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In 1919 and 1921, the British philosopher and psychologist, G.F. Stout, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. The audience in attendance, still weary from the chaos and destruction of The Great War, would have found some relief in Stout’s Idealistic Weltanschauung. In 1931, the first-half of Stout’s Gifford Lectures was published under the title, Mind & Matter; and, in 1952, eight long and eventful years after Stout’s passing, the second-half of his Gifford Lectures, entitled God & Nature, was also immortalized in print. Unfortunately, in the 71 years since its publication, God & Nature has received little more than a few passing glances and a handful of cursory reviews. This neglect, however, is understandable. The British and American philosophical landscape was in a bad way in 1952; and, in the many decades since, there have not been many signs of genuine improvement. Anglophone philosophy has been suffering from the pangs of ahistoricity and rootlessness—it drifts, like a lost continent, deeper and deeper into the turbid, briny waters of an amnestic sea—making terra firma few and far between.
In the following article, I will be diving into what I take to be the most suggestive and original argument for Idealism found in God & Nature—an argument that has taken me several years to fully grasp, decipher, and reconstruct. The overall argument is long and drawn out—spanning the entirety of Chapters XVII and XVIII. Rather than tackling the entire chapter as a whole, I will be focusing on Stout’s abbreviated version of the argument:
“When a finite individual comes to know what he did not know before, what he comes to know is not altered in any of the characters or relations which belongs to it as unknown. If any of these characters or relations were transformed in the process, he could not be said to know what he previously did not know, but something else instead. It follows that if knowledge does not pre-exist, there is no possible change or transformation of what does pre-exist by which it can become known. No modification in the qualities of pre-existing beings in their relations or interactions, or the forms of unity in which they are combined will give the required result. In a universe of absolutely unknown being, nothing could change into a known being. It follows that since there are knowing minds now, there must always have been knowing minds, or at least one knowing mind.” (Stout, God & Nature, 285)
When I first read the above passage, I was at an immediate loss. Stout’s conclusion, “It follows that since there are knowing minds now, there must always have been knowing minds, or at least one knowing mind,” seemed to me to be a non sequitur. Indeed, back in 1953, a reviewer of God & Nature found Stout’s argument to be just as opaque:
“The last sections of the book…argue that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe. This is argued first…in connexion with cognition. The unity of the mind in knowing presupposes the systematic unity of the universe known. This Kantian argument is combined…with the non-Kantian view that the knowing mind does not determine the structure of what is known. The argument is that ignorance is always partial. What we do not know we always to some extent do know as connected with what we know already…..Knowing and being then are essentially and inseparably united aspects of the whole universe. [Stout is here, I think, converting the proposition, which he has so far proved, that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe, and suggesting that the unity of the universe implies a single universal mind. But this conversion is undefended.] It follows that there must always have been knowing minds or mind.” (Mabbot, Review of G.F. Stout’s God and Nature, 533-534)
Now, I think Mabbot seriously misunderstands and depreciates Stout’s argument. Surely it would be uncharitable to suppose that Stout’s reasoning amounts to nothing more than a fallacious jump from the proposition that “The unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe,” to the conclusion that “There must always have been knowing minds or mind.” Indeed, if Stout committed such a blunder, then, we may employ the following words of C.D. Broad:
“Charity bids us avert our eyes from the pitiable spectacle of a great philosopher using an argument which would disgrace a child or a savage.” (Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (Vol. I), 85)
Thankfully, I am not alone in advocating a more sympathetic reading of Stout’s argument. In J.N. Wright’s review of God & Nature, Write briefly summarizes what he takes to be the gist of Stout’s argument, and he goes on to stress the significance of Stout’s Lectures as a whole:
“Chapters XVII-XX [of God & Nature] deal with the nature of mind and the light that this throws on the nature of knowledge and the universe. Its argument is that mind knows (inadequately), explores, and desires. It is a unity with a correlate, the Unity of the Universe—imperfectly known and an object of desire. There is no cognitive act; knowing is a logical precondition of all subjective acts or states: nor is there a pure Ego; the mind has the “unity of a complex”. Its object is “formal” being which can become “objective being”. He argues that this is impossible without positing either that there were always finite minds or a Universal Mind (p. 285) and he holds that the first entails the second, but as the correlate of mind is the unity of the object, mind is not an accidental feature in the Universe and “Knowing and being are inseparably united as alternate and co-essential aspects of the Universe as a Whole”. He thus calls himself an Idealist, but sharply distinguished from those Idealists who argue that mind is creative. I can only comment that if we are going to write of mind and knowledge, will and desire, and not substitute for it writing about noises and scribbling, much of Stout’s analysis must be taken seriously and the standard of philosophical writing in the Chapters XVII and XIX seems to me to be very high indeed….But how to sum up the book? First let me say that through the whole topic of the two volumes of Gifford Lectures, Stout moves with the firmness of a master over the entire field. He is at ease in the immense complexity and richness of European thought, with all its subtlety, variety, and fecundity. He uses the great mass of European thinkers and turns them into a system of his own, with imagination, skill, and restraint. He writes lucidly, with dignity and with leisurely grace. Philosophy has altered since 1920 in its theme and method. Natural Theology is unfashionable; some say nonsensical. A review is not a commentary and many of Stout’s tenets stand in need of detailed comment: but I believe that on some points most philosophers would find some enlightenment and that very few philosophers could have undertaken this theme with so much success. As to Natural Theology, individual philosophers may choose to do what they will. Human nature being what it is, it is preposterous to assume its demise.” (Wright, G.F. Stout, 80-81)
The following argument for Idealism is my humble attempt at streamlining Stout’s line of reasoning. I hope that my adaptation does justice to the insight and vision of the original.
P1) If an unknown thing becomes known to one or more knowing minds, then the unknown thing could not have undergone changes in any of its qualities or relations in becoming known.P2) If an unknown thing could not have undergone changes in any of its qualities or relations in becoming known, then an unknown thing’s becoming known cannot be the result of changes in any of the qualities or relations which belonged to the thing as unknown.P3) If an unknown thing’s becoming known cannot be the result of changes in any of the qualities or relations which belonged to the thing as unknown, then no changes in any of the qualities or relations of an unknown thing could result in the unknown thing’s becoming known.P4) If no changes in any of the qualities or relations of an unknown thing could result in the unknown thing’s becoming known, then, if there had been a time in our universe when it consisted solely of unknown beings, no changes in any of the qualities or relations of those unknown beings could result in any of them becoming a known being.P5) If there had been a time in our universe when it consisted solely of unknown beings, no changes in any of the qualities or relations of those unknown beings could result in any of them becoming a known being, then if there are currently knowing minds in our universe, there must have always been one or more knowing minds in our universe.P6) An unknown thing becomes known to one or more knowing minds.C1) Therefore, if there are currently one or more knowing minds in our universe, there must have always been one or more knowing minds in our universe. [From P1—P6]P7) There are currently one or more knowing minds in our universe.C2) Therefore, there must have always been one or more knowing minds in our universe. [From C1 and P7]
