calculus of chances. You trust yourself to a feeling of antecedent probability;—the intuitive probability on whose importance I dwelt in the last lecture, which is not the flower of experience but its root;—and your trust will sometimes be betrayed.

The principle of negligibility, or (in terms of belief) the belief that observed regularities may often be treated as if they were complete and self-contained cases of cause and effect, separable from contemporary events, is thus a necessary presupposition of concrete science; and, like other presuppositions, it is incapable of scientific proof. We often hear it said, indeed, that principles of this kind should be regarded as hypotheses verified by an ever-increasing volume of experimental proof. They are found to work; what more can be desired?

But it is not accurate to say that these and other fundamental principles are, or ever have been, regarded either by common sense or science as inferences from experience or as hypotheses requiring verification. Nor is it accurate to suggest that verification differs essentially from any other kind of experimental evidence except in the date of its occurrence. If evidence follows conjecture, but not otherwise, it is called verification; and though, from the point of view of method, this chronological order is of immense importance, from the point of view of logic it is nothing. A doubtful conjecture (let us suppose) is “verified” by experiment. If the experiment had come earlier there would have been no conjecture, but there would have been equal evidence, indeed the same evidence. It is true that without the conjecture there might have been no experiment, and that without the experiment there might have been no proof. But, though the conjecture occasioned the proof, it certainly adds nothing to its force, and we therefore come back to the question already discussed—namely, whether principles without which no inference from experiences is possible, can be themselves inferred from experiences?—a question to which, as I conceive, only one answer is possible. Experiences may produce habit, and habit may produce expectation, and this process may masquerade as induction. But expectations thus engendered belong to the causal series, not the cognitive. Physiology and psychology may explain them. But they can neither be proved nor treated as axiomatic.

Axiomatic they certainly are not; nor do they possess the universality and precision of outline which we are accustomed to associate with axioms. It is curious, in this connection, to note that the philosophers who are most firmly resolved to root the principle of regularity (they ignore negligibility) in experience always insist on giving it that absolute character which our inferences from experience rarely possess. The notion that fundamental beliefs should be liable to exception, should be capable of degrees, and should apply unequally in different fields of observation, is as abhorrent to them as to any metaphysician out of the opposite camp. One would suppose, to hear them talk, that, unless causation be universal, experience is worthless.

IV

The region where these uncompromising doctrines show to least advantage is human character. I do not propose to discuss causation and free will; but I may with advantage say something on a less hackneyed theme, namely, negligibility and foreknowledge. The thesis I desire to maintain is that, in dealing with a human character, full foreknowledge is theoretically impossible, even though free will be wholly absent, and the succession of psychic states be completely determined. Practically impossible we know it to be. But most determinists would hold that this impossibility is due partly to our ignorance and partly to our incapacity. We know too little either of the general laws of mind, or of individual character, or of surrounding circumstances, to make accurate forecasts; and, even if we possessed the requisite information, we could not use it, owing to the irremediable weakness of our powers of calculation. It is this contention that I wish to traverse. I hold that, had we the supernatural powers of Laplace's calculator, armed with a knowledge of the human heart which supernatural powers of observation could alone supply, we should still fail, because we are face to face with that which is inherently incalculable.

The contrary opinion is due, I think, to an imperfect comprehension of the doctrines I have touched on in this lecture. All human foreknowledge depends on detecting old sequences in a new context. The context, of course, is always new. There is never full or complete repetition. But, unless there be partial repetitions embedded in the universal flux, prescience is impossible. This is the doctrine of “negligibility.”

Now consider two illustrative examples.

First, imagine yourself standing on the edge of a valley down which a landslip has just let loose the waters of some great reservoir in the hills. The catastrophe is sudden in its onset, brief in its duration, wildly irregular in its character. Even the most tumultuous cataract retains a certain steadiness of outline: and few sights are more impressive than the stationary waves in a great rapid. But there is here no trace of order imposed on disorder, fixity on motion. The rushing wall of water, spouting into foam over every obstacle it encounters, the tossing flood that follows furiously behind, seem in their brief violence to present the very ideal of incalculable confusion. But we know it is not so. In the presence of such a spectacle our calculator would not feel a moment's embarrassment. He could forecast without difficulty the whole scene down to its minutest eddy; the motions of each drop obey laws with which he was perfectly familiar; and the total effect, catastrophic though it be, is but the sum of all these component examples of natural uniformity.

Turn now and contemplate a calmer scene. Consider the commonplace life of a commonplace man as it develops in the untroubled prosperity of a steady business and a quiet home. Such a career seems as orderly and uniform as the flood I have been describing is terrible and strange. Surely no supernatural calculator is required to cast the horoscope of its hero: for he does, and leaves undone, the same actions, he thinks and leaves unthought the same ideas, as thousands of his contemporaries; and, so far as outward appearance goes, he is an indistinguishable member of an undistinguished crowd.

Yet, in spite of this, we know him to be unique. There never has been before, nor will there ever be again, another individual exactly like him. A similar statement, it may be urged, can be made about our catastrophic flood. Though this has plenty of parallels, none of them, strictly speaking, are exact. Where, then, lies the distinction on which I am trying to insist? Let me endeavour to mark the contrast.

