The Self And Nature

THE SELF AND NATURE BY DEWITT H. PARKER ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1917 COPYRIGHT, 1917 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESJ TO MY MOTHER FOREWORD THE task of metaphysics, as I conceive it, is twofold. Accepting experience as a fragment of reality which is unimpeachably given to us, metaphysics undertakes first, to analyze and describe its omnipresent aspects and funda mental structure its relation to the self, to the body, to nature, to knowledge its changefulness its spatiality the spontaneity and causal determination of its elements its relatedness. This is the more certain part of the study, where truth will reward any one who examines attentively and without prejudice, and who constructs with skill and fidelity the concepts which he uses to describe what he finds. But metaphysics has a second, a synthetic task to project a total vision of the world. By following along the lines of the outward going relations of given experience, the philos opher seeks to discover the whole of which it is a part. As necessary materials for this purpose, he has to use the larger facts and broader generalizations of science, interpreting them, however, in the light of his analysis of experience. Hence, despite this dependence, metaphysics differs funda mentally from science in being radically empirical and criti cal, and in passing from the part to the whole. This is the less certain portion of the study, because it requires a freer use of hypothesis yet the extension of experience which it demands is no different in kind or certainty, I believe, from VI FOREWORD that involved in any specialscience where the facts are not all open to inspection. The method of metaphysics is, therefore, radical empiri cism extended through the imagination. The source of all of our knowledge of reality is given experience without a careful analysis of this, there can be no sound metaphysics. There are, however, within given experience itself motives for going beyond it, and for this, the use of the imagination is not only legitimate, but necessary. Yet the meaning and value of every concept employed either in the description of given experience or in its imaginative extension is literally equivalent to the images and concrete experiences from which it has been derived or into which it might lead. In the present work I aim to study in a direct and simple fashion the great problems of metaphysical philosophy so conceived. Each of these problems receives independent treatment in a separate chapter, yet the work is, I believe, a consistent and fairly complete whole. The doctrine of the nature and unity of mind expounded in the early chapters, as the reader will discover, determines the point of view of the entire book. Anybody familiar with the history and recent literature of philosophy will recognize how large a debt I owe both to the living and the dead. For the sake of simplicity and con tinuity of writing I have not made all the acknowledgments which I might have made in the body of my text. I wish therefore to make my chief acknowledgments here at the outset. Although I do not think that I am in total agree ment with him anywhere, I am throughout indebted to FOREWORD Vll James for the radically empirical, dramatic conception of the universe which I accept. In the early chapters myinspiration for the view that sensations are a real part of the system of the physical world has been drawn chiefly from Berkeley and Mach and Bergson in the chapter on Causal ity, for the derivation of law from spontaneity, I am directly dependent on Charles Peirce my emotional and moral attitude towards nature, as expressed in the Conclusion, if not the same as Santayanas, is at least, I feel sure, colored by the Life of Reason and the personal teaching of its author...