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Title: Scepticism and animal faith
Introduction to a system of philosophy
Author: George Santayana
Release date: October 30, 2025 [eBook #77155]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923
Credits: Tim Lindell, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH ***
SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH
_BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND AND LATER
SOLILOQUIES.
CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE
UNITED STATES. With Reminiscences
of William James and Josiah Royce and
Academic Life in America.
LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM THE
WRITINGS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA.
Edited by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.
INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND
RELIGION.
THE LIFE OF REASON. Five Volumes.
THE SENSE OF BEAUTY.
POEMS.
SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH
INTRODUCTION TO A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_First published 1923_
_Second Impression 1924_
_Third Impression 1929_
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
PREFACE
Here is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to
smile, I can assure him that I smile with him, and that my system—to
which this volume is a critical introduction—differs widely in spirit
and pretensions from what usually goes by that name. In the first place,
_my system is not mine, nor new_. I am merely attempting to express for
the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles. There are
convictions in the depths of his soul, beneath all his overt parrot
beliefs, on which I would build our friendship. I have a great respect
for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular
schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain
shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain
everywhere. I think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is
technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of
which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in
its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole. I am animated
by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices
and workaday opinions of mankind: they are ill expressed, but they are
well grounded. What novelty my version of things may possess is meant
simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by giving to everyday beliefs
a more accurate and circumspect form. I do not pretend to place myself
at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its
periphery. I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and
fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then from another, expecting
the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more
extensive and complex. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in
daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. I accept the same
miscellaneous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures
no less instinctively, and admit the same encircling ignorance.
My system, accordingly, is _no system of the universe_. The Realms of
Being of which I speak are not parts of a cosmos, nor one great cosmos
together: they are only kinds or categories of things which I find
conspicuously different and worth distinguishing, at least in my own
thoughts. I do not know how many things in the universe at large may
fall under each of these classes, nor what other Realms of Being may not
exist, to which I have no approach or which I have not happened to
distinguish in my personal observation of the world. Logic, like
language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of
symbolising and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of
things; and whilst some languages, given a man’s constitution and
habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is
a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is
intelligible or right. No language or logic is right in the sense of
being identical with the facts it is used to express, but each may be
right by being faithful to these facts, as a translation may be
faithful. My endeavour is to think straight in such terms as are offered
to me, to clear my mind of cant and free it from the cramp of artificial
traditions; but I do not ask any one to think in my terms if he prefers
others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows of his soul, that
the variety and beauty of the prospect may spread more brightly before
him.
Moreover, my system, save in the mocking literary sense of the word, is
_not metaphysical_. It contains much criticism of metaphysics, and some
refinements in speculation, like the doctrine of essence, which are not
familiar to the public; and I do not disclaim being metaphysical because
I at all dislike dialectic or disdain immaterial things: indeed, it is
of immaterial things, essence, truth, and spirit that I speak chiefly.
But logic and mathematics and literary psychology (when frankly
literary) are not metaphysical, although their subject-matter is
immaterial, and their application to existing things is often
questionable. Metaphysics, in the proper sense of the word, is
dialectical physics, or an attempt to determine matters of fact by means
of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions. It arises by a
confusion of those Realms of Being which it is my special care to
distinguish. It is neither physical speculation nor pure logic nor
honest literature, but (as in the treatise of Aristotle first called by
that name) a hybrid of the three, materialising ideal entities, turning
harmonies into forces, and dissolving natural things into terms of
discourse. Speculations about the natural world, such as those of the
Ionian philosophers, are not metaphysics, but simply cosmology or
natural philosophy. Now in natural philosophy I am a decided
materialist—apparently the only one living; and I am well aware that
idealists are fond of calling materialism, too, metaphysics, in rather
an angry tone, so as to cast discredit upon it by assimilating it to
their own systems. But my materialism, for all that, is not
metaphysical. I do not profess to know what matter is in itself, and
feel no confidence in the divination of those _esprits forts_ who,
leading a life of vice, thought the universe must be composed of nothing
but dice and billiard-balls. I wait for the men of science to tell me
what matter is, in so far as they can discover it, and am not at all
surprised or troubled at the abstractness and vagueness of their
ultimate conceptions: how should our notions of things so remote from
the scale and scope of our senses be anything but schematic? But
whatever matter may be, I call it matter boldly, as I call my
acquaintances Smith and Jones without knowing their secrets: whatever it
may be, it must present the aspects and undergo the motions of the gross
objects that fill the world: and if belief in the existence of hidden
parts and movements in nature be metaphysics, then the kitchen-maid is a
metaphysician whenever she peels a potato.
My system, finally, though, of course, formed under the fire of
contemporary discussions, is _no phase of any current movement_. I
cannot take at all seriously the present flutter of the image-lovers
against intelligence. I love images as much as they do, but images must
be discounted in our waking life, when we come to business. I also
appreciate the other reforms and rebellions that have made up the
history of philosophy. I prize their sharp criticism of one another and
their several discoveries; the trouble is that each in turn has denied
or forgotten a much more important truth than it has asserted. The first
philosophers, the original observers of life and nature, were the best;
and I think only the Indians and the Greek naturalists, together with
Spinoza, have been right on the chief issue, the relation of man and of
his spirit to the universe. It is not unwillingness to be a disciple
that prompts me to look beyond the modern scramble of philosophies: I
should gladly learn of them all, if they had learned more of one
another. Even as it is, I endeavour to retain the positive insight of
each, reducing it to the scale of nature and keeping it in its place;
thus I am a Platonist in logic and morals, and a transcendentalist in
romantic soliloquy, when I choose to indulge in it. Nor is it necessary,
in being teachable by any master, to become eclectic. All these vistas
give glimpses of the same wood, and a fair and true map of it must be
drawn to a single scale, by one method of projection, and in one style
of calligraphy. All known truth can be rendered in any language,
although the accent and poetry of each may be incommunicable; and as I
am content to write in English, although it was not my mother-tongue,
and although in speculative matters I have not much sympathy with the
English mind, so I am content to follow the European tradition in
philosophy, little as I respect its rhetorical metaphysics, its
humanism, and its worldliness.
There is one point, indeed, in which I am truly sorry not to be able to
profit by the guidance of my contemporaries. There is now a great
ferment in natural and mathematical philosophy and the times seem ripe
for a new system of nature, at once ingenuous and comprehensive, such as
has not appeared since the earlier days of Greece. We may soon be all
believing in an honest cosmology, comparable with that of Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, or Democritus. I wish such scientific systems joy, and if I
were competent to follow or to forecast their procedure, I should gladly
avail myself of their results, which are bound to be no less picturesque
than instructive. But what exists to-day is so tentative, obscure, and
confused by bad philosophy, that there is no knowing what parts may be
sound and what parts merely personal and scatter-brained. If I were a
mathematician I should no doubt regale myself, if not the reader, with
an electric or logistic system of the universe expressed in algebraic
symbols. For good or ill, I am an ignorant man, almost a poet, and I can
only spread a feast of what everybody knows. Fortunately exact science
and the books of the learned are not necessary to establish my essential
doctrine, nor can any of them claim a higher warrant than it has in
itself: for it rests on public experience. It needs, to prove it, only
the stars, the seasons, the swarm of animals, the spectacle of birth and
death, of cities and wars. My philosophy is justified, and has been
justified in all ages and countries, by the facts before every man’s
eyes; and no great wit is requisite to discover it, only (what is rarer
than wit) candour and courage. Learning does not liberate men from
superstition when their souls are cowed or perplexed; and, without
learning, clear eyes and honest reflection can discern the hang of the
world, and distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination.
In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge
would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since
it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.
CONTENTS
PREFACE ... v
I. THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM ... 1
II. DOGMA AND DOUBT ... 6
III. WAYWARD SCEPTICISM ... 11
IV. DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS ... 21
V. DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE ... 27
VI. ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM ... 33
VII. NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS ... 42
VIII. SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION ... 49
IX. THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE ... 67
X. SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY ... 77
XI. THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM ... 99
XII. IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES ... 109
XIII. BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION ... 116
XIV. ESSENCE AND INTUITION ... 125
XV. BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE ... 134
XVI. BELIEF IN THE SELF ... 145
XVII. THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY ... 150
XVIII. KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS ... 164
XIX. BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE ... 182
XX. ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE ... 192
XXI. SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH ... 214
XXII. BELIEF IN NATURE ... 233
XXIII. EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE ... 240
XXIV. LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY ... 252
XXV. THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH ... 262
XXVI. DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT ... 272
XXVII. COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE ... 289
INDEX
CHAPTER I
THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM
A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of epic poets and to
plunge _in medias res_. The origin of things, if things have an origin,
cannot be revealed to me, if revealed at all, until I have travelled
very far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must precede my first
dawn. The light as it appears hides the candle. Perhaps there is no
source of things at all, no simpler form from which they are evolved,
but only an endless succession of different complexities. In that case
nothing would be lost by joining the procession wherever one happens to
come upon it, and following it as long as one’s legs hold out. Every one
might still observe a typical bit of it; he would not have understood
anything better if he had seen more things; he would only have had more
to explain. The very notion of understanding or explaining anything
would then be absurd; yet this notion is drawn from a current
presumption or experience to the effect that in some directions at least
things do grow out of simpler things: bread can be baked, and dough and
fire and an oven are conjoined in baking it. Such an episode is enough
to establish the notion of origins and explanations, without at all
implying that the dough and the hot oven are themselves primary facts. A
philosopher may accordingly perfectly well undertake to find _episodes
of evolution_ in the world: parents with children, storms with
shipwrecks, passions with tragedies. If he begins in the middle he will
still begin at the beginning of something, and perhaps as much at the
beginning of things as he could possibly begin.
On the other hand, this whole supposition may be wrong. Things may have
had some simpler origin, or may contain simpler elements. In that case
it will be incumbent on the philosopher to prove this fact; that is, to
find in the complex present objects evidence of their composition out of
simples. But in this proof also he would be beginning in the middle; and
he would reach origins or elements only at the end of his analysis.
The case is similar with respect to first principles of discourse. They
can never be discovered, if discovered at all, until they have been long
taken for granted, and employed in the very investigation which reveals
them. The more cogent a logic is, the fewer and simpler its first
principles will turn out to have been; but in discovering them, and
deducing the rest from them, they must first be employed unawares, if
they are the principles lending cogency to actual discourse; so that the
mind must trust current presumptions no less in discovering that they
are logical—that is, justified by more general unquestioned
presumptions—than in discovering that they are arbitrary and merely
instinctive.
It is true that, quite apart from living discourse, a set of axioms and
postulates, as simple as we like, may be posited in the air, and
deductions drawn from them _ad libitum_; but such pure logic is otiose,
unless we find or assume that discourse or nature actually follows it;
and it is not by deduction from first principles, arbitrarily chosen,
that human reasoning actually proceeds, but by loose habits of mental
evocation which such principles at best may exhibit afterwards in an
idealised form. Moreover, if we could strip our thought for the arena of
a perfect logic, we should be performing, perhaps, a remarkable
dialectical feat; but this feat would be a mere addition to the
complexities of nature, and no simplification. This motley world,
besides its other antics, would then contain logicians and their sports.
If by chance, on turning to the flowing facts, we found by analysis that
they obeyed that ideal logic, we should again be beginning with things
as we find them in the gross, and not with first principles.
It may be observed in passing that no logic to which empire over nature
or over human discourse has ever been ascribed has been a cogent logic;
it has been, in proportion to its exemplification in existence, a mere
description, psychological or historical, of an actual procedure;
whereas pure logic, when at last quite recently, it was clearly
conceived, turned out instantly to have no necessary application to
anything, and to be merely a parabolic excursion into the realm of
essence.
In the tangle of human beliefs, as conventionally expressed in talk and
in literature, it is easy to distinguish a compulsory factor called
facts or things from a more optional and argumentative factor called
suggestion or interpretation; not that what we call facts are at all
indubitable, or composed of immediate data, but that in the direction of
fact we come much sooner to a stand, and feel that we are safe from
criticism. To reduce conventional beliefs to the facts they rest
on—however questionable those facts themselves may be in other ways—is
to clear our intellectual conscience of voluntary or avoidable delusion.
If what we call a fact still deceives us, we feel we are not to blame;
we should not call it a fact, did we see any way of eluding the
recognition of it. To reduce conventional belief to the recognition of
matters of fact is empirical criticism of knowledge.
The more drastic this criticism is, and the more revolutionary the view
to which it reduces me, the clearer will be the contrast between what I
find I know and what I thought I knew. But if these plain facts were all
I had to go on, how did I reach those strange conclusions? What
principles of interpretation, what tendencies to feign, what habits of
inference were at work in me? For if nothing in the facts justified my
beliefs, something in me must have suggested them. To disentangle and
formulate these subjective principles of interpretation is
transcendental criticism of knowledge.
Transcendental criticism in the hands of Kant and his followers was a
sceptical instrument used by persons who were not sceptics. They
accordingly imported into their argument many uncritical assumptions,
such as that these tendencies to feign must be the same in everybody,
that the notions of nature, history, or mind which they led people to
adopt were the right or standard notions on these subjects, and that it
was glorious, rather than ignominious or sophistical, to build on these
principles an encyclopædia of false sciences and to call it knowledge. A
true sceptic will begin by throwing over all those academic conventions
as so much confessed fiction; and he will ask rather if, when all that
these arbitrary tendencies to feign import into experience has been
removed, any factual element remains at all. The only critical function
of transcendentalism is to drive empiricism home, and challenge it to
produce any knowledge of fact whatsoever. And empirical criticism will
not be able to do so. Just as inattention leads ordinary people to
assume as part of the given facts all that their unconscious
transcendental logic has added to them, so inattention, at a deeper
level, leads the empiricist to assume an existence in his radical facts
which does not belong to them. In standing helpless and resigned before
them he is, for all his assurance, obeying his illusion rather than
their evidence. Thus transcendental criticism, used by a thorough
sceptic, may compel empirical criticism to show its hand. It had
mistaken its cards, and was bluffing without knowing it.
CHAPTER II
DOGMA AND DOUBT
Custom does not breed understanding, but takes its place, teaching
people to make their way contentedly through the world without knowing
what the world is, nor what they think of it, nor what they are. When
their attention is attracted to some remarkable thing, say to the
rainbow, this thing is not analysed nor examined from various points of
view, but all the casual resources of the fancy are called forth in
conceiving it, and this total reaction of the mind precipitates a dogma;
the rainbow is taken for an omen of fair weather, or for a trace left in
the sky by the passage of some beautiful and elusive goddess. Such a
dogma, far from being an interpenetration or identification of thought
with the truth of the object, is a fresh and additional object in
itself. The original passive perception remains unchanged; the thing
remains unfathomed; and as its diffuse influence has by chance bred one
dogma to-day, it may breed a different dogma to-morrow. We have
therefore, as we progress in our acquaintance with the world, an always
greater confusion. Besides the original fantastic inadequacy of our
perceptions, we have now rival clarifications of them, and a new
uncertainty as to whether these dogmas are relevant to the original
object, or are themselves really clear, or if so, which of them is true.
A prosperous dogmatism is indeed not impossible. We may have such
determinate minds that the suggestions of experience always issue there
in the same dogmas; and these orthodox dogmas, perpetually revived by
the stimulus of things, may become our dominant or even our sole
apprehension of them. We shall really have moved to another level of
mental discourse; we shall be living on ideas. In the gardens of Seville
I once heard, coming through the tangle of palms and orange trees, the
treble voice of a pupil in the theological seminary, crying to his
playmate: “You booby! of course angels have a more perfect nature than
men.” With his black and red cassock that child had put on dialectic; he
was playing the game of dogma and dreaming in words, and was insensible
to the scent of violets that filled the air. How long would that last?
