[In the following essay, Ellis reviews The Philosophy of "As If."]

It is noted of the young men of to-day—the after-war generation as they already regard themselves—that they suffer from disillusion. The world has not turned out as they had expected it would turn out, or, the weaker ones might say, as they had been taught to expect it to turn out. They feel home-sick wanderers in the Universe, new Werthers or new Obermanns, as the case may be, searching the horizon for the apparition of some new Romanticism to solace their sick souls.

The world is, as it has ever been, infinitely rich. We hang on to it by a thread here and there, among innumerable threads, and the thread snaps, and we cry out that it is a rotten world. But the thread was of our own choosing; it was our business to test it and to prove it. If we were deceived we were only deceived in ourselves. The world remains infinitely rich.

It is possible that some to-day may turn with interest to a book—it happens to be a German book—which they never turned to before or probably never heard of although its significance was recognized even when it appeared three years before the war. It was written many years earlier than that. Dr. Hans Vaihinger the author of The Philosophy of the As If (Die Philosophic des Als Ob) had been known as one of the profoundest students of Kant. It was in Kant that he discerned the core of his own philosophy concerning the practical significance of fiction in human life. It is by no means the idea that has traditionally been found in Kant—for Kant was himself not clear about it and his insight was further darkened by his reactionary tendencies—but it is that which under various disguises has inspired some of the most influential philosophers of recent times, and it was Vaihinger first of all who, secretly and unknown, elaborated it. He was not only the first but the most thorough-going exponent of this vision of the world. Nietzsche, the Pragmatists, Bergson, Croce, Bertrand Russell, have all expounded some aspect of a conception which finds its unadulterated essence in a book they had never seen until their own systems had been formulated.

Vaihinger certainly had his first stimulus from Kant, in whose philosophy (he is perhaps the chief living exponent of it) he found that the "as if" view of belief and conduct played an extraordinarily large though overlooked part, and was even his special and personal way of regarding things; he was not as much a metaphysician, Vaihinger argues, as a metaphorician. But Vaihinger soon found almost the same attitude more or less expressed or implicit in various other thinkers, notably in F. A. Lange, of the famous "History of Materialism," whose view of the value of poetic conceptions for science and for life made him the immediate precursor of Vaihinger.

It was in 1876-7 that Vaihinger wrote his book, a marvellous achievement for so youthful a thinker, for it would appear that he was then only about twenty-five years of age. A final revision it never underwent, and there remain various peculiarities about the form into which it is cast. A serious failure in eyesight seems to have been the main reason for delaying the publication of a work which the author felt to be too revolutionary to put forth in an imperfect form. He preferred to leave it for posthumous publication.

But the world was not standing still, and during the next thirty years many things happened. Vaihinger found the new sect of Pragmatists coming into fashion, with ideas resembling his own, though in a cruder shape, which seemed to render philosophy the meretrix theologorum. Many distinguished thinkers were working towards an attitude more or less like his own, especially Nietzsche, whom (like many others even to-day) he had long regarded with prejudice and avoided, but now discovered to be "a great liberator," with congenial veins of thought. Vaihinger realized that his conception was being independently put forward from various sides, often in forms that to him seemed imperfect or vicious. It was no longer advisable to hold back his book. In 1911, therefore, Die Philosophic des Als Ob appeared. Therewith the author's life-work was done; he still lives, in blindness and retirement, at Halle, and is still able to preside over the meetings of the Kant Society.

The problem which Vaihinger set out to solve was this: How comes it about that with consciously false ideas we yet reach conclusions that are in harmony with Nature and appeal to us as Truth? That we do so is obvious, especially in the "exact" branches of science. In mathematics it is notorious that we start from absurdities to reach a realm of law, and our whole conception of the nature of the world is based on a foundation which we believe to have no existence. For even the most sober scientific investigator in science, the most thorough-going positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing. Fiction is indeed an indispensable supplement to logic, or even a part of it of equal rank; whether we are working inductively or deductively, both ways hang closely together with fiction, and axioms, though they seek to be primary verities, are more akin to fiction. If we had realized the nature of axioms, the doctrine of Einstein, which sweeps away axioms so familiar to us that they seem obvious truths, and substitutes others which seem absurd because they are unfamiliar, might not have been so bewildering.

