The Science of Universology/Article I

From Libertarian Labyrinth

The Science of Universology

Stephen Pearl Andrews

I

The discussion, in The Index (closed with the issue of August 10, 1876), between Mr. Benjamin R. Tucker and myself, in respect to Proudhon, leads to the opportunity, and in some sense to the necessity, for an attempt to give to the readers of The Index some fair understanding of the nature of universology. Col. William B. Greene, who has been alluded to by both Mr. Tucker and myself, and for whom, as one of our great minds, I have the utmost esteem, as the friend of Mr. Tucker, requests of me, in a card in The Index of September 7, to make such a presentation; and to this course the editor of The Index has kindly added his own personal invitation. So encouraged, I will endeavor to do what is required of me, fully aware of the difficulty of the effort to assign to a "condensed statement" what would more appropriately be the burden of a text-book.

Condensed statements are far advanced and severe thinkers, and the majority of the readers of a journal even so elevated in rank as The Index can hardly, it is probable, be classed in the latter category. Considering, therefore, that I can hardly hope for an appreciation of what I shall have to expound from more than a portion of those to whom it will be tendered, I shall carefully avoid any abuse of the privilege accorded to me, even at the risk of some misapprehension from the want of more elaboration.

For the merely preliminary statement of what universology is, the reader is referred to the last half of my reply to Mr. Tucker (Index August 10). That statement will enable the reader to know about the subject. But to know about a thing is one thing, and to know the thing itself is quite another thing. I am now to undertake to enable one to know universology itself in some measure,—still, however, a very primary, and incipient sense; to give to the reader that insight at least which will enable him to judge whether it is the kind of thing which it would interest him to pursue further, by the study of the more extended expositions contained In books published and to be published on the subject. I must, at the same time, however, occupy a portion of the very limited space which I feel is assigned to me, in simple declaration of the true nature and immense scope and value of the new sciento-philosophy. If I had my readers in class, at an organised university, held by any consideratlons to the exhanative study of the whole anbject, it might be more logical, and it might seem to be more modest, to leave them to come to their own conclusions, in due time, as to the applicatioin and true estimate of what I have to teach; but grown people are no longer children, to be set to their tasks, irrespectlve of their own judgment of the ulterior uses and value of what they are to be taught. The propounder of new truth for them, has the double task of imparting the knowledge, and of maintaining the interest of the learners through the preliminary drudgery, by assurances and by encouragements drawn from an occasional picture of the charms of the new realm into which their laborious first steps are about to induct them.

In the article I have alluded to, I have spoken of universology as a method in science and philosophy. It is, In fact, all of these,—a method, a science, and a philosophy; and, as it is more specifically a philosophy within and of the sciences, It is also best described by the new coinage, sciento-philosophy. It will be but, perhaps, to begin by considering it as a method, and by contrasting it inferentially with the methods which have hitherto prevailed.

Swedenborg speaks of continuous degrees, and of discrete degrees; and of the former as lower, and of the latter as higher, in rank. A continuous degree, in the progress of thought, would be the farther on evolution, and the greater perfection of knowledge, by a process or method already initiated, pursued, and prevalently known. A discrete degree, in this domain, would be the discovery of a fresh initiation, and the inauguration of a new method. Universology is a discrete degree, or differs in this manner, by a discrete degree, from everything which has been known as science or philosophy in the past, aud must stand or fall upon its own merits. The first thing, therefore, of which the inquirer is to be warned, is that he must avoid confounding it with a mere expansion of something which he already knows. He must consent to study it on its own grounds; and for that purpose must begin by acquiring some insight into its domain and its method.

The domain covered by universology, in the first instance, is as new as the method and is one which has been overlooked and neglected by the thinkers of all schools. I say, in the first instance, because when it has been elaborated, on its own ground, and in its own way, it then invades the fields of all past thinkers; surveys them by new and improved instruments of measurement; accepts, rehabilitates and perfects all old systems; annexes them to the new, and ends in a grand reconcillation of all human conceptions. It is, then, the philosophy of reconciliation or integralism. We need therefore, to begin by defining the peculiar domain of universology, as well as its method; and in so primary an exhibit as this, it will not be necessary to keep them formally distinct.