Hardly, I suspect, until the next spring; and the troubled awakening
which puberty would presently bring to that little dogmatist, sooner or
later overtakes all elder dogmatists in the press of the world. The more
perfect the dogmatism, the more insecure. A great high topsail that can
never be reefed nor furled is the first carried away by the gale.
To me the opinions of mankind, taken without any contrary prejudice
(since I have no rival opinions to propose) but simply contrasted with
the course of nature, seem surprising fictions; and the marvel is how
they can be maintained. What strange religions, what ferocious
moralities, what slavish fashions, what sham interests! I can explain it
all only by saying to myself that intelligence is naturally forthright;
it forges ahead; it piles fiction on fiction; and the fact that the
dogmatic structure, for the time being, stands and grows, passes for a
proof of its rightness. Right indeed it is in one sense, as vegetation
is right; it is vital; it has plasticity and warmth, and a certain
indirect correspondence with its soil and climate. Many obviously
fabulous dogmas, like those of religion, might for ever dominate the
most active minds, except for one circumstance. In the jungle one tree
strangles another, and luxuriance itself is murderous. So is luxuriance
in the human mind. What kills spontaneous fictions, what recalls the
impassioned fancy from its improvisation, is the angry voice of some
contrary fancy. Nature, silently making fools of us all our lives, never
would bring us to our senses; but the maddest assertions of the mind may
do so, when they challenge one another. Criticism arises out of the
conflict of dogmas.
May I escape this predicament and criticise without a dogmatic
criterion? Hardly; for though the criticism may be expressed
hypothetically, as for instance in saying that if any child knew his own
father he would be a wise child, yet the point on which doubt is thrown
is a point of fact, and that there are fathers and children is assumed
dogmatically. If not, however obscure the essential relation between
fathers and children might be ideally, no one could be wise or foolish
in assigning it in any particular instance, since no such terms would
exist in nature at all. Scepticism is a suspicion of error about facts,
and to suspect error about facts is to share the enterprise of
knowledge, in which facts are presupposed and error is possible. The
sceptic thinks himself shrewd, and often is so; his intellect, like the
intellect he criticises, may have some inkling of the true hang and
connection of things; he may have pierced to a truth of nature behind
current illusions. Since his criticism may thus be true and his doubt
well grounded, they are certainly assertions; and if he is sincerely a
sceptic, they are assertions which he is ready to maintain stoutly.
Scepticism is accordingly a form of belief. Dogma cannot be abandoned;
it can only be revised in view of some more elementary dogma which it
has not yet occurred to the sceptic to doubt; and he may be right in
every point of his criticism, except in fancying that his criticism is
radical and that he is altogether a sceptic.
This vital compulsion to posit and to believe something, even in the act
of doubting, would nevertheless be ignominious, if the beliefs which
life and intelligence forced upon me were always false. I should then be
obliged to honour the sceptic for his heroic though hopeless effort to
eschew belief, and I should despise the dogmatist for his willing
subservience to illusion. The sequel will show, I trust, that this is
not the case; that intelligence is by nature veridical, and that its
ambition to reach the truth is sane and capable of satisfaction, even if
each of its efforts actually fails. To convince me of this fact,
however, I must first justify my faith in many subsidiary beliefs
concerning animal economy and the human mind and the world they flourish
in.
That scepticism should intervene in philosophy at all is an accident of
human history, due to much unhappy experience of perplexity and error.
If all had gone well, assertions would be made spontaneously in dogmatic
innocence, and the very notion of a _right_ to make them would seem as
gratuitous as in fact it is; because all the realms of being lie open to
a spirit plastic enough to conceive them, and those that have ears to
hear, may hear. Nevertheless, in the confused state of human speculation
this embarrassment obtrudes itself automatically, and a philosopher
to-day would be ridiculous and negligible who had not strained his
dogmas through the utmost rigours of scepticism, and who did not
approach every opinion, whatever his own ultimate faith, with the
courtesy and smile of the sceptic.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does
not justify any belief in particular; nor does it assure me that not to
live would not, for this very reason, be far safer and saner. To be dead
and have no opinions would certainly not be to discover the truth; but
if all opinions are necessarily false, it would at least be not to sin
against intellectual honour. Let me then push scepticism as far as I
logically can, and endeavour to clear my mind of illusion, even at the
price of intellectual suicide.
CHAPTER III
WAYWARD SCEPTICISM
Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. Children
insensibly accept all the suggestions of sense and language, the only
initiative they show being a certain wilfulness in the extension of
these notions, a certain impulse towards private superstition. This is
soon corrected by education or broken off rudely, like the nails of a
tender hand, by hard contact with custom, fact, or derision. Belief then
settles down in sullenness and apathy to a narrow circle of vague
assumptions, to none of which the mind need have any deep affinity, none
of which it need really understand, but which nevertheless it clings to
for lack of other footing. The philosophy of the common man is an old
wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and
resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is religious belief; really
the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer
ring, as it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for that very
reason the most jealously defended; since it is on being attacked there,
at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at being attacked at
all are first aroused in the citadel. People are not naturally sceptics,
wondering if a single one of their intellectual habits can be reasonably
preserved; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them
all. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their
religion, whatever it may be, as certain, as sublime, and as the only
rational basis of morality and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is
terribly precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in the next
tribe or in the next century it will wear quite a different form; and
partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually
remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the
world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their
variety and absurdity, although he may good-naturedly continue to
conform to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn
current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without
philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense
suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is
enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure.
Closely allied with religious beliefs there are usually legends and
histories, dramatic if not miraculous; and a man who knows anything of
literature and has observed how histories are written, even in the most
enlightened times, needs no satirist to remind him that all histories,
in so far as they contain a system, a drama, or a moral, are so much
literary fiction, and probably disingenuous. Common sense, however, will
still admit that there are recorded facts not to be doubted, as it will
admit that there are obvious physical facts; and it is here, when
popular philosophy has been reduced to a kind of positivism, that the
speculative critic may well step upon the scene.
Criticism, I have said, has no first principle, and its desultory
character may be clearly exhibited at this point by asking whether the
evidence of science or that of history should be questioned first. I
might impugn the belief in physical facts reported by the senses and by
natural science, such as the existence of a ring of Saturn, reducing
them to appearances, which are facts reported by personal remembrance;
and this is actually the choice made by British and German critics of
knowledge, who, relying on memory and history, have denied the existence
of anything but experience. Yet the opposite procedure would seem more
judicious; knowledge of the facts reported by history is mediated by
documents which are physical facts; and these documents must first be
discovered and believed to have subsisted unknown and to have had a more
or less remote origin in time and place, before they can be taken as
evidence for any mental events; for if I did not believe that there had
been any men in Athens I should not imagine they had had any thoughts.
Even personal memory, when it professes to record any distant
experience, can recognise and place this experience only by first
reconstructing the material scene in which it occurred. Memory records
moral events in terms of their physical occasions; and if the latter are
merely imaginary, the former must be doubly so, like the thoughts of a
personage in a novel. My remembrance of the past is a novel I am
constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but
sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career
had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
Romantic solipsism, in which the self making up the universe is a moral
person endowed with memory and vanity, is accordingly untenable. Not
that it is unthinkable or self-contradictory; because all the
complementary objects which might be requisite to give point and body to
the idea of oneself might be only ideas and not facts; and a solitary
deity imagining a world or remembering his own past constitutes a
perfectly conceivable universe. But this imagination would have no truth
and this remembrance no control; so that the fond belief of such a deity
that he knew his own past would be the most groundless of dogmas; and
while by chance the dogma might be true, that deity would have no reason
to think it so. At the first touch of criticism he would be obliged to
confess that his alleged past was merely a picture now before him, and
that he had no reason to suppose that this picture had had any constancy
in successive moments, or that he had lived through previous moments at
all; nor could any new experience ever lend any colour or corroboration
to such a pathological conviction. This is obvious; so that romantic
solipsism, although perhaps an interesting state of mind, is not a
position capable of defence; and any solipsism which is not a solipsism
of the present moment is logically contemptible.
The postulates on which empirical knowledge and inductive science are
based—namely, that there has been a past, that it was such as it is now
thought to be, that there will be a future and that it must, for some
inconceivable reason, resemble the past and obey the same laws—these are
all gratuitous dogmas. The sceptic in his honest retreat knows nothing
of a future, and has no need of such an unwarrantable idea. He may
perhaps have images before him of scenes somehow not in the foreground,
with a sense of before and after running through the texture of them;
and he may call this background of his sentiency the past; but the
relative obscurity and evanescence of these phantoms will not prompt him
to suppose that they have retreated to obscurity from the light of day.
They will be to him simply what he experiences them as being, denizens
of the twilight. It would be a vain fancy to imagine that these ghosts
had once been men; they are simply nether gods, native to the Erebus
they inhabit. The world present to the sceptic may continue to fade into
these opposite abysses, the past and the future; but having renounced
all prejudice and checked all customary faith, he will regard both as
painted abysses only, like the opposite exits to the country and to the
city on the ancient stage. He will see the masked actors (and he will
invent a reason) rushing frantically out on one side and in at the
other; but he knows that the moment they are out of sight the play is
over for them; those outlying regions and those reported events which
the messengers narrate so impressively are pure fancy; and there is
nothing for him but to sit in his seat and lend his mind to the tragic
illusion.
The solipsist thus becomes an incredulous spectator of his own romance,
thinks his own adventures fictions, and accepts a solipsism of the
present moment. This is an honest position, and certain attempts to
refute it as self-contradictory are based on a misunderstanding. For
example, it is irrelevant to urge that the present moment cannot
comprise the whole of existence because the phrase “a present moment”
implies a chain of moments; or that the mind that calls any moment the
present moment virtually transcends it and posits a past and a future
beyond it. These arguments confuse the convictions of the solipsist with
those of a spectator describing him from outside. The sceptic is not
committed to the implications of other men’s language; nor can he be
convicted out of his own mouth by the names he is obliged to bestow on
the details of his momentary vision. There may be long vistas in it;
there may be many figures of men and beasts, many legends and
apocalypses depicted on his canvas; there may even be a shadowy frame
about it, or the suggestion of a gigantic ghostly something on the
hither side of it which he may call himself. All this wealth of objects
is not inconsistent with solipsism, although the implication of the
conventional terms in which those objects are described may render it
difficult for the solipsist always to remember his solitude. Yet when he
reflects, he perceives it; and all his heroic efforts are concentrated
on _not_ asserting and _not_ implying anything, but simply noticing what
he finds. Scepticism is not concerned to abolish ideas; it can relish
the variety and order of a pictured world, or of any number of them in
succession, without any of the qualms and exclusions proper to
dogmatism. Its case is simply not to credit these ideas, not to posit
any of these fancied worlds, nor this ghostly mind imagined as viewing
them. The attitude of the sceptic is not inconsistent; it is merely
difficult, because it is hard for the greedy intellect to keep its cake
without eating it. Very voracious dogmatists like Spinoza even assert
that it is impossible, but the impossibility is only psychological, and
due to their voracity; they no doubt speak truly for themselves when
they say that the idea of a horse, if not contradicted by some other
idea, _is_ a belief that the horse exists; but this would not be the
case if they felt no impulse to ride that imagined horse, or to get out
of its way. Ideas become beliefs only when by precipitating tendencies
to action they persuade me that they are signs of things; and these
things are not those ideas simply hypostatised, but are believed to be
compacted of many parts, and full of ambushed powers, entirely absent
from the ideas. The belief is imposed on me surreptitiously by a latent
mechanical reaction of my body on the object producing the idea; it is
by no means implied in any qualities obvious in that idea. Such a latent
reaction, being mechanical, can hardly be avoided, but it may be
discounted in reflection, if a man has experience and the poise of a
philosopher; and scepticism is not the less honourable for being
difficult, when it is inspired by a firm determination to probe this
confused and terrible apparition of life to the bottom.
So far is solipsism of the present moment from being self-contradictory
that it might, under other circumstances, be the normal and invincible
attitude of the spirit; and I suspect it may be that of many animals.
The difficulties I find in maintaining it consistently come from the
social and laborious character of human life. A creature whose whole
existence was passed under a hard shell, or was spent in a free flight,
might find nothing paradoxical or acrobatic in solipsism; nor would he
feel the anguish which men feel in doubt, because doubt leaves them
defenceless and undecided in the presence of oncoming events. A creature
whose actions were predetermined might have a clearer mind. He might
keenly enjoy the momentary scene, never conceiving himself as a separate
body or as anything but the unity of that scene, nor his enjoyment as
anything but its beauty: nor would he harbour the least suspicion that
it would change or perish, nor any objection to its doing so if it
chose. Solipsism would then be selflessness and scepticism simplicity.
They would not be open to disruption from within. The ephemeral insect
would accept the evidence of his ephemeral object, whatever quality this
might chance to have; he would not suppose, as Descartes did, that in
thinking anything his own existence was involved. Being new-born
himself, with only this one innate (and also experimental) idea, he
would bring to his single experience no extraneous habits of
interpretation or inference; and he would not be troubled by doubts,
because he would believe nothing.
For men, however, who are long-lived and teachable animals, solipsism of
the present moment is a violent pose, permitted only to the young
philosopher, in his first intellectual despair; and even he often cheats
himself when he thinks he assumes it, and professing to stand on his
head really, like a clumsy acrobat, rests on his hands also. The very
terms “solipsism” and “present moment” betray this impurity. An actual
intuition, which by hypothesis is fresh, absolute, and not to be
repeated, is called and is perhaps conceived as an _ipse_, a self-same
man. But identity (as I shall have occasion to observe in discussing
identity in essences) implies two moments, two instances, or two
intuitions, between which it obtains. Similarly, a “present moment”
suggests other moments, and an adventitious limitation either in
duration or in scope; but the solipsist and his world (which are not
distinguishable) have by hypothesis no environment whatsoever, and
nothing limits them save the fact that there is nothing more. These
irrelevances and side glances are imported into the mind of the sceptic
because in fact he is retreating into solipsism from a far more
ambitious philosophy. A thought naturally momentary would be immune from
them.
A perfect solipsist, therefore, hardly is found amongst men; but some
men are zealous in bringing their criticism down to solipsism of the
present moment just because this attitude enables them to cast away
everything that is not present in their prevalent mood, or in their
deepest thought, and to set up this chosen object as the absolute. Such
a compensatory dogma is itself not critical; but criticism may help to
raise it to a specious eminence by lopping off everything else. What
remains will be different in different persons: some say it is Brahma,
some that it is Pure Being, some that it is the Idea or Law of the moral
world. Each of these absolutes is the sacred residuum which the
temperament of different philosophers or of different nations clings to,
and will not criticise, and in each case it is contrasted with the world
in which the vulgar believe, as something deeper, simpler, and more
real. Perhaps when solipsism of the present moment is reached by a
philosopher trained in abstraction and inclined to ecstasy, his
experience, at this depth of concentration, will be that of an extreme
tension which is also liberty, an emptiness which is intensest light;
and his denial of all natural facts and events, which he will call
illusions, will culminate in the fervent assertion that all is One, and
that One is Brahma, or the breath of life. On the other hand, a
scientific observer and reasoner, who has pried into substance, and has
learned that all the aspects of nature are relative and variable, may
still not deny the existence of matter in every object; and this element
of mere intensity, drawn from the sense of mere actuality in himself,
may lead him to assert that pure Being is, and everything else is not.
