SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT

by

H. G. Wells


A Portion of a Paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society, November 8,
1903, and reprinted, with some Revision, from the Version given in ~Mind~,
vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51.


(See also ~A Modern Utopia~, Chapter One, Section 6, and Chapter Ten,
Sections 1 and 2.)


It seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to interest you
this evening by describing very briefly the particular metaphysical and
philosophical system in which I do my thinking, and more particularly
by setting out for your consideration one or two points in which I seem
to myself to differ most widely from current accepted philosophy.

You must be prepared for things that will strike you as crude, for a
certain difference of accent and dialect that you may not like, and
you must be prepared, too, to hear what may strike you as the clumsy
statement of my ignorant re-discovery of things already beautifully
thought out and said.  But in the end you may incline to forgive me some
of this first offence. . . . It is quite unavoidable that, in setting
out these intellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse for a moment
or so towards autobiography.

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my knowledge of
concrete things quite extensively developed before I came to philosophy
examination at all.  I have heard some one say that a savage or an animal
is mentally a purely objective being, and in that respect I was like
a savage or an animal until I was well over twenty.  I was extremely
unaware of the subjective or introverted element in my being.  I was
a Positivist without knowing it.  My early education was a feeble one;
it was one in which my private observation, inquiry and experiment were
far more important factors than any instruction, or rather perhaps the
instruction I received was less even than what I learnt for myself, and it
terminated at thirteen.  I had come into pretty intimate contact with the
harder realities of life, with hunger in various forms, and many base and
disagreeable necessities, before I was fifteen.  About that age, following
the indication of certain theological and speculative curiosities, I
began to learn something of what I will call deliberately and justly,
Elemental Science -- stuff I got out of ~Cassell's Popular Educator~
and cheap text-books -- and then, through accidents and ambitions that do
not matter in the least to us now, I came to three years of illuminating
and good scientific work.  The central fact of those three years was
Huxley's course in Comparative Anatomy at the school in Exhibition Road.
About that as a nucleus I arranged a spacious digest of facts.  At the
end of that time I had acquired what I still think to be a fairly clear
and complete and ordered view of the ostensibly real universe.  Let me
try to give you the chief things I had.  I had man definitely placed
in the great scheme of space and time.  I knew him incurably for what
he was, finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations.
I had traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by
step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had seen
the ancestral ccum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix of to-day,
I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear
and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke out the needs of a sense
organ taken from its native and natural water.  I had worked out the
development of those extraordinarily unsatisfactory and untrustworthy
instruments, man's teeth, from the skin scutes of the shark to their
present function as a basis for gold stoppings, and followed the slow
unfolding of the complex and painful process of gestation through which
man comes into the world.  I had followed all these things and many
kindred things by dissection and in embryology -- I had checked the whole
theory of development again in a year's course of palontology, and I had
taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the stars,
in a course of astronomical physics.  And all that amount of objective
elucidation came before I had reached the beginnings of any philosophical
or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I believed, how I believed,
what I believed, or what the fundamental stuff of things was.

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a time when
I had to give myself to teaching, and it became advisable to acquire one
of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and so foolishly despised,
and that enterprise set me to a superficial, but suggestive study of
educational method, of educational theory, of logic, of psychology,
and so at last, when the little affair with the diploma was settled, to
philosophy.  Now to come to logic over the bracing uplands of comparative
anatomy is to come to logic with a lot of very natural preconceptions
blown clean out of one's mind.  It is, I submit, a way of taking logic in
the flank.  When you have realised to the marrow that all the physical
organs of man and all his physical structure are what they are through
a series of adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up
to a level of practical efficiency only by the elimination of death,
and that this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many
of his mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking
apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously different
and better.  And I had read only a little logic before I became aware
of implications that I could not agree with, and assumptions that seemed
to me to be altogether at variance with the general scheme of objective
fact established in my mind.

I came to an examination of logical processes and of language with the
expectation that they would share the profoundly provisional character,
the character of irregular limitation and adaptation that pervades
the whole physical and animal being of man.  And I found the thing I
had expected.  And, as a consequence, I found a sort of intellectual
hardihood about the assumptions of logic, that at first confused me and
then roused all the latent scepticism in my mind.