As to domain and method conjointly, suppose, then, that we take our departure from Hegel. He divides the universe, as the totality of the subject matter of human contemplation, into three grand departments or domains. These are (disposing them in our own order, not his), 1. Nature; 2. Mind (or human nature); and 3. (an intermediate) "Logic," the domain of Laws and Principles. In other words, there is first an outer or objective world, the domain of physics in the largest of the senses ever attached to that overloaded and overworked technicality; in a word the domain of "Nature," occupied by that whole immense army of investigators who strive to arrogate to themselves the name of scientists; hence the region of science or the sciences, excluding psychology. There is, then, secondly, Mind expanding vaguely into metaphysics, or that which is beyond or aside from physics, and especially including and allied with psychology, or mental philosophy. ThirdIy, there is the inbrmediate or third realm, called "Logic," for the want of a better same, but meaning a thousand times more than school logic, which is hardly more than a branch of the mere science of mind; somewhat as common salt, having given its name to "the salts," in chemistry; proves to be no salt at all, itself.

There are, then, we may say, three worlds: 1. An objective or outer world, called "nature"; 2. A subjective or inner world, called "mind"; and 3. A middle, intangible, abstract world, more dlfficult of appreciation, called "logic," being the domain of the pure reason, of laws and principles, or of abstract truth and truths, which are neither the outer world of nature nor the inner world of mind merely as such.

Let us conceive these three worlds after this manner: I look at my face in a mirror. The image which I see, apparently back of the mirror, may stand for Nature. It is my objective world. I, myself, who cast the image, may stand for mind, I am my own subjective world. But intermediate between the subject and the object, which have grown to be familiar terms in philosophy, there is a third object, so limpid and level that it is invisible to the eye of the ordinary observer, and goes for nothing; while yet it is that object itself, the mirror, which by its peculiar properties is the central and main functionator in the whole scene. The mirror is, then, the analogue of that intermediate world, poorly described as logic, and which is the peculiar home and seat of transcendental science and philosophy and, in the last analysis, of everything which is entitied to the name of either science or philosophy.

It is this which is peculiarly the realm of German or the so-called transcendental metaphysics, a domain which, so far from being exhausted (as our superficial sciolists in science would make us believe), is only just opened up or initiated by those greateat thinkers who have ever lived in the past, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, worthily supplemented by our own Stallo, Hickok, and the Frothingham. The glare of material suceesses in the world of "science" obscures, just for the present, the more solid values of absolute philosophy, somewhat as the vulgar nouveaux riches temporarily bedazzle and obscure the higher-style merits of a true aristocracy.

"Nature," or matter, is then obiective, "mind" is subjective; and "logic" is intermediate. These three items of discrimination answer to or correspond with the meanings of the three universalizing prepositional words out, without, or outside of, in, within, or inside of, and between. Hegel begins with the betweenity, as origin, and proceeds to the without, from which he reverts to the within. I have chosen to change the order, for our present purposes, so far as to begin with the without, proceed thence to the within, and revert to the between. Betweenity is relation: and the science of relation, abstractly and universally, is logic, in the broad Hegelian senee of the word. The relational department of grammar is the prepositional; and the universal summing up or generalization of the prepositions of grammar occurs in and as between the three prepositional words, without (outside of), within, and between. This is why we are conducted by Hegel's first grand distribution of the universe to this seemingly minute and trivial domain, the prepositions, and to a particular group of them; and this kind of connection between great things and small may give a suggestion of the scope and character of universology.