Finally, a secondary mind fed on books may drop the natural emphasis
which objects of sense have for the living animal, and may retain, as
the sole filling of its present moment, nothing but the sciences. The
philosopher will then balance his denial of material facts by asserting
the absolute reality of his knowledge of them. This reality, however,
will extend no farther than his information, as some intensest moment of
recollection may gather it together; and his personal idea of the world,
so composed and so limited, will seem to him the sole existence. His
universe will be the after-image of his learning.
We may notice that in these three instances scepticism has not suspended
affirmation but has rather intensified it, pouring it all on the devoted
head of one chosen object. There is a tireless and deafening vehemence
about these sceptical prophets; it betrays the poor old human Psyche
labouring desperately within them in the shipwreck of her native hopes,
and refusing to die. Her sacrifice, she believes, will be her salvation,
and she passionately identifies what remains to her with all she has
lost and by an audacious falsehood persuades herself she has lost
nothing. Thus the temper of these sceptics is not at all sceptical. They
take their revenge on the world, which eluded them when they tried to
prove its existence, by asserting the existence of the remnant which
they have still by them, insisting that this, and this only, is the true
and perfect world, and a much better one than that false world in which
the heathen trust. Such infatuation in the solipsist, however, is not
inevitable; no such exorbitant credit need be given to the object,
perhaps a miserable one, which still fills the sceptical mind, and a
more dispassionate scepticism, while contemplating that object, may
disallow it.
CHAPTER IV
DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Do I know, can I know, anything? Would not knowledge be an impossible
inclusion of what lies outside? May I not rather renounce all beliefs?
If only I could, what peace would descend into my perturbed conscience!
The spectacle of other men’s folly continually reawakens in me the
suspicion that I too am surely fooled; and the character of the beliefs
which force themselves upon me—the fantasticality of space and time, the
grotesque medley of nature, the cruel mockery called religion, the sorry
history and absurd passions of mankind—all invite me to disown them and
to say to what I call the world, “Come now; how do you expect me to
believe in _you_?” At the same time this very incredulity and wonder in
me are baseless and without credentials. What right have I to any
presumptions as to what would be natural and proper? Is not the most
extravagant fact as plausible as any other? Is not the most obvious
axiom a wanton dogma? Yet turn whichever way I will, and refine as I
may, the pressure of existence, of tyrannical absolute present being,
seems to confront me. Something is evidently going on, at least in
myself. I feel an instant complex strain of existence, forcing me to say
that I think and that I am. Certainly the words I use in such reflection
bring many images with them which may possess no truth. Thus when I say
“I,” the term suggests a man, one of many living in a world contrasted
with his thinking, yet partly surveyed by it. These suggestions of the
word “I” might well be false. This thinking might not belong to a member
of the human family, and no such race as this mankind that I am thinking
of might ever have existed. The natural world in which I fancy that race
living, among other races of animals, might also be imaginary. Yet, in
that case, what is imagination? Banish myself and my world as much as I
will, the present act of banishing them subsists and is manifest; and it
was this act, now unrolling itself consciously through various phases,
not any particular person in any environment, that I meant when I said,
“I find that I think and am.”
In like manner the terms thinking and finding, which I use for want of
anything better, imply contrasts and antecedents which I may disregard.
It is not a particular process called thinking, nor a particular
conjunction called finding, that I need assert to exist, but merely this
passing unrest, whatever you choose to call it: these pulsations and
phantoms which to deny is to produce and to strive to banish is to
redouble.
It might seem for a moment as if this pressing actuality of experience
implied a relation between subject and object, so that an indescribable
being called the ego or self was given with and involved in any actual
fact. This analysis, however, is merely grammatical, and if pressed
issues in mythical notions. Analysis can never find in the object what,
by hypothesis, is not there; and the object, by definition, is all that
is found. But there is a biological truth, discovered much later, under
this alleged analytic necessity: the truth that animal experience is a
product of two factors, antecedent to the experience and not parts of
it, namely, organ and stimulus, body and environment, person and
situation. These two natural conditions must normally come together,
like flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly. But
scepticism requires me to take the spark itself as my point of
departure, since it alone lives morally and lights up with its vital
flame the scene I seem to discover. This spark is single, though
changeful. Experience has no conditions for a critic of knowledge who
proceeds transcendentally, that is, from the vantage-ground of
experience itself. To urge, therefore, that a self or ego is presupposed
in experience, or even must have created experience by its absolute
fiat, is curiously to fail in critical thinking, and to renounce the
transcendental method. All transcendental system-makers are in fact
false to the very principle by which they criticise dogmatism; a
principle which admits of no system, tolerates no belief, but recalls
the universe at every moment into the absolute experience which posits
it here and now.
This backsliding of transcendentalism, when it forgets itself so far as
to assign conditions to experience, might have no serious consequences,
if transcendentalism were clearly recognised to be simply a romantic
episode in reflection, a sort of poetic madness, and no necessary step
in the life of reason. That its professed scepticism should so soon turn
into mythology would then seem appropriate in such a disease of genius.
But the delusion becomes troublesome to the serious critic of knowledge
when it perhaps inclines him to imagine that, in asserting that
experience is a product, and has two terms, he is describing the inner
nature of experience, and not merely its external conditions, as natural
history reports them. He may then be tempted to assign a metaphysical
status and logical necessity to a merely material fact. Instead of the
body, which is the true “subject” in experience, he may think he finds
an absolute ego, and instead of the natural environment of the body,
which is the true “object,” he may think he finds an illimitable
reality; and, to make things simpler, he may proceed to declare that
these two are one; but all this is myth.
The fact of experience, then, is single and, from its own point of view,
absolutely unconditioned and groundless, impossible to explain and
impossible to exorcise. Yet just as it comes unbidden, so it may fade
and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems to do so; and my hold
on existence is not so firm that non-existence does not seem always at
hand and, as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more natural
than existence. Yet this apprehension of an imminent non-existence—an
apprehension which is itself an existing fact—cannot be trusted to
penetrate to a real nothingness yawning about me unless I assert
something not at all involved in the present being, and something most
remarkable, namely, that I know and can survey the _movement_ of my
existence, and that it can actually have lapsed from one state into
another, as I conceive it to have lapsed.
Thus the sense of a complex strain of existence, the conviction that I
am and that I am thinking, involve a sense of at least possible change.
I should not speak of complexity nor of strain, if various opposed
developments into the not-given were not, to my feeling, striving to
take place. Doors are about to open, cords to snap, blows to fall,
pulsations to repeat themselves. The flux and perspectives of being seem
to be open within me to my own intuition.
Caution is requisite here. All this may be simply a present obsession,
destitute of all prophetic or retrospective truth, and carrying me no
further, if I wish to be honest, than a bare confession of how I feel.
Anything given in intuition is, by definition, an appearance and nothing
but an appearance. Of course, if I am a thorough sceptic, I may
discredit the existence of anything else, so that this appearance will
stand in my philosophy as the only reality. But, then, I must not
enlarge nor interpret nor hypostatise it: I must keep it as the mere
picture it is, and revert to solipsism of the present moment. One thing
is the _feeling_ that something is happening, an intuition which finds
what it finds and cannot be made to find anything else. Another thing is
the _belief_ that what is found is a report or description of events
that have happened already, in such a manner that the earlier phases of
the flux I am aware of existed first, before the later phases and
without them; whereas in my intuition now the earlier phases are merely
the first part of the given whole, exist only together with the later
phases, and are earlier only in a perspective, not in a flux of
successive events. If anything had an actual beginning, that first phase
must have occurred out of relation to the subsequent phases which had
not yet arisen, and only became manifest in the sequel: as the Old
Testament, if really earlier than the New Testament, must have existed
alone first, when it could not be called old. If it had existed only in
the Christian Bible, under that perspective which renders and calls it
old, it would be old only speciously and for Christian intuition, and
all revelation would have been really simultaneous. In a word, specious
change is not actual change. The unity of apperception which yields the
sense of change renders change specious, by relating the terms and
directions of change together in a single perspective, as respectively
receding, passing, or arriving. In so uniting and viewing these terms,
intuition of change excludes actual change in the given object. If
change has been actual, it must have been prior to, and independent of,
the intuition of that change.
Doubtless, as a matter of fact, this intuition of change is itself
lapsing, and yielding its place in physical time to vacancy or to the
intuition of changelessness; and this lapse of the intuition in physical
time is an actual change. Evidently, however, it is not a given change,
since neither vacancy nor the intuition of changelessness can reveal it.
It is revealed, if revealed at all, by a further intuition of specious
change _taken as a report_. Actual change, if it is to be known at all,
must be known by belief and not by intuition. Doubt is accordingly
always possible regarding the existence of actual change. Having
renounced my faith in nature, I must not weakly retain faith in
experience. This intuition of change might be false; it might be the
only fact in the universe, and perfectly changeless. I should then be
that intuition, but it would not bring me any true knowledge of anything
actual. On the contrary, it would be an illusion, presenting a false
object, since it would present nothing but change, when the only actual
reality, namely its own, was unchanging. On the other hand, if this
intuition of change was no illusion, but a change was actually occurring
and the universe had passed into its present state out of a previous
state which was different (if, for instance, this very intuition of
change had grown more articulate or more complex), I should then be
right in hazarding a very bold assertion, namely, that it is known to me
that what now is was not always, that there are things not given, that
there is genesis in nature, and that time is real.
CHAPTER V
DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE
As I watch a sensible object the evidence of variation is often
irresistible. This flag is flapping. This flame is dancing. How shall I
deny that almost everything, in nature and in fancy, like the Ghost in
_Hamlet_, is here, is there, is gone? Of course I witness these
appearances and disappearances. The intuition of change is more direct
and more imperious than any other. But _belief_ in change, as I found
just now, asserts that before this intuition of change arose the first
term of that change had occurred separately. This no intuition of change
can prove. The belief is irresistible in animal perception, for reasons
which biology can plausibly assign; and it cannot be long suspended in
actual thinking; but it may be suspended for a moment theoretically, in
the interests of a thorough criticism. The criticism too may prove
persuasive. Many solemn if not serious philosophers have actually
maintained that this irresistible assertion is false, and that all
diversity and change are illusion. In denying time, multiplicity, and
motion, their theory has harked back—and it is no mean feat of
concentration—almost to the infancy of thought, and reversed the whole
life of reason. This mystical retraction of all the beliefs necessary to
life, and suspension, almost, of life itself, have been sometimes
defended by dialectical arguments, to the effect that change is
impossible, because the idea of it is incoherent or self-contradictory.
Such arguments, however, are worthless for a critic of knowledge,
because they involve an assumption much grosser than that which they
discard. They assume that if a thing is dialectically unintelligible, as
change is, or inexpressible in terms other than its own, it cannot be
true; whereas, on the contrary, _only_ when dialectic passes its own
frontiers and, fortified by a passport countersigned by experience,
enters the realm of brute fact, has dialectic itself any claim to truth
or any relevance to the facts. Dialectical difficulties, therefore, are
irrelevant to valid knowledge, the terms of which are irrational, no
less than is their juxtaposition in existence.
The denial of change may rest on more sceptical grounds, and may have a
deeper and more tragic character. It may come from insight into the
temerity of asserting change. Why, indeed, do men believe in it? Because
they see and feel it: but this fact is not denied. They may see and feel
all the changes they like: what reason is that for believing that over
and above this actual intuition, with the specious change it regards,
one state of the universe has given place to another, or different
intuitions have existed? You feel you have changed; you feel things
changing? Granted. Does this fact help you to feel an earlier state
which you do not feel, which is not an integral part of what is now
before you, but a state from which you are supposed to have passed into
the state in which you now are? If you feel that earlier state now,
there is no change involved. That datum, which you now designate as the
past, and which exists only in this perspective, is merely a term in
your present feeling. It was never anything else. It was never given
otherwise than as it is given now, when it is given as past. Therefore,
if things are such only as intuition makes them, every suggestion of a
past is false. For if the event now called past was ever actual and in
its day a present event, then it is not merely a term in the specious
change now given in intuition. Thus the feeling of movement, on which
you so trustfully rely, cannot vouch for the reality of movement, I
mean, for the existence of an actual past, once present, and not
identical with the specious past now falling within the compass of
intuition. By a curious fatality, the more you insist on the sense of
change the more you hedge yourself in in the changeless and the
immediate. There is no avenue to the past or future, there is no room or
breath for progressive life, except through faith in the intellect and
in the reality of things not seen.
I think that if the sense of change, primordial and continual as it is,
were ever pure, this fact that in itself it is changeless would not seem
strange or confusing: for evidently the idea of _pure_ change would be
always the same, and changeless; it could change only by yielding to the
idea of rest or of identity. But in animals of a human complexity the
sense of change is never pure; larger terms are recognised and felt to
be permanent, and the change is seen to proceed within one of these or
the other, without being pervasive, or changing everything in the
picture. These are matters of animal sensibility, to be decided
empirically—that is, never to be decided at all. Every new animal is
free to feel in a new way. The gnat may begin with a sense of flux, like
Heraclitus, and only diffidently and sceptically ask himself _what_ it
is that is rushing by; and the barnacle may begin, like Parmenides, with
a sense of the unshakable foundations of being, and never quite
reconcile himself to the thought that reality could ever move from its
solid bottom, or exchange one adhesion for another. But, after all, the
mind of Heraclitus, seeing nothing but flux, would be as constant a mind
as that of Parmenides, seeing nothing but rest; and if the philosophy of
Heraclitus were the only one in the world, there would be no change in
the world of philosophy.
Accordingly, when I have removed the instinctive belief in an
environment beyond the given scene, and in a past and future beyond the
specious present, the lapse in this specious present itself and the
sensible events within it lose all the urgency of actual motions. They
become pictures of motions and ideas of events: I no longer seem to live
in a changing world, but an illusion of change seems to play idly before
me, and to be contained in my changelessness. This pictured change is a
particular quality of being, as is pain or a sustained note, not a
passage from one quality of being to another, since the part called
earlier never disappears and the part called later is given from the
first. Events, and the reality of change they involve, may therefore be
always illusions. The sceptic can ultimately penetrate to the vision of
a reality from which they should be excluded. All he need do, in order
to attain to this immunity from illusion, is to extirpate from his own
nature every vestige of anxiety, not to regret nor to fear nor to
attempt anything. If he can accomplish this he has exorcised belief in
change.
Moreover, the animal compulsion to believe in change may not only be
erroneous, but it may not operate at all times. I may remain alive, and
be actually changing, and yet this change in me, remaining unabated, may
be undiscerned. Very quick complete changes, cutting up existence into
discrete instants, the inner order of which would not be transmitted
from one to the other, would presumably exclude memory. There would be
no intuition of change, and therefore not even a possible belief in it.
A certain actual persistence is requisite to perceive a flux, and an
absolute flux, in which nothing was carried over from moment to moment,
would yield, in each of these moments, nothing but an intuition of
permanence. So far is the actual instability of things, even if I admit
it, from involving a sense of it, or excluding a sense of its opposite.