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed long ago in a little
paper that was printer in the ~Fortnightly Review~ in July 1891.  It was
called the "Rediscovery of the Unique," and re-reading it I perceive not
only how bad and even annoying it was in manner -- a thing I have long
known -- but also how remarkably bad it was in expression.  I have good
reason for doubting whether my powers of expression in these uses have
very perceptibly improved, but at any rate I am doing my best now with
that previous failure before me.

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I can no longer regard as
trivial, disregarded quite completely the fact that a whole literature
upon the antagonism of the one and the many, of the specific ideal and the
individual reality, was already in existence.  It defined no relations to
other thought or thinkers.  I understand now, what i did not understand
then, why it was totally ignored.  But the idea underlying that paper I
cling to to-day.  I consider it an idea that will ultimately be regarded
as one of primary importance to human thought, and I will try to present
the substance of that early paper again now very briefly, as the best
opening of my general case.  My opening scepticism is essentially a doubt
of ~the objective reality of classification~.  I have no hesitation in
saying that is the first and primary proposition of my philosophy.

I have it in mind that classification is a necessary condition of the
working of the mental implement, but that it is a departure from the
objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for
the practical purposes of life, but a very doubtful preliminary to those
fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods,
demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is, of course, permeated with
the suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological species.
A biological species is quite obviously a great number of unique
individuals which is separable from other biological species only by the
fact that an enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible
in time -- are in other words dead and gone -- and each new individual in
that species does, in the distinction of its own individuality, break away
in however infinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of
the species.  There is no property of any species, even the properties
that constitute the specific definition, that is not a matter of more
or less.  If, for example, a species be distinguished by a single large
red spot on the back, you will find if you go over a great number of
specimens that red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding there to a
more general redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown,
shading into crimson, and so on, and so on.  And this is true not only
of biological species.  It is true of the mineral specimens constituting
a mineral species, and I remember as a constant refrain in the lectures
of Prof. Judd upon rock classification, the words "they pass into one
another by insensible gradations."  That is true, I hold, of all things.

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of
identically similar things, but these are things not of experience
but of theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not
equally well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense
quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that mask by
the operation of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has
its unique quality, its special individual difference.  This idea of
uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the classifications
of material science; it is true, and still more evidently true, of the
species of common thought, it is true of common terms.  Take the word
~chair~.  When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair.
But collect individual instances, think of armchairs and reading chairs,
and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into benches,
chairs that cross the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs,
thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid
growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, and you
will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple straight. forward
term.  In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to
defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me.  Chairs,
just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral and rock
specimens, are unique things -- if you know them well enough you will
find an individual difference even in a set of machine-made chairs --
and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited capacity,
because our brain has only a limited number of pigeon-holes for our
correspondence with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that we
have to delude ourselves into the belief that there is a chairishness
in this species common to and distinctive of all chairs.

Let me repeat; this is of the very smallest importance in all the
practical affairs of life, or, indeed, in relation to anything but
philosophy and wide generalisations.  But in philosophy it matters
profoundly.  If I order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two
unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the chances are they
serve my rude physiological purpose.  I can afford to ignore the hens'
eggs of the past that were not quite so nearly this sort of thing, and the
hens' eggs of the future that will accumulate modification age by age;
I can venture to ignore the rare chance of an abnormality in chemical
composition and of any startling aberration in my physiological reaction;
I can, with a confidence that is practically perfect, say with unqualified
simplicity "two eggs," but not if my concern is not my morning's breakfast
but the utmost possible truth.

Now let me go on to point out whither this idea of uniqueness tends.
I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard
logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in
the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that
I deny the absolute validity of logic.  Classification and number,
which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities,
have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things.  Let me
for clearness' sake take a liberty here -- commit, as you may perhaps
think, an unpardonable insolence.  Hindoo thought and Greek thought
alike impress me as being overmuch obsessed by an objective treatment
of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought -- number
and definition and class and abstract form.  But these things, number,
definition, class and abstract form, I hold, are merely unavoidable
conditions of mental activity -- regrettable conditions rather than
essential facts. ~The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush
the truth a little in taking hold of it.~

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little
inconclusively all his life.  For the most part he tended to regard the
~idea~ as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that idea
idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which
the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an
otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities.