Physics, especially mathematical physics, Vaihinger explains in detail, has been based, and fruitfully based, on fictions. The infinite, infinitely little or infinitely great, while helpful in lightening our mental operations, is a fiction. The Greeks disliked and avoided it, and "the gradual formation of this conception is one of the most charming and instructive themes in the history of science"—indeed one of the most noteworthy spectacles in the history of the human spirit; we see the working of a logical impulse first feeling in the dark, gradually constructing ideas fitted to yield precious service, yet full of hopeless contradictions, without any relation to the real world. That absolute space is a fiction is no new idea. Hobbes had declared it was only a phantasma; Leibnitz, who agreed, added that it was merely "the idolum of a few modern Englishmen," and called time extension, and movement choses ideales. Berkeley, in attacking the defective conceptions of the mathematicians, failed to see that it was by means of, and not in spite of, these logically defective conceptions that they attained logically valuable results. All the marks of fiction are set on the mathematician's pure space; it is impossible and unthinkable; yet it has been proved useful and fruitful.

The tautological fiction of "Force"—an empty reduplication of the fact of a succession of relationships—is one that we constantly fall back on with immense satisfaction and with the feeling of having achieved something; it has been a highly convenient fiction which has aided representation and experience. It is one of the most famous, and also, it must be added, one of the most fatal of fantasies. For when we talk of, for instance, a "life-force" and its elan, or whatever other dainty term we like to apply to it, we are not only summarily mingling together many separate phenomena, but we are running the risk that our conception may be taken for something that really exists. There is always temptation, when two processes tend to follow each other, to call the property of the first to be followed by the other its "force," and to measure that force by the magnitude of the result. In reality we only have succession and co-existence, and the "force" is something that we imagine.

We must not, therefore, treat our imagination with contempt, as was formerly the fashion, but rather the reverse. The two great periods of English philosophy, Vaihinger remarks, ended with Ockham and with Hume, who each took up, in effect, the fictional point of view, but both too much on the merely negative side, without realizing the positive and constructive value of fictions. English law has above all realised it, even, he adds, to the point of absurdity. Nothing is so precious as fiction, provided only one chooses the right fiction. "Matter" is such a fiction. There are still people who speak with lofty contempt of "Materialism"; they mean well, but they are unhappy in their terms of abuse. When Berkeley demonstrated the impossibility of "matter" he thought he could afford to throw away the conception as useless. He was quite wrong; it is logically contradictory ideas that are the most valuable. Matter is a fiction, just as the fundamental ideas with which the sciences generally operate are mostly fictions, and the scientific materialization of the world has proved a necessary and useful fiction, only harmful when we regard it as hypothesis, and thus possibly true. The representative world is a system of fictions. It is a symbol by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of action, for action is the last end of thinking.

The atom, to which matter is ultimately reduced, is regarded by Vaihinger as equally a fiction, though it was at first viewed as a hypothesis, and it may be added that since he wrote it seems to have returned to the stage of hypothesis. But when with Boscovich the "atom" was regarded as simply the bearer of energy, it became literally "a hypostatized nothing." We have to realize at the same time that every "thing" is a "summatory fiction," for to say, as is often said, that a "thing" has properties, and yet has a real existence apart from its properties, is obviously only a convenient manner of speech, a "verbal fiction." The "force of attraction," as Newton himself pointed out, belongs to the same class of summatory fictions.

Vaihinger is throughout careful to distinguish fiction alike from hypothesis and dogma. He regards the distinction as, methodologically, highly important though not always easy to make. The dogma is put forward as an absolute and unquestionable truth; the hypothesis is a possible truth, such as Darwin's doctrine of descent; the fiction is impossible, but it enables us to reach what for us is relatively truth, and, above all, while hypothesis simply contributes to knowledge, fiction thus used becomes a guide to practical action and indispensable to what we feel to be progress. Thus the mighty and civilizing structure of Roman law was built up by the aid of what the Romans themselves recognized as fictions, while in the different and more flexible system of English law a constant inspiration to action has been furnished by the supposed privileges gained by Magna Carta, though we now recognize them as fictitious. Many of our ideas tend to go through the three stages of Dogma, Hypothesis, and Fiction, sometimes in that order and sometimes in the reverse order. Hypothesis especially presents a state of instability which is unpleasant to the mind, so it tends to become either dogma or fiction. The ideas of Christianity, beginning as dogmas, have passed through all three stages in the minds of thinkers during recent centuries; the myths of Plato, beginning as fiction, not only passed through the three stages, but then passed back again, being now again regarded as fiction. The scientifically valuable fiction is a child of modern times, but we have already emerged from the period when the use of fiction was confined to the exact sciences.