I may, therefore, occasionally deny it; and nothing can persuade me,
during those moments, that my insight then is not truer than at other
times, when I perceive and believe in change. The mystic must confess
that he spends most of his life in the teeming valleys of illusion: but
he may still maintain that truth and reality are disclosed to him only
on those almost inaccessible mountain tops, where only the One and
Changeless is visible. That the believer in nature perceives that this
mystical conviction is itself a natural event, and a very ticklish and
unstable illusion, does not alter that conviction while it lasts, nor
enter into its deliverance: so that under its sway the mystic may
disallow all change and multiplicity, either virtually by forgetting it,
or actually by demonstrating it to be false and impossible. Being
without irrational expectation (and all expectation is irrational) and
without belief in memory (which is a sort of expectation reversed), he
will lack altogether that sagacity which makes the animal believe in
latent events and latent substances, on which his eventual action might
operate; and his dialectic not being rebuked by any contrary buffets of
experience, he will prove to his heart’s content that change is
unthinkable. For if discrete altogether, without a continuous substance
or medium, events will not follow one another, but each will simply
exist absolutely; and if a substance or medium be posited, no relation
can be conceived to obtain between it and the events said to diversify
it: for in so far as the substance or medium permeates the events
nothing will happen or change; and in so far as the events really occur
and are not merely specious changes given in one intuition, they will be
discrete altogether, without foothold in that medium or substance
postulated in vain to sustain them. Thus the mystic, on the wings of a
free dialectic, will be wafted home to his ancient and comforting
assurance that all is One, that Being is, and that Non-Being is not.
CHAPTER VI
ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM
Why should the mystic, in proportion as he dismisses the miscellany of
experience as so much illusion, feel that he becomes one with reality
and attains to absolute existence? I think that the same survival of
vulgar presumptions which leads the romantic solipsist to retain his
belief in his personal history and destiny, leads the mystic to retain,
and fondly to embrace, the feeling of existence. His speculation is
indeed inspired by the love of security: his grand objection to the
natural world, and to mortal life, is that they are deceptive, that they
cheat the soul that loves them, and prove to be illusions: the
assumption apparently being that reality must be permanent, and that he
who has hold on reality is safe for ever. In this the mystic, who so
hates illusions, is the victim of an illusion himself: for the reality
he has hold of is but the burden of a single moment, which in its
solipsism thinks itself absolute. What is reality? As I should like to
use the term, reality is being of any sort. If it means character or
essence, illusions have it as much as substance, and more richly. If it
means substance, then sceptical concentration upon inner experience, or
ecstatic abstraction, seems to me the last place in which we should look
for it. The immediate and the visionary are at the opposite pole from
substance; they are on the surface or, if you like, at the top; whereas
substance if it is anywhere is at the bottom. The realm of immediate
illusion is as real as any other, and very attractive; many would wish
it to be the only reality, and hate substance; but if substance exists
(which I am not yet ready to assert) they have no reason to hate it,
since it is the basis of those immediate feelings which fill them with
satisfaction. Finally, if reality means existence, certainly the mystic
and his meditation may exist, but not more truly than any other natural
fact; and what would exist in them would be a pulse of animal being,
kindling that momentary ecstasy, as animal life at certain intensities
is wont to do. The theme of that meditation, its visionary object, need
not exist at all; it may be incapable of existing if it is essentially
timeless and dialectical. The animal mind treats its data as facts, or
as signs of facts, but the animal mind is full of the rashest
presumptions, positing time, change, a particular station in the midst
of events yielding a particular perspective of those events, and the
flux of all nature precipitating that experience at that place. None of
these posited objects is a datum in which a sceptic could rest. Indeed,
existence or fact, in the sense which I give to these words, cannot be a
datum at all, because existence involves external relations and actual
(not merely specious) flux: whereas, however complex a datum may be,
with no matter what perspectives opening within it, it must be embraced
in a single stroke of apperception, and nothing outside it can belong to
it at all. The datum is a pure image; it is essentially illusory and
unsubstantial, however thunderous its sound or keen its edge, or however
normal and significant its presence may be. When the mystic asserts
enthusiastically the existence of his immediate, ideal, unutterable
object, Absolute Being, he is peculiarly unfortunate in his faith: it
would be impossible to choose an image less relevant to the agencies
that actually bring that image before him. The burden and glow of
existence which he is conscious of come entirely from himself; his
object is eminently empty, impotent, non-existent; but the heat and
labour of his own soul suffuse that emptiness with light, and the very
hum of change within him, accelerated almost beyond endurance and quite
beyond discrimination, sounds that piercing note.
The last step in scepticism is now before me. It will lead me to deny
existence to any datum, whatever it may be; and as the datum, by
hypothesis, is the whole of what solicits my attention at any moment, I
shall deny the existence of everything, and abolish that category of
thought altogether. If I could not do this, I should be a tyro in
scepticism. Belief in the existence of anything, including myself, is
something radically incapable of proof, and resting, like all belief, on
some irrational persuasion or prompting of life. Certainly, as a matter
of fact, when I deny existence I exist; but doubtless many of the other
facts I have been denying, because I found no evidence for them, were
true also. To bring me evidence of their existence is no duty imposed on
facts, nor a habit of theirs: I must employ private detectives. The
point is, in this task of criticism, to discard every belief that is a
belief merely; and the belief in existence, in the nature of the case,
can be a belief only. The datum is an idea, a description; I may
contemplate it without belief; but when I assert that such a thing
exists I am hypostatising this datum, placing it in presumptive
relations which are not internal to it, and worshipping it as an idol or
thing. Neither its existence nor mine nor that of my belief can be given
in any datum. These things are incidents involved in that order of
nature which I have thrown over; they are no part of what remains before
me.
Assurance of existence expresses animal watchfulness: it posits, within
me and round me, hidden and imminent events. The sceptic can easily cast
a doubt on the remoter objects of this belief; and nothing but a certain
obduracy and want of agility prevents him from doubting present
existence itself. For what could present existence mean, if the imminent
events for which animal sense is watching failed altogether, failed at
the very roots, so to speak, of the tree of intuition, and left nothing
but its branches flowering _in vacuo_? Expectation is admittedly the
most hazardous of beliefs: yet what is watchfulness but expectation?
Memory is notoriously full of illusion; yet what would experience of the
present be if the veracity of primary memory were denied, and if I no
longer believed that anything had just happened, or that I had ever been
in the state from which I suppose myself to have passed into this my
present condition?
It will not do for the sceptic to take refuge in the confused notion
that expectation _possesses_ the future, or memory the past. As a matter
of fact, expectation is like hunger; it opens its mouth, and something
probably drops into it, more or less, very often, the sort of thing it
expected; but sometimes a surprise comes, and sometimes nothing. Life
involves expectation, but does not prevent death: and expectation is
never so thoroughly stultified as when it is not undeceived, but
cancelled. The open mouth does not then so much as close upon nothing.
It is buried open. Nor is memory in a better case. As the whole world
might collapse and cease at any moment, nullifying all expectation, so
it might at any moment have sprung out of nothing: for it is thoroughly
contingent, and might have begun to-day, with this degree of complexity
and illusive memory, as well as long ago, with whatever energy or
momentum it was first endowed with. The backward perspective of time is
perhaps really an inverted expectation; but for the momentum of life
forward, we might not be able to space the elements active in the
present so as to assign to them a longer or a shorter history; for we
should not attempt to discriminate amongst these elements such as we
could still count on in the immediate future, and such as we might
safely ignore: so that our conception of the past implies, perhaps, a
distinction between the living and the dead. This distinction is itself
practical, and looks to the future. In the absolute present all is
specious; and to pure intuition the living are as ghostly as the dead,
and the dead as present as the living.
In the sense of existence there is accordingly something more than the
obvious character of that which is alleged to exist. What is this
complement? It cannot be a feature in the datum, since the datum by
definition is the whole of what is found. Nor can it be, in my sense at
least of the word existence, the intrinsic constitution or specific
being of this object, since existence comports external relations,
variable, contingent, and not discoverable in a given being when taken
alone: for there is nothing that may not lose its existence, or the
existence of which might not be conceivably denied. The complement added
to the datum when it is alleged to exist seems, then, to be added by
_me_; it is the finding, the occurrence, the assault, the impact of that
being here and now; it is the experience of it. But what can experience
be, if I take away from it the whole of what is experienced? And what
meaning can I give to such words as impact, assault, occurrence, or
finding, when I have banished and denied my body, my past, my residual
present being, and everything except the datum which I find? The sense
of existence evidently belongs to the intoxication, to the _Rausch_, of
existence itself; it is the strain of life within me, prior to all
intuition, that in its precipitation and terror, passing as it
continually must from one untenable condition to another, stretches my
attention absurdly over what is not given, over the lost and the
unattained, the before and after which are wrapped in darkness, and
confuses my breathless apprehension of the clear presence of all I can
ever truly behold.
Indeed, so much am I a creature of movement, and of the ceaseless
metabolism of matter, that I should never catch even these glimpses of
the light, if there were not rhythms, pauses, repetitions, and nodes in
my physical progress, to absorb and reflect it here and there: as the
traveller, hurried in a cloud of smoke and dust through tunnel after
tunnel in the Italian Riviera, catches and loses momentary visions of
blue sea and sky, which he would like to arrest, but cannot; yet if he
had not been rushed and whistled along these particular tunnels, even
those snatches, in the form in which they come to him, would have been
denied him. So it is the rush of life that, at its open moments, floods
me with intuitions, partial and confused, but still revelations; the
landscape is wrapped in the smoke of my little engine, and turned into a
tantalising incident of my hot journey. What appears (which is an ideal
object and not an event) is thus confused with the event of its
appearance; the picture is identified with the kindling or distraction
of my attention falling by chance upon it; and the strain of my material
existence, battling with material accidents, turns the ideal object too
into a temporal fact, and makes it seem substantial. But this fugitive
existence which I egotistically attach to it, as if its fate was that of
my glimpses of it, is no part of its true being, as even my intuition
discerns it; it is a practical dignity or potency attributed to it by
the irrelevant momentum of my animal life. Animals, being by nature
hounded and hungry creatures, spy out and take alarm at any datum of
sense or fancy, supposing that there is something substantial there,
something that will count and work in the world. The notion of a moving
world is brought implicitly with them; they fetch it out of the depths
of their vegetating psyche, which is a small dark cosmos, silently
revolving within. By being noticed, and treated as a signal for I know
not what material opportunity or danger, the given image is taken up
into the business world, and puts on the garment of existence. Remove
this frame, strip off all suggestion of a time when this image was not
yet present, or a time when it shall be past, and the very notion of
existence is removed. The datum ceases to be an appearance, in the
proper and pregnant sense of this word, since it ceases to imply any
substance that appears or any mind to which it appears. It is an
appearance only in the sense that its nature is wholly manifest, that it
is a specific being, which may be mentioned, thought of, seen, or
defined, if any one has the wit to do so. But its own nature says
nothing of any hidden circumstances that shall bring it to light, or any
adventitious mind that shall discover it. It lies simply in its own
category. If a colour, it is just this colour; if a pain, just this
pain. Its appearance is not an event: its presence is not an experience;
for there is no surrounding world in which it can arise, and no watchful
spirit to appropriate it. The sceptic has here withdrawn into the
intuition of a surface form, without roots, without origin or
environment, without a seat or a locus; a little universe, an immaterial
absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own quality. This theme, being
out of all adventitious relations and not in the least threatened with
not being the theme it is, has not the contingency nor the fortunes
proper to an existence; it is simply that which it inherently,
logically, and unchangeably is.
Existence, then, not being included in any immediate datum, is a fact
always open to doubt. I call it a fact notwithstanding, because in
talking about the sceptic I am positing his existence. If he has any
intuition, however little the theme of that intuition may have to do
with any actual world, certainly I who think of his intuition, or he
himself thinking of it afterwards, see that this intuition of his must
have been an event, and his existence at that time a fact; but like all
facts and events, this one can be known only by an affirmation which
posits it, which may be suspended or reversed, and which is subject to
error. Hence all this business of intuition may perfectly well be
doubted by the sceptic: the existence of his own doubt (however
confidently I may assert it for him) is not given to him then: all that
is given is some ambiguity or contradiction in images; and if afterwards
he is sure that he has doubted, the sole cogent evidence which that fact
can claim lies in the psychological impossibility that, so long as he
believes he has doubted, he should not believe it. But he may be wrong
in harbouring this belief, and he may rescind it. For all an ultimate
scepticism can see, therefore, there may be no facts at all, and perhaps
nothing has ever existed.
Scepticism may thus be carried to the point of denying change and
memory, and the reality of all facts. Such a sceptical dogma would
certainly be false, because this dogma itself would have to be
entertained, and that event would be a fact and an existence: and the
sceptic in framing that dogma discourses, vacillates, and lives in the
act of contrasting one assertion with another—all of which is to exist
with a vengeance. Yet this false dogma that nothing exists is tenable
intuitively and, while it prevails, is irrefutable. There are certain
motives (to be discussed later) which render ultimate scepticism
precious to a spiritual mind, as a sanctuary from grosser illusions. For
the wayward sceptic, who regards it as no truer than any other view, it
also has some utility: it accustoms him to discard the dogma which an
introspective critic might be tempted to think self-evident, namely,
that he himself lives and thinks. That he does so is true; but to
establish that truth he must appeal to animal faith. If he is too proud
for that, and simply stares at the datum, the last thing he will see is
himself.
CHAPTER VII
NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS
Scepticism is not sleep, and in casting a doubt on any belief, or
proving the absurdity of any idea, the sceptic is by no means losing his
sense of what is proposed. He is merely doubting or denying the
_existence_ of any such object. In scepticism, therefore, everything
turns on the meaning of the word existence, and it will be worth while
to stop a moment here to consider it further.
I have already indicated roughly how I am using the word existence,
namely, to designate such being as is in flux, determined by external
relations, and jostled by irrelevant events. Of course this is no
definition. The term existence is only a name. In using it I am merely
pointing out to the reader, as if by a gesture, what this word
designates in my habits of speech, as if in saying Cæsar I pointed to my
dog, lest some one should suppose I meant the Roman emperor. The Roman
emperor, the dog, and the sound Cæsar are all indefinable; but they
might be described more particularly, by using other indicative and
indefinable names, to mark their characteristics or the events in which
they figured. So the whole realm of being which I point to when I say
existence might be described more fully; the description of it would be
physics or perhaps psychology; but the exploration of that realm, which
is open only to animal faith, would not concern the sceptic.
The sceptic turns from such indefinite confusing objects to the
immediate, to the datum; and perhaps for a moment he may fancy he has
found true existence there; but if he is a good sceptic he will soon be
undeceived. Certainly in the immediate he will find freedom from the
struggle of assertion and counter-assertion: no report there, no
hypothesis, no ghostly reduplication of the obvious, no ghostly
imminence of the not-given. Is not the obvious, he might ask, the truly
existent? Yet the obvious is only the apparent; and this in both senses
of this ambiguous word. The datum is apparent in the sense of being
self-evident and luminous; and it is apparent also in the sense of
merely appearing and being unsubstantial. In this latter sense, the
apparent threatens to become the non-existent. Does not the existent
profess to be more than apparent: to be not so much the self-evident as
that which I am seeking evidence for, in the sense of testimony? Is not
the existent, then (which from its own point of view, or physically, is
more than the apparent), cognitively and from my point of view less than
the apparent? Does it not need witnesses to bear testimony to its being?
And what can recommend those witnesses to me except their intrinsic
eloquence? I shall prove no sceptic if I do not immediately transfer all
my trust from the existence reported to the appearance reporting it, and
substitute the evidence of my senses for all lawyer’s evidence. I shall
forget the murders and embroglios talked about in the court, and gaze at
the judge in his scarlet and ermine, with the pale features of an old
fox under his grey wig; at the jury in their stolidity; at the witness
stammering; at the counsel, officially insolent, not thinking of what he
is saying mechanically, but whispering something that really interests
him in an aside, almost yawning, and looking at the clock to see if it
is time for luncheon; and at the flood of hazy light falling aslant on
the whole scene from the high windows. Is not the floating picture, in
my waking trance, the actual reality, and the whole world of existence
and business but a perpetual fable, which this trance sustains?