Observe, in the next place, that two of these three worlds, or departments of universal being, can be thrown into a single class as distinct in kind from the third one; and so a binary division substituted for the ternary one. Matter and mind, the objective and the subjective, are alike, or constitute one class in the fact that they are both concrete (grown together), thick, or real-like, as having body or substance; while logic, the intermediate realm, is abstract (drawn asunder), thin, filmy, or unreal-like. It is this bifold distribution which Herbert Spencer adopts as the basis of the total classification of the sciences, placing matter and mind, or univeresal physics and psychology, in one class as "the concrete," and the abstract domain, on the other hand, as ."the abstract." Hegel in distributing the universe, and Spencer in distributing the sciences, are dealing virtually with the same subject-matter, since every domain or department of being is represented in or by the science of that domain; and with this mere change from the threefold to the twofold first branching, they two are brought into harmony with each other. It will be a great convenience if I may be allowed to be so technical as to call "the concrete" by the new term concretismus, and "the abstract" by the corresponding new term abstractismus, this termination -ismus being taken, as by German usage, to denote a domain, or as equivalent to our English termination -dom.

The abstractismus is then, as a whole, what Hegel means to cover by the term logic, including a he does quantity and its science, mathematics, under that head, as a branch of logic. Here again, however, Spencer differs, and divides the abstractismus into (1) logic, and (2) the mathematics. These and a thousand other disharmonies among philosophers, in the extension of their terms or the meanings of words hinder and discourage the student even more than the difficulty of the ideas; and it is part of the need of a universology, that it should remove these obstacles, and bring order out of chaos, as between the several achievement of its predecessors, in the whole field of knowledge.

The science of the concretismus we may now call concretology, and the science of the abstract, abstractology; and we may say, inversely, that the concretismus subdivides into "nature," (or matter) and "mind"; as the abstractismus does into logic, in the Spencerian sense, and the mathematics. It is obvious, therefore, that the twofold, the threefold, and the fourfold method of distribition can each be justified, a fact admirably demonstrated by Proudhon, in his Creation de l' Ordre; but he has not shown, as it belongs to universology to do, the precise plan, properties, and values of each of these methods, and their relations to each other, in an absolutely exhaustive classificatory system. lt will suffice here if I call attention to the fact that these varying orders of the division of things necessarily relate to the series of primal number, one, two, three, four,—one being taken for the undistributed totality; and if I affirm that in the relations of these first numbers lies the nut of all classification then, we have the authority of Mr. John Fiske for the dictum that "all knowledge is classification."

The without, the within, and the between, taken merely as words, are, as I have said, prepositions; more strictly speaking, spatial prepositions, passing readily into adverbs of place; but as ideas, they are geometrical, or more properly morphological, discriminations, and the most general or universalizing possible discriminations of that classs; that is to say, of the statu or spatial, which is the governing order. We are thus carried back of words to the realm of form, for the objective source of those grand primal divisions which make the basis of Hegel's philosophy, and which are, in truth, the appropriate primal divisions of the universe, and so, in a sense, to the bottom region of philosophy.

But neither Hegel nor any of the philosophers has traced either these or any other of their fundamental discriminations into their relation with words, or forms (figures, diagrams), or with any objective realm whateoever. They have brought them, therefore, to no objective test, which would determine how far they were right, would correct them when wrong; and would serve as means of facilitating the acquisition and right understanding of the ideas themselsee. Metaphysics or philosophy has thus remained a something apart from all objective or properly scientific knowledge; true, perhaps, but disconnected with real things, and only attainable by a class of minds which could hold bald, naked ideas before the mind, analyzing and combining them in a thousand ways, unaided by the slighteet reference to anything tangible by the senses.