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this
first attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms.  You have
seen the results of those various methods of black and white reproduction
that involve the use of a rectangular net.  You know the sort of process
picture I mean -- it used to be employed very frequently in reproducing
photographs.  At a little distance you really seem to have a faithful
reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closer you find
not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of little
rectangles, uniform in shape and size.  The more earnestly you go into the
thing, the closer you look, the more the picture is lost in reticulations.
I submit the world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar relation to
the world I call objectively real.  For the rough purposes of every
day the network picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it
will serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general
knowledge that will be as true for a man at a distance with a telescope
as for a man with a microscope it will not serve at all.

It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and
finer, you can fine your classification more and more -- up to a certain
limit.  But essentially you are working in limits, and as you come closer,
as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the practical
purpose for which the method exists, the element of error increases.
Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my
way of thinking, relentless logic is only another phrase for a stupidity
-- for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness.  If you push a philosophical
or metaphysical inquiry through a series of valid syllogisms-never
committing any generally recognised fallacy-you nevertheless leave
a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth, and you get
deflections that are difficult to trace, at each phase in the process.
Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool is a little
loose in its handle, every scale has its individual error.  So long
as you are reasoning for practical purposes about the finite things of
experience, you can every now and then check your process, and correct
your adjustments.  But not when you make what are called philosophical
and theological inquiries, when you turn your implement towards the final
absolute truth of things.  Doing that is like firing at an inaccessible,
unmarkable and indestructible target at an unknown distance, with a
defective rifle and variable cartridges.  Even if by chance you hit,
you cannot know that you hit, and so it will matter nothing at all.

This assertion of the necessary untrustworthiness of all reasoning
processes arising out of the fallacy of classification in what is quite
conceivably a universe of uniques, forms only one introductory aspect
of my general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought.

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepticism of the
instrument which concerns negative terms.

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hard firm
outline, whereas they have no such definite limits, but also there is a
constant disposition to think of negative terms as if they represented
positive classes.  With words just as with numbers and abstract forms
there are definite phases of human development.  There is, you know, with
regard to number, the phase when man can barely count at all, or counts in
perfect good faith and sanity upon his fingers.  Then there is the phase
when he is struggling with the development of number, when he begins to
elaborate all sorts of ideas about numbers, until at last he develops
complex superstitions about perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, about
threes and sevens and the like.  The same is the case with abstracted
forms, and even to-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast
subtle muddle of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so
on, that was the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking.
You know better than I do how large a part numerical and geometrical
magic, numerical and geometrical philosophy has played in the history of
the mind.  And the whole apparatus of language and mental communication
is beset with like dangers.  The language of the savage is, I suppose,
purely positive; the thing has a name, the name has a thing.  This indeed
is the tradition of language, and to-day even, we, when we hear a name,
are predisposed -- and sometimes it is a very vicious disposition -- to
imagine forthwith something answering to the name.  ~We are disposed,
as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate intension in terms.~ If I
say to you Wodget or Crump, you find yourself passing over the fact that
these are nothings, these are, so to speak, mere terms.  Our instrument
of knowledge persists in handling even such openly negative terms as the
Absolute, the Infinite, as though they were real existences, and when
the negative element is ever so little disguised, as it is in such a word
as Omniscience, then the illusion of positive reality may be complete.