The theory that the universe is nothing but a flux of appearances is
plausible to the sceptic; he thinks he is not believing much in
believing it. Yet the residuum of dogma is very remarkable in this view;
and the question at once will assail him how many appearances he shall
assert to exist, of what sort, and in what order, if in any, he shall
assert them to arise; and the various hypotheses that may be suggested
concerning the character and distribution of appearances will become
fresh data in his thought; and he will find it impossible to decide
whether any such appearances, beyond the one now passing before him, are
ever actual, or whether any of the suggested systems of appearances
actually exists. Thus existence will loom again before him, as something
problematical, at a distance from that immediacy into which he thought
he had fled.
Existence thus seems to re-establish itself in the very world of
appearances, so soon as these are regarded as facts and events occurring
side by side or one after the other. In each datum taken separately
there would be no occasion to speak of existence. It would be an obvious
appearance; whatever appeared there would be simply and wholly apparent,
and the fact that it appeared (which would be the only fact involved)
would not appear in it at all. This fact, the existence of the
intuition, would not be asserted until the appearance ceased to be
actual, and was viewed from the outside, as something that presumably
had occurred, or would occur, or was occurring elsewhere. In such an
external view there might be truth or error; not so in each appearance
taken in itself, because in itself and as a whole each is a pure
appearance and bears witness to nothing further. Nevertheless, when some
term within this given appearance comes to be regarded as a sign of some
other appearance not now given, the question is pertinent whether that
other appearance exists or not. Thus existence and non-existence seem to
be relevant to appearances in so far as they are problematical and
posited from outside, not in so far as they are certain and given.
Hence an important conclusion which at first seems paradoxical but which
reflection will support; namely, that the notion that the datum exists
is unmeaning, and if insisted upon is false. That which exists is the
fact that the datum is given at that particular moment and crisis in the
universe; the intuition, not the datum, is the fact which occurs; and
this fact, if known at all, must be asserted at some other moment by an
adventurous belief which may be true or false. That which is certain and
given, on the contrary, is something of which existence cannot be
predicated, and which, until it is used as a description of something
else, cannot be either false or true.
I see here how halting is the scepticism of those modern philosophers
who have supposed that to exist is to be an idea in the mind, or an
object of consciousness, or a fact of experience, if by these phrases no
more is meant than to be a datum of intuition. If there is any existence
at all, presence to consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient to
render it an existence. Imagine a novelist whose entire life was spent
in conceiving a novel, or a deity whose only function was to think a
world. That world would not exist, any more than the novel would
comprise the feelings and actions of existing persons. If that novelist,
in the heat of invention, believed his personages real, he would be
deceived: and so would that deity if he supposed his world to exist
merely because he thought of it. Before the creation could be actual, or
the novel historical, it would have to be enacted elsewhere than in the
mind of its author. And if it was so enacted, it would evidently not be
requisite to its existence that any imaginative person, falsely
conceiving himself to be its author, should form an image of it in his
mind. If he did so, that remarkable clairvoyance would be a fact
requiring explanation; but it would be an added harmony in the world,
not the ground of its existence.
If for the sake of argument I accept the notion that presence to
intuition is existence, I may easily disprove it by a _reductio ad
absurdum_. If nothing not given in intuition can exist, then all those
beliefs in existing facts beyond my intuition, by which thought is
diversified when it is intelligent, would be necessarily false, and all
intelligence would be illusion. This implication might be welcome to me,
if I wished not to entertain any opinions which might conceivably be
wrong. But the next implication is more disconcerting, namely, that the
intuitions in which such illusion appears can have no existence
themselves: for being instances of intuition they could not be data for
any intuition. At one moment I may _believe_ that there are or have been
or will be other moments; but evidently they would not be _other_
moments, if they were data to me now, and nothing more. If presence to
intuition were necessary to existence, intuition itself would not exist;
that is, no other intuition would be right in positing it; and as this
absence of transcendence would be mutual, nothing would exist at all.
And yet, since presence to intuition would be sufficient for existence,
everything mentionable would exist without question, the non-existent
could never be thought of, to deny anything (if I knew what I was
denying) would be impossible, and there would be no such thing as fancy,
hallucination, illusion, or error.
I think it is evidently necessary to revise a vocabulary which lends
itself to such equivocation, and if I keep the words existence and
intuition at all, to lend them meanings which can apply to something
possible and credible. I therefore propose to use the word existence (in
a way consonant, on the whole, with ordinary usage) to designate not
data of intuition but facts or events believed to occur in nature. These
facts or events will include, _first_, intuitions themselves, or
instances of consciousness, like pains and pleasures and all remembered
experiences and mental discourse; and _second_, physical things and
events, having a transcendent relation to the data of intuition which,
in belief, may be used as signs for them; the same transcendent relation
which objects of desire have to desire, or objects of pursuit to
pursuit; for example, such a relation as the fact of my birth (which I
cannot even remember) has to my present persuasion that I was once born,
or the event of my death (which I conceive only abstractly) to my
present expectation of some day dying. If an angel visits me, I may
intelligibly debate the question whether he exists or not. On the one
hand, I may affirm that he came in through the door, that is, that he
existed before I saw him; and I may continue in perception, memory,
theory, and expectation to assert that he was a fact of nature: in that
case I believe in his existence. On the other hand, I may suspect that
he was only an event in me, called a dream; an event not at all included
in the angel as I saw him, nor at all like an angel in the conditions of
its existence; and in this case I disbelieve in my vision: for visiting
angels cannot honestly be said to exist if I entertain them only in
idea.
Existences, then, from the point of view of knowledge, are facts or
events affirmed, not images seen or topics merely entertained. Existence
is accordingly not only doubtful to the sceptic, but odious to the
logician. To him it seems a truly monstrous excrescence and superfluity
in being, since anything existent is more than the description of it,
having suffered an unintelligible emphasis or materialisation to fall
upon it, which is logically inane and morally comic. At the same time,
existence suffers from defect of being and obscuration; any ideal
nature, such as might be exhaustively given in intuition, when it is
materialised loses the intangibility and eternity proper to it in its
own sphere; so that existence doubly injures the forms of being it
embodies, by ravishing them first and betraying them afterwards.
Such is existence as approached by belief and affirmed in animal
experience; but I shall find in the sequel that considered physically,
as it is unrolled amidst the other realms of being, existence is a
conjunction of natures in adventitious and variable relations. According
to this definition, it is evident that existence can never be given in
intuition; since no matter how complex a datum may be, and no matter how
many specious changes it may picture, its specious order and unity are
just what they are: they can neither suffer mutation nor acquire new
relations: which is another way of saying that they cannot exist. If
this whole evolving world were merely given in idea, and were not an
external object posited in belief and in action, it could not exist nor
evolve. In order to exist it must enact itself ignorantly and
successively, and carry down all ideas of it in its own current.
CHAPTER VIII
SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION
The ultimate position of the sceptic, that nothing given exists, may be
fortified by the authority of many renowned philosophers who are
accounted orthodox; and it will be worth while to stop for a moment to
invoke their support, since the scepticism I am defending is not meant
to be merely provisional; its just conclusions will remain fixed, to
remind me perpetually that all alleged knowledge of matters of fact is
faith only, and that an existing world, whatever form it may choose to
wear, is intrinsically a questionable and arbitrary thing. It is true
that many who have defended this view, in the form that all appearance
is illusion, have done so in order to insist all the more stoutly on the
existence of something occult which they call reality; but as the
existence of this reality is far easier to doubt than the existence of
the obvious, I may here disregard that compensatory dogma. I shall soon
introduce compensatory dogmas of my own, more credible, I think, than
theirs; and I shall attribute existence to a flux of natural events
which can never be data of intuition, but only objects of a belief which
men and animals, caught in that flux themselves, hazard instinctively.
Although a sceptic may doubt all existence, none being involved in any
indubitable datum, yet I think good human reasons, apart from
irresistible impulse, can be found for positing existing intuitions to
which data appear, no less than other existing events and things, which
the intuited data report or describe. For the moment, however, I am
concerned to justify further the contention of the sceptic that, if we
refuse to bow to the yoke of animal faith, we can find in pure intuition
no evidence of any existence whatsoever.
There is notably one tenet, namely, that all change is illusion, proper
to many deep-voiced philosophers, which of itself suffices to abolish
all existence, in the sense which I give to this word. Instead of change
they probably posit changeless substance or pure Being; but if substance
were not subject to change, at least in its distribution, it would not
be the substance of anything found in the world or happening in the
mind; it would, therefore, have no more lodgement in existence than has
pure Being, which is evidently only a logical term. Pure Being, as far
as it goes, is no doubt a true description of everything, whether
existent or non-existent; so that if anything exists, pure Being will
exist in it; but it will exist merely as pure colour does in all
colours, or pure space in all spaces, and not separately nor
exclusively. These philosophers, in denying change, accordingly deny all
existence. But though many of them have prized this doctrine, few have
lived up to it, or rather none have; so that I may pass over the fact
that in denying change they have inadvertently denied existence, even to
substance and pure Being, because they have inadvertently retained both
existence and change. The reality they attributed with so much unction
and conviction to the absolute was not that proper to this idea—one of
the least impressive which it is possible to contemplate—but was
obviously due to the strain of existence and movement within themselves,
and to the vast rumble, which hypnotised them, of universal mutation.
It is the Indians who have insisted most sincerely and intrepidly on the
non-existence of everything given, even adjusting their moral regimen to
this insight. Life is a dream, they say: and all experienced events are
illusions. In dreaming of nature and of ourselves we are deceived, even
in imagining that we exist and are deceived and dreaming. Some aver,
indeed, that there is a universal dreamer, Brahma, slumbering and
breathing deeply in all of us, who is the reality of our dreams, and the
negation of them. But as Brahma is emphatically not qualified by any of
the forms of illusory existence, but annuls them all, there is no need,
for my purpose, of distinguishing him from the reported state of
redeemed souls (where many souls are admitted) nor from the Nirvana into
which lives flow when they happily cease, becoming at last aware, as it
were, that neither they nor anything else has ever existed.
It would be rash, across the chasm of language and tradition that
separates me from the Indians, to accuse their formidable systems of
self-contradiction. Truth and reality are words which, in the mouths of
prophets, have often a eulogistic rather than a scientific force; and if
it is _better_ to elude the importunities of existence and to find a
sanctuary of intense safety and repose in the notion of pure Being,
there may be a dramatic propriety in saying that the view of the saved,
from which all memory of the path to salvation is excluded, is the true
view, and their condition the only reality; so that they are right in
thinking that they have never existed, and we wrong in thinking that we
now exist.
Here is an egotism of the redeemed with which, as with other egotisms, I
confess I have little sympathy. The blessed, in giving out that I do not
exist in my sins, because they cannot distinguish me, appear to me to be
deceived. The intrinsic blessedness of their condition cannot turn into
a truth this small oversight on their part, however excusable. I
suspect, or I like to imagine, that what the Indians mean is rather that
the principle of my existence, and of my persuasion that I exist, is an
_evil_ principle. It is sin, guilt, passion, and mad will, the natural
and universal source of illusion—very much what I am here calling animal
faith; and since this assertiveness in me (according to the Indians) is
wrong morally, and since its influence alone leads me to posit existence
in myself or in anything else, if I were healed morally I should cease
to assert existence; and I should, in fact, have ceased to exist.
Now in this doctrine, so stated, lies a great confirmation of my thesis
that nothing given exists; because it is only a dark principle,
transcendental in respect to the datum (that is, on the hither side of
the footlights) that calls up this datum at all, or leads me to posit
its existence. It is this sorry self of mine sitting here in the dark,
one in this serried pack of open-mouthed fools, hungry for illusion,
that is responsible for the spectacle; for if a foolish instinct had not
brought me to the playhouse, and if avid eyes and an idealising
understanding had not watched the performance, no part of it would have
abused me: and if no one came to the theatre, the actors would soon flit
away like ghosts, the poets would starve, the scenery would topple over
and become rubbish, and the very walls would disappear. Every part of
experience, as it comes, is illusion; and the source of this illusion is
my animal nature, blindly labouring in a blind world.
Such is the ancient lesson of experience itself, when we reflect upon
experience and turn its illusions into instruction: a lesson which a
bird-witted empiricism can never learn, though it is daily repeated. But
the Indian with a rare sensitiveness joined a rare recollection. He
_lived_: a religious love, a childish absorption in appearances as they
come (which busy empiricists do not share), led him to remember them
truly, in all their beauty, and therefore to perceive that they were
illusions. The poet, the disinterested philosopher, the lover of things
distilled into purity, frees himself from belief. This infinite chaos of
cruel and lovely forms, he cries, is all deceptive, all unsubstantial,
substituted at will for nothing, and soon found to sink into nothing
again, and to be nothing in truth.
I will disregard the vehemence with which these saintly scholastics
denounce the world and the sinful nature that attaches me to it. I like
the theatre, not because I cannot perceive that the play is a fiction,
but because I do perceive it; if I thought the thing a fact, I should
detest it: anxiety would rob me of all my imaginative pleasure. Even as
it is, I often wish the spectacle were less barbarous; but I am not
angry because each scene does not last for ever, and is likely to be
followed by a thousand others which I shall not witness. Such is the
nature of endless comedy, and of experience. But I wish to retain the
valuable testimony of the Indians to the non-existence of the obvious.
This testimony is the more valuable because the spectacle present to
their eyes was tropical; harder, therefore, to master and to smile at
than are the political and romantic medleys which fill the mind of
Europe. Yet amidst the serpents and hyænas, the monkeys and parrots of
their mental jungle, those sages could sit unmoved, too holily
incredulous for fear. How infinite, how helpless, how deserving of
forgiveness creative error becomes to the eye of understanding, that
loves only in pity, and has no concupiscence for what it loves! How like
unhappy animals western philosophers seem in comparison, with their
fact-worship, their thrift, their moral intolerance, their imaginative
poverty, their political zeal, and their subservience to intellectual
fashion!
It makes no difference for my purposes if the cosmology of the Indians
was fanciful. It could hardly be more extraordinary than the
constitution of the material world is in fact, nor more decidedly out of
scale with human data; truth and fancy in this matter equally convict
the human senses of illusion. Nor am I out of sympathy with their hope
of escaping from the universal hurly-burly into some haven of peace. A
philosopher has a haven in himself, of which I suspect the fabled bliss
to follow in other lives, or after total emancipation from living, is
only a poetic symbol: he has pleasure in truth, and an equal readiness
to enjoy the scene or to quit it. Liberation is never complete while
life lasts, and is nothing afterwards; but it flows in a measure from
this very conviction that all experience is illusion, when this
conviction is morally effective, as it was with the Indians. Their
belief in transmigration or in Karma is superfluous in this regard,
since a later experience could only change the illusion without
perfecting the liberation. Yet the mention of some ulterior refuge or
substance is indispensable to the doctrine of illusion, and though it
may be expressed mythically must be taken to heart too. It points to
other realms of being—such as those which I call the realms of matter,
truth, and spirit—which by nature cannot be data of intuition but must
be posited (if recognised by man at all) by an instinctive faith
expressed in action. Whether these ulterior realms exist or not is their
own affair: existence may be proper to some, like matter or spirit, and
not to others, like truth. But as to the data of intuition, their
non-existent and illusory character is implied in the fact that they are
given. A datum is by definition a theme of attention, a term in passing
thought, a visioned universal. The realm in which it lies, and in which
flying intuition discloses it for a moment, is the very realm of
non-existence, of inert or ideal being. The Indians, in asserting the
non-existence of every term in possible experience, not only free the
spirit from idolatry, but free the realm of spirit (which is that of
intuition) from limitation; because if nothing that appears exists,
anything may appear without the labour and expense of existing; and
fancy is invited to range innocently—fancies not murdering other fancies
as an existence must murder other existences. While life lasts, the
field is thus cleared for innocent poetry and infinite hypothesis,
without suffering the judgement to be deceived nor the heart enslaved.