Universology differs precisely at this point, and holds no idea to be constituted into a term of true knowledge, until it can be construed into its appropriate objective representations. lt brings the abstruse and far-off truths of metaphysical philosophy out and down into the realm of common knowledge by means of their analogy with common things. Inversely, it refers all common things by the same analogy, back to those logical and metaphysical counterparts in the realm of pure ldeae. It is, therefore, a unification of science and philosophy, a lifting of science and the sciences into unity, by the discovery of their fundamental and unifying principles; and on the other hand a scientizing of philosophy by bringing it forward into the details of all the sciences. In a word, universology is neither, philosophy, in its former purely abstruse and metaphysical signification, nor science, in that lower sense which excludes metaphysics; but it is a new and third thing, which by a new and simple and far-reaching discovery bridges over the wide chasm that has hitherto separated science and philosophy; constituting first a universal and all-inclusive one science, and thn identifying it with logic in the Hegelian sense, and so again with metaphysics in the more generic and indiscriminate meaning of the word. Hence the term sciento-philosophy seems requisite to describe it; a term which also, in a less specific sense, is applicable to the generalizations of science made by Comte, Spencer, Haeckel, and others.

Let us now return to the threefold distribution of the universe, substantially equivalent to that of Hegel. For the two extremes we may say matter and mind, or the objective and the subjective,—the two sets of terms not being synonymous, but sufficiently nearly so, for this incipient allusion. For the middle or intermediate term we have already before us a variety of expressions or namings; thus logic (Hegel), the abstract (Spencer), abstractology, and, as that which is most simple and most certainly right, the betweenity, or the between.

This realm of the abstract, as including a group of the sciences, Prof. Louis Elsberg, in his classffication of the sciences, denominates "logics," he recommending the termination -ies, for the abstravt sciences in the place of -ology. which he reserves for the concrete, aud Prof. Michael A Clancy, a pupil and teacher of the universological school, insists on the single word "language" for this department of being, in that immensely large sense in which it signifies all intermediation and communication whatsoever, whether vocal or otherwise. He may be inclined to intervene in this discussion, so far as to give his reasons for this preference, amounting with him to a fixed opinion based on universological grounds.

In this latter view of the case, this first threefold distribution of universal things is greatly simplifled, and is merely to be stated as (1) matter, (2) mind, and (3) language. It may be appropriate to state here, that the first specific outgrowth of universology is a universal language—Alwato (Ahl-wah-to),—the immense scope of which seems fully to justify Prof. Clancy'a idea that language fills the entire domain intermediate between matter and mind.

But setting aside this latter view, for the present, and eonfining ourselves to the term abstractismus, as naming the domain of this betweenity, it in turn divides, not with Spencer and Elsberg into two merely, but into three grand subordinate domains; the lowest of which, repeating "nature" or matter, is catalogic, or the whole grammatica-logical domain; dipping backward more especially into the science of mmd, the middle one of which is mathematics, repeating the betweenity; and the third or highest one of which is analogic, the new abetract science which universology brings to light, and which leans rather to the outer or material world, while yet originating subjectively, and repeating mind.

It now appears that mathematics is the middle of the betweenity; and, as such, it is peculiarly the central, germinal, or originative sphere of universal being. Universology pivots, therefore, upon mathematical discriminations. The primal differences of number and form furnish the type for all true classification, whether of matter or mind. The middle ground yields the new clew to the acquisition of all knowledge. This is the new domain, and departure from it the new method referred to. "Science" finds in matter the field for its spacial exercitation; philosophy in mind, and its allied metaphysical domain,—even the logic of Hegel more strictly falls here, though I began by conceding it the middle ground: aud the true betweenity, or the middle ground proper, is this new domain of thought and being, which holds tenaciously to mathematical analogies; and sciento-philosophy belongs, strictly speaking, to this realm.

I have so far, therefore, merely conducted my "condensed statement" to its proper beginning-point. In another article, which I hope may not be long delayed, I will endeavor to make obvious what I mean by the mathematical analogies, and to give such illustration as to render the general field of analogie comprehensible.

Proudhon, in the work I have alluded to, made a noteworthy effort to bring the abstrusities of philosophy out into the clearness of scientific expression; but he came short of making the definite discovery of the virtual identity between the broadest speculative discriminations, and the simplest, most immediate, and most specific of mathemathical differences.