Please remember that I an trying to tell you my philosophy, and not
arguing about yours.  Let me try to express how in my mind this matter
of negative terms has shaped itself.  I think of something which I may
perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out of the court, or as
the Void without Implications, or as Nothingness or as Outer Darkness.
This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of human
thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach at last, and merge
and become nothing.  Whatever positive class you make, whatever boundary
you draw, straight away from that boundary begins the corresponding
negative class and passes into the illimitable horizon of nothingness.
You talk of pink things, you ignore, if you are a trained logician,
the more elusive shades of pink, and draw your line.  Beyond is the
not pink, known and knowable, and still in the not pink region one
comes to the Outer Darkness.  Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the
~not~ classes meet in that Outer Darkness.  That same Outer Darkness
and nothingness is infinite space, and infinite time, and any being
of infinite qualities, and all that region I rule out of court in my
philosophy altogether.  I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help
it about any ~not~ things.  I will not deal with not things at all,
except by accident and inadvertence. If I use the word "infinite" I use
it as one often uses "countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"
-- or "immeasurable" -- "immeasurable cliffs" -- that is to say as the
limit of measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary measurability,
as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard as you can,
and as many again and so on and so on.  Now a great number of apparently
positive terms are, or have become, practically negative terms and are
under the same ban with me.  A considerable number of terms that have
played a great part in the world of thought, seem to me to be invalidated
by this same defect, to have no content or an undefined content or an
unjustifiable content. For example, that word Omniscient, as implying
infinite knowledge, impresses me as being a word with a delusive air of
being solid and full when it is really hollow with no content whatever.
I am persuaded that knowing is the relation of a conscious being to
something not itself, that the thing known is defined as a system of parts
and aspects and relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so
that only finite things can know or be known.  When you talk of a being
of infinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent and
Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing whatever.

When you speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing.

If, however, you talk of a great yet finite and thinkable being, a
being not myself, extending beyond my imagination in time and space,
knowing all that I can think of as known and capable of doing all that I
can think of as done, you come into the sphere of my mental operations,
and into the scheme of my philosophy. . . .

These then are my first two charges against our Instrument of Knowledge,
firstly, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating
uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that, so as
to group them under one term, and that once it has done so it tends
automatically to intensify the significance of that term, and secondly,
that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them
as though they were positive.  But I have a further objection to the
Instrument of Human Thought, that is not correlated to these former
objections and that is also rather more difficult to convey.

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratification in human
ideas.  I have it very much in mind that various terms in our reasoning
lie, as it were, at different levels and in different planes, and that
we accomplish a large amount of error and confusion by reasoning terms
together that do not lie or nearly lie in the same plane.

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a most flagrant
instance from physical things.  Suppose some one began to talk seriously
of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, or better perhaps of cutting
one in half with a knife. There are a number of non-analytical people
who would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible
to the eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with
physical conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square
root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife.
Our conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis
and analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men
to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental movement,
then when you have thought of your atom under the knife blade, your
knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging grouped atoms, and your
microscope lens a little universe of oscillatory and vibratory molecules.
If you think of the universe, thinking at the level of atoms, there is
neither knife to cut, scale to weigh, nor eye to see.  The universe ~at
that plane to which the mind of the molecular physicist descends~ has
none of the shapes or forms of our common life whatever. This hand with
which I write is in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring
atoms and molecules, combining and recombining, colliding, rotating,
flying hither and thither in the universal atmosphere of ether.

You see, I hope, what I mean when I say that the universe of molecular
physics is at a different level from the universe of common experience;
-- what we call stable and solid is in that world a freely moving system
of interlacing centres of force, what we call colour and sound is there
no more that this length of vibration or that.  We have reached to a
conception of that universe of molecular physics by a great enterprise
of organised analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands
in relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis of those
elemental things.

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance of the
general state of affairs, that there may be finer and subtler differences
of level between one term and another, and that terms may very well be
thought of as lying obliquely and as being twisted through different
levels.

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey if
I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man's thought and
knowledge.  Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all angles and in
all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are embedded.  They are
all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none in reality incompatible
with any.  If you imagine the direction in which one moves by analysis or
by synthesis, if you go down for example from matter to atoms and centres
of force and up to men and states and countries -- if you will imagine the
ideas lying in that manner -- you will get the beginning of my intention.
But our Instrument, our process of thinking, like a drawing before the
discovery of perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third
dimension, appears capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas
by projecting them upon the same plane.  It will be obvious that a great
multitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly, which
would be overlapping and incompatible and mutually destructive, when
projected together upon one plane. Through the bias in our Instrument
to do this, through reasoning between terms not in the same plane, an
enormous amount of confusion, perplexity, and mental deadlocking occurs.

