of gravity does not change its state of motion or rest by the actions of the bodies between themselves; and they further extended the law to bodies, qua elastic.
(d) Hence, first inductively and then deductively, the third law was originally discovered only as a law of collision or impact between bodies of ascertained weights and therefore masses, impressing on one another equal and opposite changes of momentum, and always reducing one another to a joint mass with a common velocity to begin with, apart from the subsequent effects of elasticity.
(e) Newton in the Principia, repeating and correcting Wren’s experiments on collision, and adding further instances from attractive forces of magnetism and gravity, induced the third law of motion as a general law of all forces.
This order of discovery shows that the third law was generalized from the experiments of Wren on bodies of ascertained comparative weights or masses, which are not material points or mass-points. It shows that the bodies impress on one another opposite changes of velocity inversely as their weights or masses; and that in doing so they always begin by reducing one another to a joint mass with a common velocity, whatever they may do afterwards in consequence of their elasticities. The two bodies therefore do not penetrate one another, but begin by acting on one another with a force precisely sufficient, instead of penetrating one another, to cause them to form a joint mass with a common velocity. Bodies then are triply extended substances, each occupying enough space to prevent mutual penetration, and by this force of mutual impenetrability or inter-resistance cause one another to form a joint mass with a common velocity whenever they collide. Withdraw this foundation of bodies as inter-resisting forces causing one another in collision to form a joint mass with a common velocity but without penetration, and the evidence of the third law disappears; for in the case of attractive forces we know nothing of their modus operandi except by the analogy of the collision of inter-resisting bodies, which makes us believe that something similar, we know not what, takes place in gravity, magnetism, electricity, &c. Now, Mach, though he occasionally drops hints that the discovery of the law of collision comes first, yet never explains the process of development from it to the third law of motion. On the contrary, he treats the law of collision with other laws as an application of the third law of motion, because it is now unfortunately so taught in books of mechanics. He has therefore lost sight of the truths that bodies are triply extended, mutually impenetrable substances, and by this force causes which reduce one another to a joint mass with a common velocity on collision, as for instance in the ballistic pendulum; that these forces are the ones we best understand; and that they are reciprocal causes of the common velocity of their joint mass, whatever happens afterwards. In the case of this one force we know far more than the interdependence supposed by Mach and Kirchhoff; we know bodies with impenetrable force causing one another to keep apart. It might have been expected that scepticism on this subject would not have had much effect. But the idealists are only too glad to get any excuse for denying bodily substances and causes; and, while Leibnitz supplied them with the fancied analysis of material into immaterial elements, and Hume with the reduction of bodies to assemblages of sensations, Mach adds the additional argument that bodily forces are not causes at all. In Great Britain Mach’s scepticism was welcomed by Karl Pearson to support an idealistic phenomenalism derived from Hume, and by Ward to support a noumenal idealism derived from Lotze. No real advance in metaphysics can take place, and natural science itself is in some danger, until the true history of the evidences of the laws of mechanical force is restored; and then it will soon appear that in the force of collision what we know is not material points determining one another’s opposite accelerations, but bodies by force of impenetrable pressure causing one another to keep apart. Mechanics is a natural philosophy of causes.
3. Dualism within Experience.—Besides those philosophies which are reactions to Kant or to Hume, there are a number of other modern systems which start with the common hypothesis that knowledge is experience. The consequence is that whatever is true of experience they transfer to all knowledge. One of the characteristics of actual experience is that its object is, or has been, present to an experiencing subject; and of possible experience that it can be present. As a matter of fact, this characteristic differentiates experience from inference. By inference we know that things, such as the farther side of the moon, which neither are, nor have been, nor can be, present to an experiencing subject on the earth, nevertheless exist. But, on the hypothesis that knowledge contains no inferences beyond experience, it follows that all the objects of knowledge, being objects of experience, are, or have been, or can be, present to an experiencing subject. Hence it is common nowadays to hold that there is indeed a difference between knower and known, ego and non-ego, subject and object, but that they are inseparable; or that all known things are objects and subjects inseparably connected in experience. This view, however, is held in different forms; and two opposite forms have arisen in Germany, “immanent philosophy” and “empirio-criticism,” the former nearer to Kant, the latter to Hume.
