Truth and Error or the Science of Intellection/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII QUALITIES
There is another class of relations which here require careful consideration. They will be called qualities. Sometimes the words property and quality have been considered synonymous, while the words quality and class or category are often used as synonyms. Perhaps the distinction now made between properties and qualities has never been set forth. I think that the foregoing chapters will have made clear to the reader the sense in which the* term property has been used. These properties in the five realms of nature, namely, the ether, the stars, the rocks, the plants, and the animals, all subserve human ends or purposes, which may be considered as good or evil. In this manner qualities arise, while terms denoting these qualities are found in all languages. These quality terms have the characteristic of being more or less vague, in that they may instantly change with the point of view. Some illustrations will be given to make this distinction plain. Number is a property. Here are five apples and the number cannot be changed without adding or substracting therefrom, but the five apples may be few or many by a change in the point of view. Five apples in a tray at a dinner board where twelve persons are sitting are few, but upon the plate of one of the guests are many. Thus it is that a number may become few or many by some circumstance or purpose in view. Few are thus qualities, while five is a property. A barrel of apples on a table would be many or very many; in the cellar plenty; in the warehouse when the steamer is seeking a cargo it would be few, and the merchant would not be considered untruthful if by a figure of speech he affirmed that he had none.

Again, extension and form are properties, but they may easily become qualities where there is some purpose in view. A pin may be large or small in relation to the hole which it is to fill in the timbers of a house; the same pin may be too large for one purpose and too small for another. The watchmaker uses a pin so small that it can be seen only with care, and yet it may be large or too large for the purpose intended. A hill in the Park Mountains would be called a mountain in the Catskills, and a mountain in the Park would be called a hill in the Himalayas. Thus properties are transformed into qualities by ideal circumstances.

The railway train is fast to the man who is driving an ox-team, but the train is slow to the mother who is on her way to the death-bed of her child. An old man may say at one moment that the day is long, and in the next that life is short. To the laborer who is bent on his task the hum of the machinery is scarcely heard, but on his couch at night the tick of his clock is loud. The razor is beautiful and good in the hand of the skilful barber, but it is ugly and dangerous in the hands of an assassin; thus properties are transmuted into qualities by human ideas. Red is beautiful in the rose, ugly in the spot of blood on the floor. The sheen of sable in the ousel is beautiful, but the sheen of sable on the carrion-loving buzzard is ugly. If all serpents were harmless, gentle and intelligent, their lithe forms and gliding motions would be beautiful. If robins were poisonous their red breasts would be symbols of horror. If the red lightning and the crimson cloud could change relations to men’s ideas of good and evil, the one as the harbinger of summer rain and the other as a visit of death, the lightning would be a thing of beauty and the cloud a terror.

The coming of the rain may be welcomed by the husbandman who has planted his field of corn; it may be unwelcome to the belated traveler. Time is long and weary to the invalid on the couch of pain; time is short and joyous to the child in the park.

It is thus that properties become qualities through our ideals, through the purposes which we have in view. There is no difficulty in distinguishing between qualities and properties as they have here been defined. Properties are not qualities and qualities are not properties, but qualities are founded upon properties. Properties are qualities when they are considered teleologically. It is right, therefore, to say that properties are real in the sense that they are grounded on matter and that qualities are ideal in the sense that they are dependent for their existence upon the mind. When we reflect upon these facts nothing can be more simple. The distinction can be discovered without difficulty and it would seem that there need be no confusion between properties and qualities as here defined. To affirm properties is to affirm inseparable concomitants of matter, but to affirm qualities is to affirm things that change with the point of view. I see a man suddenly push another upon the street, and think it rude, and am indignant. The next moment I see that he saved him from falling into a pit, and in an instant the quality of the act is changed, and I call it wise and kind, while the activity as property remains the same.

From the days of Aristotle to the last book of philosophy, substance and the properties of which it is composed, bodies as compounded substance and hence compounded properties, relations and compounded relations, qualities, and compounded qualities all have been under discussion, and attempts have been made to define them.

These distinctions, which seem simple and are simple when understood, and may be understood by every intelligent man, have led to tomes and libraries of discussion and disputation not always friendly and charitable. There are those who affirm that qualities and properties are all one as ideal; there are those who affirm that qualities and properties are all one as real or material. And thus we have an idealistic philosophy and a materialistic philosophy. A few idealists have gone so far as to affirm that not only qualities but properties, bodies and relations are ideal; that there is no material or real world which exists except as it is created by the mind and that all these things exist only in mind.