The old theological deadlock between predestination and free-will serves
admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean.  Take life at
the level of common sensation and common experience, and there is no more
indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete
moral responsibility.  But make only the least penetrating of analyses
and you perceive a world of inevitable consequences, a rigid succession
of cause and effect.  Insist upon a flat agreement between the two,
and there you are!  The Instrument fails.

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme suspicion of
abstract terms which arises materially out of my first and second
objections, that I chiefly rest my case for a profound scepticism of
the remoter possibilities of the Instrument of Thought.  It is a thing
no more perfect than the human eye or the human ear, though like those
other instruments it may have undefined possibilities of evolution
towards increased range, and increased power.

So much for my main contention.  But before I conclude I may -- since I am
here -- say a little more in the autobiographical vein, and with a view
to your discussion to show how I reconcile this fundamental scepticism
with the very positive beliefs about world-wide issues I possess, and
the very definite distinction I make between right and wrong.

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you that if there
is any validity in my image of that three dimensional jelly in which
our ideas are suspended, such a reconciliation as you demand in logic,
such a projection of the things as in accordance upon one plane, is
totally unnecessary and impossible.

This insistence upon the element of uniqueness in being, this
subordination of the class to the individual difference, not only
destroys the universal claim of philosophy, but the universal claim
of ethical imperatives, the universal claim of any religious teaching.
If you press me back upon my fundamental position I must confess I put
faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly the same level
as I put my belief of what is right in art, and what I consider right
practice in art.  I have arrived at a certain sort of self-knowledge,
and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite
prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else.
One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much
self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music.  But since life has
for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to
obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into
other minds, to bring about ~my~ good and to resist and overcome ~my~
evil as though they were the universal Good and the universal Evil in
which unthinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way contradictory
to this philosophy, for me, if I find others responding sympathetically
to any notes of mine, or if I find myself responding sympathetically to
notes sounding about me, to give that common resemblance between myself
and others a name, to refer these others and myself in common to this
thing as if it were externalised and spanned us all.

Scepticism of the Instrument is, for example, not incompatible with
religious association and with organisation upon the basis of a common
faith.  It is possible to regard God as a Being synthetic in relation to
men and societies, just as the idea of a universe of atoms and molecules
and inorganic relationships is analytical in relation to human life.

The repudiation of demonstration in any but immediate and verifiable
cases that this Scepticism of the Instrument amounts to, the abandonment
of any universal validity for moral and religious propositions, brings
ethical, social, and religious teaching into the province of poetry,
and does something to correct the estrangement between knowledge and
beauty that is a feature of so much mental existence at this time.
All these things are self-expression.  Such an opinion sets a new and
greater value on that penetrating and illuminating quality of mind we
call insight, insight which when it faces towards the contradictions that
arise out of the imperfections of the mental instrument is called humour.
In these innate, unteachable qualities I hold -- in humour and the sense
of beauty -- lies such hope of intellectual salvation from the original
sin of our intellectual instrument as we may entertain in this uncertain
and fluctuating world of unique appearances. . . .

So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental assumptions
before you, heartily glad of the opportunity you have given me of taking
them out, of looking at them with the particularity the presence of
hearers ensures, and of hearing the impression they have made upon you.
Of course, such a sketch must have an inevitable crudity of effect.
The time I had for it -- I mean the time I was able to give in preparation
-- was altogether too limited for any exhaustive finish of presentation;
but I think on the whole I have got the main lines of this sketch map
of my mental basis true.  Whether I have made myself comprehensible is
a different question altogether.  It is for you rather than me to say
how this sketch map of mine lies with regard to your own more systematic
cartography. . . .


[Here followed certain comments upon ~Personal Idealism~, and Mr. F. C. S.
Schiller's ~Humanism~, of no particular value.]


[End.]