European philosophers, even when called idealists, have seldom
reconciled themselves to regarding experience as a creature of fancy.
Instead of looking beneath illusion for some principle that might call
it forth or perhaps dispel it, as they would if endeavouring to
interpret a dream, they have treated it as dreams are treated by the
superstitious; that is, they have supposed that the images they saw were
themselves substances, or powers, or at least imperfect visions of
originals resembling them. In other words, they have been empiricists,
regarding appearances as constituents of substance. There have been
exceptions, but some of them only prove the rule. Parmenides and
Democritus certainly did not admit that the data of sense or imagination
existed otherwise than as illusions or conventional signs: but their
whole interest, for this reason, skipped over them, and settled heavily
on “Being,” or on the atoms and the void, which they severally supposed
underlay appearance. Appearance itself thereby acquired a certain
vicarious solidity, since it was thought to be the garment of substance;
somehow within the visionary datum, or beneath it, the most
unobjectionable substance was always to be found. Parmenides could not
have admitted, and Democritus had not discovered, that the sole basis of
appearances was some event in the brain, in no way resembling them; and
that the relation of data to the external events they indicated was that
of a spontaneous symbol, like an exclamatory word, and not that of a
copy or emanation. The simple ancients supposed (as some of my
contemporaries do also) that perception stripped material things of
their surface properties, or was actually these surface properties
peeled off and lodged in the observer’s head. Accordingly the denial of
existence to sensibles and to intelligibles was never hearty until
substance was denied also, and nothing existent was any longer supposed
to lurk within these appearances or behind them.
All modern idealists have perceived that an actual appearance cannot be
a part of a substance that does not appear; the given image has only the
given relations; if I assign other relations to it (which I do if I
attribute existence to it) I substitute for the pure datum one of two
other things: either a substance possessing the same form as that datum,
but created and dissolved in its own medium, at its own periods, apart
from all observation; or else, a perception of my own, a moment in my
experience, carrying the vision of such an image. The former choice
simply puts me back at the beginning of physics, when a merely pictorial
knowledge of the material world existed, and nothing of its true
mechanism and history had been discovered. The latter choice posits
human discourse, or as these philosophers call it, experience: and it is
certain that the status of a datum in discourse or experience is that of
a mere appearance, fluctuating, intermittent, never twice the same, and
dependent for its specious actuality on the movement of attention and
the shuffling of confused images in the fancy. In other words, what
exists—that is, what is carried on through the flux and has changing and
external relations—is a _life_, discourse itself, the voluminous
adventures of the mind in its wholeness. This is also what novelists and
literary psychologists endeavour to record or to imagine; and the
particular data, hardly distinguishable by the aid of a word clapped on
to them, are only salient sparks or abstract points of reference for an
observer intent on ulterior events. It is ulterior events, the whole of
human experience and history as conventionally reported, that is the
object of belief in this school, and the true existence.
Ostensibly empiricists seek to reduce this unmanageable object to
particular data, and to attribute existence to each scintilla taken
separately; but in reality all the relations of these intuitions (which
are not relations between the data), their temporal order, subordination
to habit and passion, associations, meaning, and embosoming
intelligence, are interpolated as if they were matters of course; and
indeed they are, because these are the tides of animal life on which the
datum sparkles for a moment. Empiricists are interested in practice, and
wish to work with as light an intellectual equipment as possible; they
therefore attribute existence to “ideas”—meaning intuitions but
professing to mean data. If they were interested in these data for their
own sake, they would perceive that they are only symbols, like words,
used to mark or express the crises in their practical career; and
becoming fervid materialists again in their beliefs, as they have always
been in their allegiances, they might soon go so far as to deny that
there is intuition of data at all: which is a radical way of denying
their existence. Discourse and experience would thus drop out of sight
altogether, and instead of data of intuition there would be only the
pictorial elements of physics—the other possible form in which anything
given may be asserted to exist.
If anything, therefore, exists at all when an appearance arises, this
existence is not the unit that appears, but either a material fact
presenting such an appearance, though constituted by many other
relations, or else an actual intuition evoking, creating, or dreaming
that non-existent unit. Idealists, if they are thorough, will deny both;
for neither a material thing nor an actual intuition has its being in
being perceived: both, by definition, exist on their own account, by
virtue of their internal energy and natural relations. Therefore either
existence apart from givenness is admitted, inconsistently with
idealism, or existence is denied altogether. It is allowed, and in fact
urged, by all complete idealists that appearance, far from involving the
existence of what appears, positively excludes it. _Esse est percipi_
was a maxim recalled by an intelligible literary impulse, as Faust said,
_Gefühl ist Alles!_ Yet that maxim was uttered without reflection,
because what those who uttered it really meant was the exact opposite,
namely, that only spirits, or perhaps one spirit, existed, which were
beings perfectly imperceptible. It was the beautiful and profound part
of such a sentiment that whatever is pictorial is nonexistent. Data
could be only forms assumed by animal sensibility, like the camel and
the weasel seen by Hamlet in a cloud; as these curious creatures could
have no zoological existence in that nebula, so the units of human
apperception have no existence anywhere.
When idealists say, therefore, that ideas are the only objects of human
knowledge and that they exist only in the mind, their language is
incoherent, because knowledge of ideas is not knowledge, and presence to
intuition is not existence. But this incoherence enables two different
philosophies to use the same formula, to the extreme confusion both of
doctrine and feeling. One philosophy under the name idea conceives of a
fact or phenomenon, a phase in the flux of fortune or experience,
existing at a given moment, and known at other moments to have existed
there: in other words, its ideas are recollected events in nature, the
subject-matter of psychology and physics. This philosophy, when carried
out, becomes materialism; its psychology turns into a record of
behaviour and its phenomenalistic view of nature into a mathematical
calculus of invisible processes. The other philosophy (which alone
concerns me here) under the name idea understands the terms of sensation
and thought, and their pictorial or rhetorical synthesis. Since these
themes of intuition are called upon to absorb all reality, and no belief
is accepted as more than a fresh datum in thought, this philosophy
denies the transcendence of knowledge and the existence of anything.
Although the temper of absolute idealists is often far from sceptical,
their method is scepticism itself: as appears not only in their
criticism of all dogma, but in the reasons they give for their own
views. What are these reasons? That the criticism of knowledge proves
that actual thinking is the only reality; that the objects of knowledge
can live, move, and have their being only within it; that existence is
something merely imputed; and that truth is coherence among views having
themselves no objects. A fact, these critics say, is a concept. This
statement might seem absurd, since a concept means at most the idea or
supposition of a fact; but if the statement is taken sympathetically,
for what the malicious criticism of knowledge means by it, it amounts to
this: that there are no facts, but that what we call facts, and believe
to be such, are really only conventional fictions, imaginations of what
facts would be if facts were possible at all. That facts are ideals,
impossible to realise, is clear on transcendental principles, since a
fact would be an event or existence which knowledge would have to
approach and lay siege to somehow from the outside, so that for
knowledge (the only reality on this system) they would always remain
phantoms, creatures of a superstitious instinct, terms for ever posited
but never possessed, and therefore perpetually unreal. If fact or truth
had any separate being it could not be an integral part of knowledge;
what modicum of reality facts or truths can possess they must borrow
from knowledge, in which they perforce remain ideals only; so that it is
only as unreal that they are real at all. Transcendentalists are sure
that knowledge is everything, not because they presume that everything
is known, but precisely because they see that there is nothing to know.
If anything existed actually, or if there was any independent truth, it
would be unknowable, as these voracious thinkers conceive knowledge. The
glorious thing about knowledge, in their eyes, is that, as there is
nothing to know, knowledge is a free and a sure creation, new and
self-grounded for ever.
Transcendentalism, when it is thorough, accordingly agrees with the
Indian systems in maintaining that the illusion that given objects exist
has itself no existence. Any actual sensation, any instance of thinking,
would be a self-existing fact; but facts are only concepts, that is,
inert terms in absolute thought: if illusions occurred actually, they
would not be concepts but events, and though their visionary objects
might be non-existent, the vision of them would exist; and they would be
the sort of independent facts which transcendental logic excludes as
impossible. Acts of judging or positing or imagining cannot be admitted
on this system until they in their turn have been posited in another
judgement; that is, until they cease to hide their heads in the
obscurity of self-existence, and become purely ideal themes of actual
intuition. When they have thus become phenomenal, intent and judgement
may posit them and depute them to exist; but the belief that they exist
otherwise than as present postulates is always false. Imputed existence
is the only existence possible, but must always be imputed falsely. For
example, the much-talked-of opinions of ancient philosophers, if they
had existed at all, would have had to exist before they became objects
of intuition to the historian, or to the reader of history, who judges
them to have existed; but such self-existence is repugnant to
transcendental logic: it is a ghost cut off from knowledge and from the
breath of life in me here and now. Therefore the opinions of
philosophers exist only in history, history exists only in the
historian, and the historian only in the reader; and the reader himself
exists only for his self-consciousness, which is not really his own, but
absolute consciousness thinking about him or about all things from his
point of view. Thus everything exists only ideally, by being falsely
supposed to exist. The only knowable reality is unreal because specious,
and all other reality is unreal because unknowable.
Transcendentalists are thus driven, like Parmenides and the Vedanta
philosophy, to withdraw into a dark interior yet omnipresent principle,
the unfathomable force that sets all this illusion going, and at the
same time rebukes and annuls the illusion. I am here concerned, let me
repeat, with scepticism, not with compensatory dogmas; but for the
transcendentalist, who fundamentally abhors substance, the compensatory
dogma itself is one more denial of existence. For what, in his system,
is this transcendental seat of all illusion, this agent in all
judgements and positings? Not an existing spirit, if such a phrase could
have a meaning. Absolute thought cannot exist first, before it imputes
existence to other things or to itself. If it needed to possess
existence before imputing it, as the inexpert in logic might suppose,
the whole principle of transcendental criticism would be abandoned and
disproved, and nothing would any longer prevent the existence of
intuitions or of material things before any one posited them. But if
non-existent, what can absolute spirit be? Just a principle, a logic to
be embodied, a self-creating programme or duty, asserting itself without
any previous instrument, ground, or occasion. Existence is something
utterly unworthy of such a transcendental spirit, and repugnant to it.
Spirit is here only a name for absolute law, for the fatality or chance
that one set of appearances instead of another insists upon arising. No
doubt this fatality is welcome to the enthusiast in whom this spirit is
awake, and its very groundlessness takes on the form of freedom and
creative power to his apprehension: but this sympathy with life, being
expressly without any natural basis, is itself a happy accident, and
precarious: and sometimes conscience may suddenly turn against it, and
call it vain, mad, and criminal. Fichte once said that he who truly
wills anything must will that very thing for ever; and this saying may
be interpreted consistently with transcendentalism, if it is understood
to mean that, since transcendental will is dateless and creates its own
universe wherever it exerts itself, the character of this will is
unalterable in that phase of it, producing just that vision and that
world, which being out of time cannot be devoured by time. But perhaps
even Fichte was not free from human weakness, and he may also have
meant, or half-meant, that a thorough education, such as Prussia was
called to create, could fix the will of mankind and turn it into an
unalterable habit; and that a philosopher could pledge the absolute
always to posit the same set of objects. So understood, the maxim would
be contrary to transcendentalism and to the fervent conviction of Fichte
himself, which demanded “new worlds for ever.” Even if he meant only
that the principle of perpetual novelty at least was safe and could
never be betrayed by the event, he would have contradicted the absolute
freedom of “Life” to be what it willed, and his own occasional fears
that, somewhere and some day, Life might grow weary, and might consent
to be hypnotised and enslaved by the vision of matter which it had
created.
But the frailty even of the greatest idealists is nothing against
idealism, and the principle that existence is something always imputed,
and never found, is not less cogent if idealists, for the sake of
courtesy, sometimes say that when existence is imputed necessarily it is
imputed truly; and it makes no difference for my object whether they
call fiction truth because it is legal, or call legality illusion
because it is false. In any case, I can invoke the authority of this
whole school, in which consciousness has been studied and described with
admirable sincerity, for the thesis I have at heart. They deny with one
voice that anything given can exist on its own account, or can be
anything but a theme chosen by the spirit, a theme which no substantial
thing or event existing outside could ever force the spirit to conceive
or to copy. Nothing existent can appear, and nothing specious can exist.
An apparition is a thought, its whole life is but mine in thinking it;
and whatever monition or significance I may attribute to its presence,
it can never be anything but the specious thing it is. In the routine of
animal life, an appearance may be normal or abnormal, and animal faith
or practical intellect may interpret it in a way practically right or
wrong; but in itself every appearance, just because it is an appearance,
is an illusion.
Confirmation of this thesis may also be found in an entirely different
quarter, in natural history. The sensibility of animals, as judged by
their motions and behaviour, is due to their own structure. The
surrounding facts and forces are like the sun shining and the rain
falling on the just and the unjust; they condition the existence of the
animal and reward any apt habits which he may acquire; but he survives
mainly by insensibility, and by a sort of pervasive immunity to most of
the vibrations that run through him. It is only in very special
directions, to very special occasional stimulations, that he develops
instinctive responses in special organs: and his intuitions, if he has
them, express these reactions. If the stimulus is cut off, the material
sources of it may continue to be what they were, but they will not be
perceived. If the stimulus, or anything equivalent to it, reaches the
brain from any source, as in dreams, the same intuition will appear, in
the absence of the material object. The feelings of animals express
their bodily habit; they do not express directly either the existence or
the character of any external thing. The intent to react on these
external things is independent of any presumptive data of intuition and
antecedent to their appearance: it is an animal endeavour in pursuit or
avoidance, or an animal expectation; but the signals by which intuition
may mark the crises of this animal watch or animal struggle are the same
signals as appear in a dream, when nothing is afoot. The immediate
visionary datum is never the intended object, but always a pathological
symptom, a term in discourse, a description proffered at that moment by
that feeling for that object, different for each channel of sense,
translating digestibility into taste, salubrity into freshness, distance
into size, refraction into colour, attitude into outline, distribution
into perspective, and immersing everything in a moral medium, where it
becomes a good or an evil, as it cannot be save to animal sympathy.
All these transcripts, however original in character, remain symbols in
function, because they arise in the act of focussing animal sensibility
or animal endeavour upon some external influence. In a healthy life they
become the familiar and unmistakable masks of nature, lending to
everything in the environment its appropriate aspect in human discourse,
its nickname in the human family. For this reason, when imagination
works in a void (as it can do in dreams or under the influence of
violent passion) it becomes illusion in the bad sense of this word; that
is, it is still taken for a symbol, when it is the symbol of nothing.
All these data, if by a suspension of practical reference they came to
be regarded in themselves, would cease to be illusions cognitively,
since no existence would be suggested by any of them; but a practical
man might still call them illusions for that very reason, because
although free from error they would be devoid of truth. In order to
reach existences intent must transcend intuition, and take data for what
they mean, not for what they are; it must credit them, as understanding
credits words, accepting the passing vision as a warrant for something
that once was, or that will be, or that lies in an entirely different
medium, that of material being, or of discourse elsewhere. Intuition
cannot reveal or discriminate any fact; it is pure fancy; and the more I
sink into it, and the more absolute I make it, the more fanciful it
becomes. If ever it ceases to mean anything at all, it becomes pure
poetry if placid, and mere delirium if intense. So a pain, when it is
not sorrow at some event or the sign of some injury or crisis in bodily
life, becomes sheer horror, and a sort of wanton little hell, existing
absolutely; because the rending of the organism has raised intuition to
an extreme intensity without giving it direction upon anything to be
found or done in the world, or contemplated in the fancy; and pain, when
it reaches distraction, may be said to be that moral monster, intuition
devouring itself, or wasted in agony upon nothing.