The difference between qualities and properties was vaguely seen by Aristotle, but seems to have been unrecognized by Plato. In modern times we find Locke, with a clearness never before exhibited, giving the distinction between properties and qualities, though he called them all qualities, but the names used are of little moment. He divided qualities into primary and secondary; what are here called properties he called secondary qualities. But at his time the nature of force was unknown and the laws of evolution or time were undiscovered and many of the properties of force and change were relegated to his second class and confounded with what are here called qualities. Then he added a third class which he called powers; so the properties of force were divided between secondary qualities and powers. Dropping his term as primary and secondary qualities, and using the terms properties and qualities in their stead, it is proposed briefly to explain the errors into which Locke fell. In his time his errors were excusable; at the present time they are inexcusable. All of this can now be set forth and the truth demonstrated as simply and clearly as a proposition in Euclid, and it must be understood if modern science is to be understood, for upon these simple, self-evident propositions all modern science is founded. Since Locke all later writers, so far as my reading extends, instead of clearing away Locke’s errors have piled up a mountain of new fallacies. To reduce these questions to their simple elements it becomes necessary to go back to Locke.

The correlation of forces which has its ground in the persistence of motion was unknown in Locke’s time, though Locke himself affirmed it. In his discussion he clearly set forth that numbers are primary qualities—i.e., properties; but he does not see that kinds are derived from number and also are properties. He clearly explains that extension and all the properties of form derived therefrom are properties. He clearly sees that motions are properties, but he does not see the relation between motions and forces, so he places some of the forces in the second class of qualities and thus includes them in what we call qualities, while others he includes among powers. Thus classes, forces and durations were practically left in the second class and among powers. The nature of the first class he clearly understood and explained, and finally he refers the second class of qualities and powers also to a foundation or substrate in qualities of the first class, or properties. His second class of qualities he included with pains and pleasures, which are true qualities. He clearly saw that good and evil, however expressed as pleasures, satisfactions, joys and delights, or as pains, discomforts, dangers and horrors, formed another class of attributes. But with them he grouped classes, though he does not make this plain; but he does make it plain that he grouped many forces and many changes in his second class of qualities.

Since Locke’s time this classification has been modified mainly in the direction of his errors. More and more have properties been considered as qualities, and a school of idealists has sprung up who hold that all properties are qualities in the sense in which these terms are here used. At the same time a school of realists has sprung up who hold that there are no qualities, but only properties, as these terms are here used. By what course of reasoning did Locke lapse into error? On carefully examining this matter it will be seen that while he did not discuss the whole question fully and left much unsaid that should have been said, he clearly understood his position; yet it will be seen that he stumbles over those properties of force that are revealed to us through the senses of seeing, hearing, and smelling. He clearly saw that the bodies revealed to us through these senses do not act directly as bodies upon the self, but in the case of seeing and hearing through media and in the case of smelling through the action of minute particles dissevered from the bodies. At least all this may be justly gathered from his statement, though he is not always clear upon these points. It is fair to Locke to credit him with this degree of insight into the truth. He believed that in seeing there must be a medium between the body perceived and the perceiving mind, but he did not clearly understand it as the universal ether. In his time the existence of the universal ether was a doubtful doctrine in the history of science. Locke denied the validity of the actio in distans in his first publications, and he never retracted, but under the influence of the supposed opinions of Newton in regard to the attraction of gravity, Locke affirmed that he was not prepared to assert that God could not do things in any way he pleased. Had he known what we now know, that Newton used the term attraction in a metaphoric sense, and no more believed in actio in distans than did Locke himself, he would not have made this apparent concession to the opinions of Newton.

It still remains, however, that Locke believed and taught that certain properties of force (especially those manifesting themselves to the senses above mentioned) and many properties of change are qualities and do not exist as properties or primary qualities. Fallacies of force and change were still current in his time, for the correlation of forces through the persistence of motion was unknown and untaught, and the fallacies of evolution were yet to be dispelled. This state of things has passed away, and no man who now understands light or heat will call it a quality in the sense in which the term is here used, but a property inherent in matter itself. At first view it seems strange that Locke fell into this error in the case of sound, but it must be remembered that in his time the kinetics of gas was unknown, and although Locke and his predecessors for two thousand years had understood that sound was a mode of motion, yet it was very vaguely or inadequately explained.