Thus we find fiction fruitfully flourishing in the biological and social sciences, and even in the highest spheres of human spiritual activity. The Linnæan and similar classificatory systems are fictions, even though put forward as hypotheses, having their value simply as pictures, as forms of representation, but leading to contradictions and liable to be replaced by other systems which present more helpful pictures. There are still people who disdain Adam Smith's "economic man," as though proceeding from a purely selfish view of life, although Buckle, forestalling Vaihinger, long ago explained that Smith was deliberately making use of a "valid artifice," separating facts that he knew to be in Nature inseparable—he based his moral theory on a totally different kind of man—because so he could reach results approximately true to the observed phenomena. Bentham also adopted a fiction for his own system, though believing it to be a hypothesis, and Mill criticized it as being "geometrical"; the criticism is correct, comments Vaihinger, but the method was not thereby invalidated, for in complicated fields no other method can be fruitfully used.

The same law holds when we approach our highest and most sacred conceptions. It was recognized by enlightened philosophers and theologians before Vaihinger that the distinction between body and soul is not different from that between matter and force, a provisional and useful distinction, that light and darkness, life and death, are abstractions, necessary indeed, but in their application to reality always to be used with precaution. On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, "one of the weightiest conceptions man has ever formed," once a dogma, in course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken. Many other great conceptions have tended to follow the same course: God, the Soul, Immortality, the Moral World-Order. The critical hearer understands what is meant when these great words are used, and if the uncritical misunderstand, that, adds Vaihinger, may sometimes also be useful. For these things are Ideals, and all Ideals are, logically speaking, fictions. As Science leads to the Imaginary, so Life leads to the Impossible; without them we cannot reach the heights we are born to scale. "Taken literally, however, our most valuable conceptions are worthless."

When we review the vast field which Vaihinger summarizes, we find that thinking and existing must ever be on two different planes. The attempt of Hegel and his followers to transform subjective processes into objective world-processes will not work out. The Thing-in-itself, the Absolute, remains a fiction, though the ultimate and most necessary fiction, for without it representation would be unintelligible. We can only regard reality as a Heraclitean flux of happening—though Vaihinger fails to point out that this "reality" also can only be an image or symbol—and our thinking would itself be fluid if it were not that by fiction we obtain imaginary standpoints and boundaries by which to gain control of the flow of reality. It is the special art and object of thinking to attain existence by quite other methods than that of existence itself. But the wish by so doing to understand the world is both unrealizable and foolish, for we are only trying to comprehend our own fictions. We can never solve the so-called world-riddle because what seem riddles to us are merely the contradictions we have ourselves created. Yet though the way of thinking cannot be the way of being, since they stand on such different foundations, thinking always has a kind of parallelism with being, and though we make our reckonings with a reality that we falsify, yet the practical results tend to come out right. Just because thinking is different from reality, its forms must also be different. Our conceptions, our conventional signs, have a fictive function to perform, and thinking is, in its lower grades, comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Imagination is thus a constitutive part of all thinking. We may make distinctions between practical scientific thinking and disinterested aesthetic thinking. Yet all thinking is finally a comparison. Scientific fictions are parallel with aesthetic fictions. The poet is the type of all thinkers; there is no sharp boundary between the region of poetry and the region of science. Both alike are not ends in themselves, but means to higher ends.

Vaihinger's doctrine of the "as if" is not immune from criticism on more than one side, and it is not indeed always quite congruous with itself. Nor can it be said that he ever really answered the question with which he set out. In philosophy, however, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way. And Vaihinger's philosophy is not only of interest because it presents so clearly and vigorously a prevailing tendency in modern thought. Rightly understood, it is a fortifying influence to those who see their cherished spiritual edifice, whatever it may be, fall around them and are tempted to a mood of disillusionment. We make our own world; when we have made it awry we can remake it, truer to the facts. It will never be finally made; we are always stretching forth to larger and better fictions which answer more truly to our growing knowledge and experience. Even when we walk it is only by a series of regulated errors, Vaihinger well points out, a perpetual succession of falls to one side and the other side, and our whole progress through life is of the same nature; all thinking is a regulated error. For we cannot, as Vaihinger insists, choose our errors at random or in accordance with what happens to please us; such fictions are only too likely to turn into deadening dogmas; the old visdormitiva is the type of them, mere husks that are of no vital use and help us not at all. There are good fictions and bad fictions (we had too many opportunities to study the latter class during the war), just as there are good poets and bad poets. It is in the choice and regulation of our errors, in our readiness to accept ever closer approximations to the unattainable reality, that we think rightly and live rightly. We triumph in so far as we succeed in that regulation. "A lost battle," Foch, quoting De Maistre, lays down in his Principes de Guerre, "is a battle one thinks one has lost"; the battle is won by the fiction that it is won; and it is so also in the battle of life, in the whole art of living. Freud regards dreaming as fiction that helps us to sleep; thinking we may regard as fiction that helps us to live. Man lives by imagination.