Thus scientific psychology confirms the criticism of knowledge and the
experience of life which proclaim that the immediate objects of
intuition are mere appearances and that nothing given exists as it is
given.
CHAPTER IX
THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE
The loss of faith, as I have already observed, has no tendency to banish
ideas; on the contrary, since doubt arises on reflection, it tends to
keep the imagination on the stretch, and lends to the whole spectacle of
things a certain immediacy, suavity, and humour. All that is sordid or
tragic falls away, and everything acquires a lyric purity, as if the die
had not yet been cast and the ominous choice of creation had not been
made. Often the richest philosophies are the most sceptical; the mind is
not then tethered in its home paddock, but ranges at will over the
wilderness of being. The Indians, who deny the existence of the world,
have a keen sense for its infinity and its variegated colours; they play
with the monstrous and miraculous in the grand manner, as in the
_Arabian Nights_. No critic has had a sharper eye for the outlines of
ideas than Hume, who found it impossible seriously to believe that they
revealed anything. In the critic, as in the painter, suspension of
belief and of practical understanding is favourable to vision; the
arrested eye renders every image limpid and unequivocal. And this is not
merely an effect of physiological compensation, in that perhaps the
nervous energy withdrawn from preparations for action is allowed to
intensify the process of mere sensation. There ensues a logical
clarification as well; because so long as belief, interpretation, and
significance entered in, the object in hand was ambiguous; in seeking
the fact the mind overlooked or confused the datum. Yet each element in
this eager investigation—including its very eagerness—is precisely what
it is; and if I renounce for the moment all transitive intelligence, and
give to each of these elements its due definition, I shall have a much
richer as well as clearer collection of terms and relations before me,
than when I was clumsily attempting to make up my mind. Living beings
dwell in their expectations rather than in their senses. If they are
ever to _see_ what they see, they must first in a manner stop living;
they must suspend the will, as Schopenhauer put it; they must photograph
the idea that is flying past, veiled in its very swiftness. This
swiftness is not its own fault, but that of my haste and inattention; my
hold is loose on it, as in a dream; or else perhaps those veils and that
swiftness are the truth of the picture; and it is they that the true
artist should be concerned to catch and to eternalise, restoring to all
that the practical intellect calls vague its own specious definition.
Nothing is vague in itself, or other than just what it is. Symbols are
vague only in respect to their signification, when this remains
ambiguous.
It is accordingly an inapt criticism often passed upon Berkeley and Hume
that they overlooked vagueness in ideas, although almost every human
idea is scandalously vague. No, their intuition of ideas, at least
initially, was quite direct and honest. The ambiguity they overlooked
lay in the relation of ideas to physical things, which they wished to
reduce to groups or series of these pellucid ideas—a chimerical physics.
Had they abstained altogether from identifying ideas with objects of
natural knowledge (which are events and facts), and from trying to
construct material things out of optical and tactile images, they might
have much enriched the philosophy of specious reality, and discerned the
innocent realm of ideas as directly as Plato did, but more accurately.
In this they need not have confused or undermined faith in natural
things. Perception _is_ faith; more perception may extend this faith or
reform it, but can never recant it except by sophistry. These virgin
philosophers were like the cubists or futurists in the painting of
to-day. They might have brought to light curious and neglected forms of
direct intuition. They could not justly have been charged with absurdity
for seeing what they actually saw. But they lapse into absurdity, and
that irremediably, if they pretend to be the first and only masters of
anatomy and topography.
Far from being vague or abstract the obvious ideas remaining to a
complete sceptic may prove too absorbing, too multitudinous, or too
sweet. A moral reprobation of them is no less intelligible than is the
scientific criticism which rejects them as illusions and as no
constituents of the existing world. Conscience no less than business may
blame the sceptic for a sort of luxurious idleness; he may call himself
a lotus-eater, may heave a sigh of fatigue at doing nothing, and may
even feel a touch of the vertigo and wish to close the eyes on all these
images that entertain him to no purpose. But scepticism is an exercise,
not a life; it is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and
render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act
wisely; and meantime the pure sceptic need take no offence at the
multiplicity of images that crowd upon him, if he is scrupulous not to
trust them and to assert nothing at their prompting. Scepticism is the
chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon
or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and
proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct
and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
But the philosopher, when he is speculative only, is a sort of perpetual
celibate; he is bent on not being betrayed, rather than on being annexed
or inspired; and although if he is at all wise he must see that the true
marriage of the mind is with nature and science and the practical arts,
yet in his special theoretic vocation, it will be a boon to him to view
all experience simply, in the precision and distinctness which all its
parts acquire when not referred to any substance which they might
present confusedly, nor to any hypothesis or action which they might
suggest.
The sceptic, then, as a consequence of carrying his scepticism to the
greatest lengths, finds himself in the presence of more luminous and
less equivocal objects than does the working and believing mind; only
these objects are without meaning, they are only what they are
obviously, all surface. They show him everything thinkable with the
greatest clearness and force; but he can no longer imagine that he sees
in these objects anything save their instant presence and their
face-value. Scepticism therefore suspends all knowledge worthy of the
name, all that transitive and presumptive knowledge of facts which is a
form of belief; and instead it bestows intuition of ideas,
contemplative, aesthetic, dialectical, arbitrary. But whereas transitive
knowledge, though important if true, may always be challenged,
intuition, on the contrary, which neither has nor professes to have any
ulterior object or truth, runs no risks of error, because it claims no
jurisdiction over anything alien or eventual.
In this lucidity and calmness of intuition there is something
preternatural. Imagine a child accustomed to see clothes only on living
persons and hardly distinguishing them from the magical strong bodies
that agitate them, and suddenly carry this child into a costumer’s shop,
where he will see all sorts of garments hung in rows upon manikins, with
hollow breasts all of visible wire, and little wooden nobs instead of
heads: he might be seriously shocked or even frightened. How should it
be possible for clothes standing up like this not to be people? Such
abstractions, he might say to himself, are metaphysically impossible.
Either these figures must be secretly alive and ready, when he least
expects it, to begin to dance, or else they are not real at all, and he
can only fancy that he sees them. Just as the spectacle of all these
gaunt clothes without bodies might make the child cry, so later might
the whole spectacle of nature, if ever he became a sceptic. The little
word _is_ has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things
with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if
therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too
lies the danger. Whenever I use the word _is_, except in sheer
tautology, I deeply misuse it; and when I discover my error, the world
seems to fall asunder and the members of my family no longer know one
another. Existence is the strong body and familiar motion which the
young mind expects to find in every dummy. The oldest of us are
sometimes no less recalcitrant to the spectacle of the garments of
existence—which is all we ever saw of it—when the existence is taken
away. Yet it is to these actual and familiar, but now disembowelled
objects, that scepticism introduces us, as if to a strange world; a vast
costumer’s gallery of ideas where all sorts of patterns and models are
on exhibition, without bodies to wear them, and where no human habits of
motion distract the eye from the curious cut and precise embroideries of
every article. This display, so complete in its spectacular reality, not
a button nor a feather wanting or unobserved, is not the living crowd
that it ought to be, but a mockery of it, like the palace of the
Sleeping Beauty. To my conventional mind, clothes without bodies are no
less improper than bodies without clothes; yet the conjunction of these
things is but human. All nature runs about naked, and quite happy; and I
am not so remote from nature as not to revert on occasion to that
nakedness—which is unconsciousness—with profound relief. But ideas
without things and apparel without wearers seem to me a stranger
condition; I think the garments were made to fit the limbs, and should
collapse without them. Yet, like the fig leaves of Eden, they are not
garments essentially. They become such by accident, when one or another
of them is appropriated by the providential buyer—not necessarily
human—whose instinct may choose it; or else it is perfectly content to
miss its chance, and to lie stacked for ever among its motley neighbours
in this great store of neglected finery.
It was the fear of illusion that originally disquieted the honest mind,
congenitally dogmatic, and drove it in the direction of scepticism; and
it may find three ways, not equally satisfying to its honesty, in which
that fear of illusion may be dispelled. One is death, in which illusion
vanishes and is forgotten; but although anxiety about error, and even
positive error, are thus destroyed, no solution is offered to the
previous doubt: no explanation of what could have called forth that
illusion or what could have dissipated it. Another way out is by
correcting the error, and substituting a new belief for it: but while in
animal life this is the satisfying solution, and the old habit of
dogmatism may be resumed in consequence without practical inconvenience,
speculatively the case is not at all advanced; because no criterion of
truth is afforded except custom, comfort, and the accidental absence of
doubt; and what is absent by chance may return at any time unbidden. The
third way, at which I have now arrived, is to entertain the illusion
without succumbing to it, accepting it openly as an illusion, and
forbidding it to claim any sort of being but that which it obviously
has; and then, whether it profits me or not, it will not deceive me.
What will remain of this non-deceptive illusion will then be a truth,
and a truth the being of which requires no explanation, since it is
utterly impossible that it should have been otherwise. Of course I may
still ask why the identity of this particular thing with itself should
have occurred to _me_; a question which could only be answered by
plunging into a realm of existence and natural history every part and
principle of which would be just as contingent, just as uncalled-for,
and just as inexplicable as this accident of my being; but that this
particular thing, or any other which might have occurred to me instead,
should be constituted as it is raises no problem; for how could _it_
have been constituted otherwise? Nor is there any moral offence any
longer in the contingency of my view of it, since my view of it involves
no error. The error came from a wild belief about it; and the
possibility of error came from a wild propensity to belief. Relieve now
the pressure of that animal haste and that hungry presumption; the error
is washed out of the illusion; it is no illusion now, but an idea. Just
as food would cease to be food, and poison poison, if you removed the
stomach and the blood that they might nourish or infect; and just as
beautiful things would cease to be beautiful if you removed the wonder
and the welcome of living souls, so if you eliminate your anxiety,
deceit itself becomes entertainment, and every illusion but so much
added acquaintance with the realm of form. For the unintelligible
accident of existence will cease to appear to lurk in this manifest
being, weighting and crowding it, and threatening it with being
swallowed up by nondescript neighbours. It will appear dwelling in its
own world, and shining by its own light, however brief may be my glimpse
of it: for no date will be written on it, no frame of full or of empty
time will shut it in; nothing in it will be addressed to me, nor
suggestive of any spectator. It will seem an event in no world, an
incident in no experience. The quality of it will have ceased to exist:
it will be merely the quality which it inherently, logically, and
inalienably is. It will be an ESSENCE.
Retrenchment has its rewards. When by a difficult suspension of
judgement I have deprived a given image of all adventitious
significance, when it is taken neither for the manifestation of a
substance nor for an idea in a mind nor for an event in a world, but
simply if a colour for that colour and if music for that music, and if a
face for that face, then an immense cognitive certitude comes to
compensate me for so much cognitive abstention. My scepticism at last
has touched bottom, and my doubt has found honourable rest in the
absolutely indubitable. Whatever essence I find and note, that essence
and no other is established before me. I cannot be mistaken about it,
since I now have no object of intent other than the object of intuition.
If for some private reason I am dissatisfied, and wish to change my
entertainment, nothing prevents; but the change leaves the thing I first
saw possessed of all its quality, for the sake of which I perhaps
disliked or disowned it. That, while one essence is before me, some one
else may be talking of another, which he calls by the same name, is
nothing to the purpose; and if I myself change and correct myself,
choosing a new essence in place of the old, my life indeed may have
shifted its visions and its interests, but the characters they had when
I harboured them are theirs without change. Indeed, only because each
essence is the essence defined by instant apprehension can I truly be
said to have changed my mind; for I can have discarded any one of them
only by substituting something different. This new essence could not be
different from the former one, if each was not unchangeably itself.
There is, then, a sort of play with the non-existent, or game of
thought, which intervenes in all alleged knowledge of matters of fact,
and survives that knowledge, if this is ever questioned or disproved. To
this mirage of the non-existent, or intuition of essence, the pure
sceptic is confined; and confined is hardly the word; because though
without faith and risk he can never leave that thin and bodiless plane
of being, this plane in its tenuity is infinite; and there is nothing
possible elsewhere that, as a shadow and a pattern, is not prefigured
there. To consider an essence is, from a spiritual point of view, to
enlarge acquaintance with true being; but it is not even to broach
knowledge of fact; and the ideal object so defined may have no natural
significance, though it has æsthetic immediacy and logical definition.
The modest scope of this speculative acquaintance with essence renders
it infallible, whilst the logical and æsthetic ideality of its object
renders that object eternal. Thus the most radical sceptic may be
consoled, without being rebuked nor refuted; he may leap at one bound
over the whole human tangle of beliefs and dogmatic claims, elude human
incapacity and bias, and take hold of the quite sufficient assurance
that any essence or ideal quality of being which he may be intuiting has
just the characters he is finding in it, and has them eternally.
This is no idle assurance. After all, the only thing that can ultimately
interest me in other men’s experience or, apart from animal egotism, in
my own, is just this character of the essences which at any time have
swum into our ken; not at all the length of time through which we may
have beheld them, nor the circumstances that produced that vision;
unless these circumstances in turn, when considered, place before the
mind the essences which it delights to entertain. Of course, the choice
and the interest of essences come entirely from the bent of the animal
that elicits the vision of them from his own soul and its adventures;
and nothing but affinity with my animal life lends the essences I am
able to discern their moral colour, so that to my mind they are
beautiful, horrible, trivial, or vulgar. The good essences are such as
accompany and express a good life. In them, whether good or bad, that
life has its eternity. Certainly when I cease to exist and to think, I
shall lose hold on this assurance; but the theme in which for a moment I
found the fulfilment of my expressive impulses will remain, as it always
was, a theme fit for consideration, even if no one else should consider
it, and I should never consider it again.
Nor is this all. Not only is the character of each essence inalienable,
and, so long as it is open to intuition, indubitable, but the realm of
essences is infinite. Since any essence I happen to have hit upon is
independent of me and would possess its precise character if I had never
been born, or had never been led by the circumstances of my life and
temperament to apprehend that particular essence, evidently all other
essences, which I have not been led to think of, rejoice in the same
sort of impalpable being—impalpable, yet the only sort of being that the
most rugged experience can ever actually find. Thus a mind enlightened
by scepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports,
and free from all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes or
existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very sweet and
marvellous solitude. The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open
out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and
peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise
where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have
lost their urgency and their venom.
CHAPTER X
SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY
There is some danger in pointing out the obvious. Quick wits, perceiving
at once how obvious the obvious is (though they may never have noticed
it before), will say it is futile and silly to dwell upon it. Pugnacious
people will assume that you mean more than you say, and are attempting
to smuggle in some objectionable dogma under your truisms. Finally,
docile minds, pleased to think you are delivering an oracle for their
edification, will bow before your plain words as before some sacred
mystery. The discernment of essence is subject, I know, to all these
misunderstandings, and before going further I will endeavour to remove
them.