Immanent Philosophy is the hypothesis that the world is not transcendent, but immanent in consciousness. Among the upholders of this view are Anton von Leclair, who expresses it in the formula—“Denken eines Seins＝gedachtes Sein,” and R. von Schubert-Soldern, who says that every fragment of the pretended transcendent world belongs to the Immanent Philosophy. immanent. But the best known representative of Immanent Philosophy is W. Schuppe, who, in his Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (1878), and in his shorter Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie und Logik (1894), gives the view a wider scope by the contention that the real world is the common content or object of common consciousness, which, according to him, as according to Fichte, is one and the same in all individual men. Different individual consciousnesses plainly differ in having each its own content, in which Schuppe includes each individual’s body as well as the rest of the things which come within the consciousness of each; but they also as plainly agree, e.g. in all admitting one sun. Now, the point of Schuppe is that, so far as they agree, individual consciousnesses are not merely similar, but the same in essence; and this supposed one and the same essence of consciousness in different individuals is what he calls consciousness in general (Bewusstsein überhaupt). While in this identification he follows Fichte, in other respects he is more like Kant. He supposes that the conscious content is partly a posteriori, or consisting of given data of sense, and partly a priori, or consisting of categories of understanding, which, being valid for all objects, are contributed by the common consciousness. He differs, however, from Kant, not only because he will not allow that the given data are received from things in themselves, but also because, like Mach, he agrees with the nativists that the data already contain a spatial determinacy and a temporal determinacy, which he regards as a posteriori elements of the given, not like Kant, as a priori forms of sense. He allows, in fact, no a priori forms except categories of the understanding, and these he reduces, considering that the most important are identity with difference and causality, which in his view are necessary to the judgments that the various data which make up a total impression (Gesammteindruck, Totaleindruck) are each different from the others, together identical with the total impression, and causally connected in relations of necessary sequence and coexistence. At the same time, true to the hypothesis of “immanence,” he rigidly confines these categories to the given data, and altogether avoids the inconsistent tendency of Kant to transfer causality from a necessary relation between phenomena to a necessary relation between phenomena and things in themselves as their causes. Hence he strictly confines true judgment and knowledge to the consciousness of the identity or difference, and the causal relations of the given content of the common consciousness. From this epistemology he derives the metaphysical conclusion that the things we know are indeed independent of my consciousness and of yours, taken individually, or, to use a new phrase, are “trans-subjective”; but, so far from being independent of the common consciousness, one and the same in all of us, they are simply its contents in the inseparable relation of subject and object. To the objection that there are objects, e.g. atoms, which are never given to any consciousness, he returns the familiar Kantian answer that, though unperceived, they are perceptible. The whole known world, then according to him, is the perceived and the perceptible content of common consciousness.
The “empirio-criticism” of R. Avenarius (q.v.) is the hypothesis of the inseparability of subject and object, or, to use his own phraseology, of ego and environment, in purely empirical, or a posteriori form. It is like “immanent philosophy,” in opposing experience to the transcendent; but it also opposes experience to the transcendental, or a priori. Empirio-Criticism. It opposes “pure experience” to “pure reason,” while it agrees with Kant’s limitation of knowledge to experience. Avenarius held a view of knowledge very like that of Mach’s view of the economy of thinking. In his first philosophical treatise, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmaasses, Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1876), he based his views on the principle of least action, contending that, as in Nature the force which produces a change is the least that can be, so in mind belief tends in the easiest direction. In illustration of this tendency, he pointed out that mind tends to assimilate a new impression to a previous content, and by generalization to bring as many impressions under as few general conceptions as possible, and succeeds so far as it generalizes from pure experience of the given. Nor is there any objection to this economical view of thought, as long as we remember what Avenarius and Mach forget, that the essence of thought is the least action neither more nor less than necessary to the point, which is the reality of things. Afterwards, in his Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1888–1890), Avenarius aimed at giving a description of pure experience which he identified with the natural view of the world held by all unprejudiced persons. What, then, is
this pure experience? “Every human individual,” says he,
