And so it appears that woman is without logic.
George Simmel has held this familiar statement to be erroneous, inasmuch as women have been known to draw conclusions with the strongest consistency. That a woman in a concrete case can unrelentingly pursue a given course at the stimulation of some object is no more a proof that she understands the syllogism, than is her habit of perpetually recurring to disproved arguments a proof that the law of identity is an axiom for her. The point at issue is whether or no they recognise the logical axioms as the criteria of the validity of their thoughts, as the directors of their process of thinking, whether they make or do not make these the rule of conduct and the principle of judgment. A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes. Hence the ease with which women assume opinions. If a woman gives vent to an opinion, or statement, and a man is so foolish as to take it seriously and to ask her for the proof of it, she regards the request as unkind and offensive, and as impugning her character. A man feels ashamed of himself, feels himself guilty if he has neglected to verify a thought, whether or no that thought has been uttered by him; he feels the obligation to keep to the logical standard which he has set up for himself. Woman resents any attempt to require from her that her thoughts should be logical. She may be regarded as “logically insane.”
The most common defect which one could discover in the conversation of a woman, if one really wished to apply to it the standard of logic (a feat that man habitually shuns, so showing his contempt for a woman’s logic) is the quaternio terminorum, that form of equivocation which is the result of an incapacity to retain definite presentations; in other words the result of a failure to grasp the law of identity. Woman is unaware of this; she does not realise the law nor make it a criterion of thought. Man feels himself bound to logic; the woman is without this feeling. It is only this feeling of guilt that guarantees man’s efforts to think logically. Probably the most profound saying of Descartes, and yet one that has been widely misunderstood, is that all errors are crimes.
The source of all error in life is failure of memory. Thus logic and ethics, both of which deal with the furtherance of truth and join in its highest service, are dependent on memory. The conception dawns on us that Plato was not so far wrong when he connected discernment with memory. Memory, it is true, is not a logical and ethical act, but it is a logical and ethical phenomenon. A man who has had a vivid and deep perception regards it as a fault, if some half-hour afterwards he is thinking of something different, even if external influences have intervened. A man thinks himself unconscientious and blameworthy if he notices that he has not thought of a particular portion of his life for a long time. Memory, moreover, is linked with morality, because it is only through memory that repentance is possible. All forgetfulness is in itself immoral. And so reverence is a moral exercise; it is a duty to forget nothing, and for this reason we should reverence the dead. Equally from logical and ethical motives, man tries to carry logic into his past, in order that past and present may become one.
It is with something of a shock that we realise here that we approach the deep connection between logic and ethics, long ago suggested by Socrates and Plato, discovered anew by Kant and Fichte, but lost sight of by living workers.
A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not A has no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth. Such a creature if endowed with speech will lie without knowing it, without the possibility of knowing it; Veritas norma sui et falsa est. There is nothing more upsetting to a man than to find, when he has discovered a woman in a lie, and has asked her, “Why did you lie about it?” that she simply does not understand the question, but simply looks at him and laughingly tries to soothe him, or bursts into tears.
The subject does not end with the part played by memory. Lying is common enough amongst men. And lies can be told in spite of a full remembrance of the subject which for some purpose some one wishes to be informed about. Indeed, it might almost be said that the only persons who can lie are those who misrepresent facts in spite of a superior knowledge and consciousness of them.
Truth must first be regarded as the real value of logic and ethics before it is correct to speak of deviations from truth for special motives as lies from the moral point of view. Those who have not this high conception should be adjudged as guilty rather of vagueness and exaggeration than of lying; they are not immoral but non-moral. And in this sense the woman is non-moral.
The root of such an absolute misconception of truth must lie deep. The continuous memory against which alone a man can be false, is not the real source of the effort for truth, the desire for truth, the basal ethical-logical phenomenon, but only stands in intimate relation with it.
That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the individual himself quite independently of all social codes (so condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the social life of man). Society recognises the idea of illegality, but not of sin; it presses for punishment without wishing to produce repentance; lying is punished by the law only in its ceremonious form of perjury, and error has never been placed under its ban. Social ethics with its conception of duty to our neighbour and to society, and practical exclusion from consideration of the other fifteen hundred million human beings, cannot extend the realm of morality, when it begins by limiting it in this arbitrary fashion.
What is this “centre of apperception” that is superior to time and change?
It can be nothing less than what raises man above himself (as a part of the world of sense) which joins him to an order of things that only the reason can grasp, and that puts the whole world of sense at his feet. It is nothing else than personality.
The most sublime book in the world, the “Criticism of Practical Reason,” has referred morality to an intelligent ego, distinct from all empirical consciousness. I must now turn to that side of my subject.
CHAPTER VII
LOGIC, ETHICS AND THE EGO
David Hume is well known to have abolished the conception of the ego by seeing in it only a bundle of different perceptions in continual ebb and flow. However completely Hume thought himself to have compromised the ego, at least he explained his view relatively moderately. He proposed to say nothing about a few metaphysicians who appeared to rejoice in another kind of ego; for himself he was quite certain that he had none, and he dared to suppose that the majority of mankind, leaving the few peculiar metaphysicians out of the question, were, like himself, mere bundles. So the polite man expressed himself. In the next chapter I shall show how his irony recoils on himself. That his view became so famous depends partly on the over-estimation in which Hume is held and which is largely due to Kant. Hume was a most distinguished empirical psychologist, but he cannot be regarded as a genius, the popular view notwithstanding. It is not very much to be the first of English philosophers, but Hume has not even a claim to that position. I do not think that Kant would have given so much praise to Hume if he had been fully acquainted with all Hume’s work and not merely with the “Enquiry,” as he certainly rejected the position of Spinoza, according to which men were not “substances,” but merely accidents.
Lichtenberg, who took the field against the ego later than Hume, was still bolder. He is the philosopher of impersonality, and calmly