Locke’s contemporaries and successors have but added to the confusion in which the subject was left by himself. Spencer takes up this subject for discussion in three chapters of his Psychology under the subject of static, dynamic, and statico-dynamic attributes. We first note that he replaced Locke’s term of qualities by another, namely, attributes. He did not discuss Locke’s classification, but that of Hamilton, which is much more vague than that of Locke, but Hamilton, like others, had introduced a third class between the primary and the secondary, which was called secundo-primary. Spencer adopted this threefold classification, but used the terms static, dynamic, and statico-dynamic. It will be remembered that Spencer was a Monist, and believed that the primordial unity is based on dynamics or reified force. With him all the properties, and in them he included qualities, manifest only the primordial force. This was his first error. His second error was to neglect number and to consider class as classification, or a process of the mind, and not a property of bodies discovered “by the mind. Then he presented his two classes, one based on dynamics and the other on statics, but statics is not the other to dynamics, but the other to change; state and change are the reciprocals of time. The reciprocals of force are action and passion or action and reaction. You may read Spencer on this subject with great care many times, as I have, and you will see that he himself is vaguely conscious of this illogical proceeding and affirms that he uses the term statics with an especial meaning devised for his own purpose; but under dynamics he appears to include change, although he purports to be the philosopher of evolution, and under statics he includes a part of the properties of duration and change and a part of the properties of number and class and of extension and form. It is thus that the confusion introduced by Locke in his discussion, due to the ignorance of his time, was still further increased by Spencer, and his three chapters on the attributes of matter constitute a monument of errors. An erroneous classification is the bane of science, for it throws phenomena into false relations and makes that which is simple appear to be complex, difficult, profound and even unknowable, as Spencer believed.

Locke’s “Essay” introduced a new theme into philosophy, which at last comes down to us in the form of epistomology. It seeks to discuss the activities of mind and the certitudes of its conclusions. Berkeley seized upon Locke’s explanation of vision and amplified it. Neither Locke nor Berkeley clearly saw that the properties of bodies discovered by the several senses are integrated by conception in such a manner that one sense impression becomes a symbol or mark of all the properties belonging to the body which are known to the mind; that a light impression, a sound impression, a taste impression or a smelling impression are by conception transformed into symbols of the body perceived with all its properties. Failing to understand this in its full significance, and science not having explained the nature of light, heat and other forces, all forces were by Berkeley considered to be qualities as the term is here used, and then he made a further step, that all properties are but qualities, and have their existence only in the mind. Thus it was that Berkeley robbed us of the beautiful world, but with a literary skill that is alluring; he was not a vulgar highwayman crying, “Stand and deliver!” but a knight of the green wood who courteously invoked our assistance in yielding to him our treasures.

Hume took up the same problem and with sturdy blows destroyed the world, and reason was crushed in its fall. Then in Germany Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel essayed to solve these problems; Kant leaving behind a monument of criticism erected into antinomies where truth and certitude are lost. Fichte carried the whole subject to its logical conclusion by reducing it to an absurdity. It was a simple demonstration the meaning of which he never knew, dying in a mist of reification. Hegel, seeing the contradictions of Kant and Fichte and accepting their conclusions, developed the most elaborate and artificial philosophy ever presented in the history of human thought—a philosophy of contradiction, a scheme of the negative by which it was attempted to show that words are divine, but the world is finite and contradictory, and that every proposition affirmed of the world contains within itself its own contradiction, and that words must be believed and that sensation, perception, understanding, and reflection create phantasms.

So these problems have come down to us. In the meantime an army of scientific men have been at work clearing away the fallacies of imperfect reason by designed and skilful investigation. Mysterious forces have been resolved into their simple elements as the motion of matter in collision, and the metageneses of the world have been resolved, and the laws of evolution formulated, and the subject is once more taken up by Spencer with a literary skill equal to that of Berkeley or Plato, and with the powers of an advocate never excelled. The attributes or things which may be attributed to an object are properties and qualities. It was the distinction between properties and qualities that the Greeks sought to characterize as noumena and phenomena. Noumena are the properties of bodies as they are in themselves, while phenomena are the qualities of bodies and the fallacies which we entertain concerning them. But when in later times noumena were held to be occult or mysterious substrates, then science adopted the term phenomena as synonymous with properties.

Qualities give rise to emotions, for qualities are good and evil. All properties may be considered as good or evil in relation to man’s wants. The emotions are founded upon the cognition of good and evil. We are not in this volume to set forth the good and evil of environment, nor their cognition as emotions. All of this subject must be treated in a subsequent volume. In this volume we are endeavoring to explain, first, what are properties and bodies, and how they are cognized. This brief reference to the cognition of qualities must here suffice.