If the material world be conceived as a mechanical system, the flood in my illustration may be regarded as a piece arbitrarily cut out of it at the whim of the spectator. It possesses no natural unity; and, like the whole of which it is a fraction, the moving particles which compose it do each obey laws which are (we assume) perfectly well known, and have been endlessly exemplified. Its behaviour is the sum of the behaviour of these several parts; and it is by estimating their movements that our imaginary calculator can prophesy its course with absolute exactness. He is never perplexed by the problem of negligibility; for negligibility in such a case can be accurately measured, and our calculator possesses all the data required for its measurement. In short, the principle of regularity may here be applied in its most uncompromising form; it requires no qualification, nor can it be pressed too boldly or too far.

But the case is otherwise when we have to abandon the strictly mechanical point of view, and investigate regions where negligibility has a small and uncertain application. Such a region is individual consciousness. This possesses a natural or intrinsic unity. Its phases are never precisely repeated; nor can it he regarded as a collection of independent elements, the sequences of which may he separately examined, verified, and repeated. Not only is the whole unique, but the parts are unique also. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there are no parts possessing a fixed character of their own apart from the whole. Not only is everything qualified by everything else, but few of these qualifications are negligible. Perfect repetition is therefore impossible, and our calculator, whatever his powers, could never feel at home with his premises, or secure in his conclusions. The present would always be new, and the future would always be doubtful.

If this seems paradoxical it is, I think, mainly for two reasons. In the first place, such a doctrine seems inconsistent with the fact that, whatever Laplace's calculator could do, humbler beings like ourselves manage somehow or other to forecast the behaviour of our neighbours with some small measure of success. This, no doubt, is true. But it is in part because the alternatives of behaviour are very few and very definite compared with the infinitely graduated variations of thought, will, and feeling. Action is “canalised.” It can flow only along channels engineered for it by circumstances, and among these the choice is commonly small. But the character which lies behind action is complex beyond all power of analysis, and variable beyond all powers of anticipation. The routine which is unwaveringly pursued from month to month and year to year is pursued each day in a different spirit; and often a critical hour strikes when some well-drilled creature of custom, to his own surprise and the scandal of his friends, deserts the ancient ways and wanders suddenly forth into the unknown.

Of course, these violent aberrations are the exception. The more familiar experience is that, in an orderly society, the alternatives of action which need be taken into account are few, and the “limits of deviation” narrow. Often, therefore, we can anticipate conduct without any real insight into the depths of character or the complexities of motive from which the conduct springs. And truly this is fortunate; for, if mutual comprehension were necessary to social intercourse, how could society exist?

But there is another reason why we take little note of the distinction I am endeavouring to draw between the calculable uniformities of a material world and the incalculable regularities, of psychic life. The distinction is rather speculative than practical. It does not affect the routine of daily existence. For, although the course of the material world is calculable, we mortals have neither the time nor the knowledge nor the mental powers required to calculate it. We behave, therefore, towards nature as we behave towards man. We content ourselves with approximations, with analogies, with resemblances. Even if we had the power, we should not have the time to resolve the movement of all the bits of matter with which we have to deal from minute to minute into the exact sequences of which they are composed. We would not if we could. We apply rough methods; we are satisfied with imperfect results. Nor are these results always more imperfect in the psychic than in the material sphere of observation. The ways (for example) of British weather are even more mysterious than the ways of British men. Why, then, should we interest ourselves in a speculation which tells us, however truly, that perfect foreknowledge is theoretically possible in the first case, but theoretically impossible in the second? In practice it is impossible in both. And with this we must be content.

And yet the speculation is interesting. For the distinction between the two cases lies deep. It has nothing (let me say again) to do with free will. It has nothing to do with our ignorance of facts. It has nothing to do with our intellectual insufficiency. It is due to a fundamental difference between the uniformities of matter and the regularities of mind. Perfect foresight requires perfect repetition, and in the psychic sphere perfect repetition can never happen. Every self is unique; all its experiences are unique; and these unique wholes are not compounded of interchangeable elements obeying identical laws. They do not alter by mere addition, subtraction, or rearrangement of parts. They grow. And the sequence of one phase upon another faintly resembles that which would prevail in the imaginary universe of which I spoke just now, the universe where all contemporaneous events were treated as the single effect of the immediate past and the single cause of the immediate future. Of such a universe I observed that it would have a history, but could have no science. And though we cannot go so far when speaking of psychic unities, though we cannot rule out psychology or sociology, it must be admitted that no regularities which observation discloses can ever possess the precision which we theoretically attribute to material mechanism. Instructive likenesses we shall find in abundance, complete determination we may assume if we please; but “laws,” in the full and strict sense of the term, we shall not find, for they are not there.

Note

The shortcomings of mechanism have been discussed by M. Bergson in a manner which no other thinker is likely to rival. He has, however, usually dealt with the subject in connection with freedom; whereas in this section I have only dealt with it in connection with foreknowledge, repetition, and what I have termed the doctrine of “negligibility.” He approaches it from the side of reality. I approach it from the side of inductive inference and the law of universal causation.

• 1.

  Extract from Morgan's “Habit and Instinct,” page 40. “A young chick two days old, for example, had learnt to pick out pieces of yolk from others of white of egg. I cut little bits of orange-peel of about the same size as the pieces of yolk, and one of these was soon seized, but at once relinquished, the chick shaking his head. Seizing another, he held it for a moment in the bill, but then dropped it and scratched at the base of his beak. That was enough; he could not again be induced to seize a piece of orange-peel. The obnoxious material was now removed, and pieces of yolk of egg substituted, but they were left untouched, being probably taken for orange-peel. Subsequently, he looked at the yolk with hesitation, but presently pecked doubtfully, not seizing, but merely touching. Then he pecked again, seized, and swallowed.”