In the first place, a warning to tender idealists. This recognition that
the data of experience are essences is Platonic, but it is a corrective
to all that is sentimental in Platonism, curing it as it were
homœopathically. The realm of essence is not peopled by choice forms or
magic powers. It is simply the unwritten catalogue, prosaic and
infinite, of all the characters possessed by such things as happen to
exist, together with the characters which all different things would
possess if they existed. It is the sum of mentionable objects, of terms
about which, or in which, something might be said. Thus although
essences have the texture and ontological status of Platonic ideas, they
can lay claim to none of the cosmological, metaphysical, or moral
prerogatives attributed to those ideas. They are infinite in number and
neutral in value. Greek minds had rhetorical habits; what told in debate
seemed to them final; and Socrates thought it important to define in
disputation the common natures designated by various words. Plato, who
was initially a poet, had a warmer intuition of his ideas; but it was
still grammar and moral prejudice that led him to select and to deify
them. The quality or function that makes all shepherds shepherds or all
goods good is an essence; but so are all the remaining qualities which
make each shepherd and each good distinguishable from every other. Far
from gathering up the fluidity of existence into a few norms for human
language and thought to be focussed upon, the realm of essence
infinitely multiplies that multiplicity, and adds every undiscriminated
shade and mode of being to those which man has discriminated or which
nature contains. Essence is not something invented or instituted for a
purpose; it is something passive, anything that might be found, every
quality of being; it therefore has not the function of reducing
plurality to unity for the convenience of our poor wits or economy of
language. It is far more garrulous than nature, herself not laconic.
Nor have essences a metaphysical status, so as to exercise a non-natural
control over nature. My doctrine lends no countenance to the human
presumption that whatsoever man notices or names or loves ought to be
more deeply seated in reality or more permanent than what he ignores or
despises. The good is a great magnet over discourse and imagination, and
therefore rightly rules the Platonic world, which is that of moral
philosophy only; but this good is itself defined and chosen by the
humble animal nature of man, demanding to eat and live and love. In the
realm of essence this human good has no pre-eminence, and being an
essence it has no power. The Platonic notion that ideas were models
which things imperfectly imitated expresses admirably the moral nature
of man attaining to self-knowledge and proclaiming clearly his
instinctive demands; or possibly (if the moralist is also a poet plastic
to the wider influences of nature) defining also the demands which
non-human creatures would make on themselves or on us if they had life
and thought. Platonic ideas, in their widest range, express sympathy
with universal life; they are anagrams of moral insight. Hence their
nobility, and constant appeal to minds struggling after perfection,
whether in art or in self-discipline. The spirit, by expressing itself
in them, is fortified, as the artist is by his work taking shape before
his eyes and revealing to him his own hidden intentions and judgements
never expressed. But the realm of essence is no more limited to these
few ideals chosen and projected heavenwards by the aspiration of living
creatures, than the celestial galaxy is limited to the north star.
Excellence is relative to the accidental life of nature which selects
now one essence and now another to be the goal of some thought or
endeavour. In the realm of essence no emphasis falls on these favourite
forms which does not fall equally on every other member of that infinite
continuum. Every bad thing—bad because false to the ideal which its own
nature may propose to it—illustrates an essence quite as accurately as
if it had been good. No essence, except temporarily and by accident, is
the goal of any natural process, much less its motive power.
Thus the discernment of essence, while confirming Platonic logic in the
ideal status which it assigns to the terms of discourse (and discourse
includes all that is mental in sensation and perception), destroys the
illusions of Platonism, because it shows that essences, being
non-existent and omnimodal, can exercise no domination over matter, but
themselves come to light in nature or in thought only as material
exigencies may call them forth and select them. The realm of essence is
a perfect democracy, where everything that is or might be has a right of
citizenship; so that only some arbitrary existential principle—call it
the predispositions in matter or the blindness of absolute will—can be
rendered responsible, in a verbal metaphysics, for things being as they
are, causing them to fall now into this form and now into that, or to
choose one essence rather than another to be their type and ideal. These
chosen types are surrounded in the realm of essence by every monster,
every unexampled being, and every vice; no more vicious there, no more
anomalous or monstrous than any other nature. Seen against that infinite
background even the star-dust of modern astronomy, with its strange
rhythms and laws, and its strange fertility, seems the most curious of
accidents: what a choice for existence to make, when it might have been
anything else! And as to the snug universe which the ancients, and most
men in their daily thoughts, have imagined about them, presided over by
its Olympian deities, or its Jewish God, or its German Will, it is not
only the figment of the most laughable egotism, but even if by chance it
were the actual world, it would be utterly contingent and ephemeral.
This is one hygienic effect of the discovery of essence: it is a
shower-bath for the dreamy moralist, and clears Platonism of
superstition.
On the other hand, the discernment of essence reinstates the Socratic
analysis of knowledge, by showing that essences are indispensable terms
in the perception of matters of fact, and render transitive knowledge
possible. If there were no purely ideal characters present to intuition
yet not existentially a part either of the mind or of the environment,
nothing ulterior could ever be imagined, much less truly conceived.
Every supposed instance of knowledge would be either a bit of sentience
without an object, or an existing entity unrelated to any mind. But an
essence given in intuition, being non-existent in itself and by no means
the object at that moment intended by the animal in his alertness or
pursuit, may become a description of that object. If there is to be
intelligence at all, the immediate must be vehicular. It is so when
animal fancy is turned to the description of things; for then passive
sensibility supplies terms which are in themselves volatile and
homeless, and these terms may be dispersed as names, to christen the
things that receive them, carrying intelligence by its intent to its
objects (objects already selected by animal endeavour) and reporting the
objects to the animal mind by their appearance. What is given becomes in
this manner a sign for what is sought, and a conventional description of
it; and the object originally posited by faith and intent in the act of
living may be ultimately more and more accurately revealed to belief and
to thought. Essences are ideal terms at the command of fancy and of the
senses (whose data are fancies) as words are at the command of a ready
tongue. If thought arises at all, it must think something after some
fashion; and the essences it evokes in intuition enable it to imagine,
to assert, and perhaps truly to know something about what is not itself
nor its own condition: some existing thing or removed event which would
otherwise run on blindly in its own medium, at best overtaking the
animal unawares, or confronting him to no purpose. But when the animate
body responds to circumstances and is sensitive, in various
unprecedented ways, to their variations, it acquires a whole sensuous
vocabulary in which to describe them, colours, sounds, shapes, sizes,
excellences, and defects being the parts of speech in its grammar. It
feels hot or cold according to the season; so that cold and heat become
signs of the seasons for the spirit, the homely poetry in which the
senses render the large facts and the chief influences of nature.
Perhaps even the vegetative soul has her dreams, but in the animal these
floating visions are clarified by watchfulness and can be compared and
contrasted in their character as well as in their occasions; and they
lend intelligence terms in which to think and judge. The toys of sense
become the currency of commerce; ideas, which were only echoes of facts,
serve as symbols for them. Thus intuition of essences first enables the
mind to say something about anything, to think of what is not given, and
to be a mind at all.
A great use of the discovery of essence, then, is to justify the notions
of intelligence and knowledge, otherwise self-contradictory, and to show
how such transcendence of the actual is possible for the animal mind.
The notion of essence is also useful in dismissing and handing over to
physical science, where it belongs, the mooted question concerning the
primary and secondary qualities of matter. There is a profound but
genuine problem here which no logical discrimination and no
psychological analysis can affect, namely: What are the elements of
matter, and by what arrangement or motion of these elements do gross
bodies acquire their various properties? The physical philosophers must
tell us, if they can, how matter is composed: and as they are compelled,
like the rest of us, to begin by studying the aspects and behaviour of
obvious bodies, on the scale of human perception, it is but fair to give
them time, or even eternity, in which to come to a conclusion. But the
question of primary and secondary qualities, as mooted in modern
philosophy, is a false problem. It rests on the presumption that the
data of sense can be and should be constituents of the object in nature,
or at least exactly like its constituents. The object in nature is, for
example, bread I am eating: and the presumption of modern psychologists
is that this object is, or ought to be, composed of my sensations of
contact, colour, temperature, movement, and pleasure in eating it. The
pleasure and the colour, however, soon prove to be reversible according
to the accidents of appetite or jaundice in me, without any change in
the object itself. In the act of eating (overlooked by these
psychologists) I have my radical assurance of that object, know its
place, and continue to testify to its identity. The bread, for animal
faith, is this thing I am eating, and causing to disappear to my
substantial advantage; and although language is clumsy in expressing
this assurance, which runs much deeper than language, I may paraphrase
it by saying that bread is this substance I can eat and turn into my own
substance; in seizing and biting it I determine its identity and its
place in nature, and in transforming it I prove its existence. If the
psychological critics of experience overlooked this animal faith in fact
as they do in theory, their theory itself would have no point of
application, and they would not know what they were talking about, and
would not really be talking about anything. Their data would have no
places and no context. As it is, they continue illegitimately to posit
the bread, as an animal would, and then, in their human wisdom, proceed
to remove from the description of it the colour and the pleasure
concerned, as being mere effects on themselves, while they identify the
bread itself with the remainder of their description hypostatised:
shape, weight, and hardness. But how should some data, when posited,
produce others entirely different, but contemporary, or perhaps earlier?
Evidently these so-called primary qualities are simply those essences
which custom or science continues to use in its description of things:
but meantime the things have evaporated, and the description of them, in
no matter what terms, ought to be idle and useless. All knowledge of
nature and history has become a game of thought, a laborious dream in
which a dim superstition makes me believe that some trains of images are
more prosperous than others.
It is because essences are not discerned that philosophers in so many
ways labour the hopeless notion that there is nothing in sense which is
not first in things. Either perception and knowledge (which are animal
faith) are deputed to be intuition, so that things have to be composed
pictorially, out of the elements of human discourse, as if their
substance consisted of images pressed together like a pack of cards; or
else ideas must be explained as imports from the outer world, prolonging
the qualities of things, as if the organs of sense were only holes in
the skin, through which emanations of things could pass ready-made into
the heart or head, and perhaps in those dark caverns could breed
unnaturally together, producing a monstrous brood of dreams and errors.
But, as a matter of fact, elaborate bodily mechanisms are just as
requisite for seeing as for thinking, and the landscape, as a man sees
it, is no less human than the universe as his philosophy constructs
it—and we know how human that is. Evidences soon accumulate to prove
that no quality in the object is like any datum of sense. Nothing given
exists. Consider, for instance, the water which seems cold to one hand
and warm to the other. Shall the water be called hot or cold? Both,
certainly, if a full description of it, in all its relations and
appearances, is what is sought. But if what is sought is the substance
of the water, properties shown to be relative to my organs of sense
cannot be “real” qualities of that substance. Their original (for they
were still expected to have originals) was accordingly placed elsewhere.
Perhaps the “real” cold might be in the warm hand, and the “real” warmth
in the cold one; or in cold and hot tracts of the brain respectively; or
else “in the mind”—a substance which might endure heat and cold
simultaneously in different parts of itself. Or perhaps the mind was
simply the heat and the cold existing successively, each a feeling
absolute in itself: but in this case a second mind would be required to
observe, remember, and appropriate those existing feelings, and how
should reflection reach those feelings or know at all what they were? If
they are past, how should intuition possess them now? And if they are
only the present data of intuition, need they ever have existed before,
or in any form but that in which I feel them now, when I feel them no
longer?
The notion that knowledge is intuition, that it must either penetrate to
the inner quality of its object or else have no object but the overt
datum, has not been carried out with rigour: if it had, it might have
been sooner abandoned. Rudimentary vital feelings, such as pleasure or
hunger, are not supposed even by the most mythological philosophers to
be drawn from external sources of the same quality. Plato in one place
says of intelligence that there must surely be floods of it in the vast
heavens, as there are floods of light there, whence puny man may draw
his dribblet. He neglects, however, to extend this principle to pain,
pleasure, or hunger. He does not argue that my paltry pains and
pleasures can be but drops sucked in from some vast cosmic reservoir of
these feelings, nor that my momentary hunger could never have improvised
its own quality, but must be only a bit, transferred to my mortal
stomach, of a divine hunger eternally gnawing the whole sky. Yet this is
the principle on which many a candid idolater has supposed, and still
supposes, that light, space, music, and reason, as his intuition renders
them, must permeate the universe.
The illusion is childish, and when we have once discerned essence, it
seems strangely idolatrous. The essences given in intuition are fetched
from no original. The reason, music, space, and light of my imagination
are essences existing nowhere: the intuition of them is quite as
spiritual and quite as personal as my pain, pleasure, or hunger, and
quite as little likely to be drawn from an imaginary store of similar
substances in the world at large. They are dream-lights kindled by my
fancy, like all the terms of discourse; they do not need to be
previously resident either in the object or in the organ of sense. Not
existing at all, they cannot be the causes of their own appearance; nor
would introducing an existing triangle under the skin, or making the
brain triangular, in the least help to display the triangle to
intuition. But if some material thing called a triangle is placed before
me at a suitable distance, my eyes and brain will do the rest, and the
essence dear to Euclid will arise in my mind’s eye. No essence would
ever appear simply because many hypostatic instances of it existed in
the world: a living body must create the intuition and blossom into it,
evoking some spontaneous image. Sense is a faculty of calling names
under provocation; all perception and thought are cries and comments
elicited from the heart of some living creature. They are original,
though not novel, like the feelings of lovers: normal phases of
animation in animals, whose life carries this inner flux of pictures and
currents in the fancy, mixed with little and great emotions and dull
bodily feelings: nothing in all this discourse being a passive copy of
existences elsewhere.
On the other hand, if the so-called primary qualities, taken
pictorially, are just as symbolic as the secondary ones, the secondary,
taken indicatively, are just as true as the primary. They too report
some particularity in the object which, being relative to me, may be of
the highest importance, and being also relative to something in the
constitution of the object, may be a valuable indication of its nature,
like greenness in grapes. The qualities most obviously relative and
reversible, like pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, are truly
qualities of things in some of their relations. They can all, by
judicious criticism and redistribution, become _true_ expressions of the
life of nature. They have their exits and their entrances at appointed
times, and they supply a perspective view, or caricature, of the world
no less interesting and pungent for being purely egotistical. Artists
have their place, and the animal mind is one of them.
That like knows like is a proverb, and after the manner of proverbs it
is applicable on occasion, but its opposite is so too. Similar minds can
understand the same things, and in that sense can understand each other:
they can share and divine one another’s thoughts. This is because
similar organs under similar stimulation will yield similar intuitions,
revealing the same essence: like knows like by dramatic sympathy and
ideal unanimity. But in sensuous perception the unlike knows the unlike.
Here the organ is not adjusted to a similar organ, like instruments
tuned up to the same key: the adjustment is rather to heterogeneous
events in the environment or remote facts on quite a different scale;
and the images that mediate this knowledge are quite unlike the events
they signify. It would be grotesque to expect a flower to imitate or to
resemble the soil, climate, moisture, and light, or even the seed and
sap, that preside over its budding: but the flower presupposes all these
agencies and is an index to them; an index which may become a sign and a
vehicle of knowledge when it is used as an index by some discursive
observer. Any given essence is normally a true sign for the object or
event which occupies animal attention when that essence appears: as it
is true of arsenic that it is poisonous and of pepper that it is hot,
although the quality of being hot or poisonous cannot possibly be a
material constituent of those substances, nor a copy of such a
constituent. The environment determines the occasions on which
intuitions arise, the psyche—the inherited organisation of the
animal—determines their form, and ancient conditions of life on earth no
doubt determined which psyches should arise and prosper; and probably
many forms of intuition, unthinkable to man, express the facts and the
rhythms of nature to other animal minds. Yet all these various
symbolisms and sensuous dialects may be truly significant, composing
most relevant complications in nature, by which she comments on herself.
To suppose that some of these comments are poetical and others literal
is gratuitous. They are all presumably poetical in form (intuition being
poetry in act) and all expressive in function, and addressed to the
facts of nature in some human and moral perspective, as poetry is too.
The absurdity of wishing to have _intuitions of things_ reaches its
climax when we ask whether things, if nobody looked at them, would still
look as they do. Of course they would still be what they are: but
whether their intrinsic essence, whether they are looked at or not,
_resembles_ such essences as eyes of one sort or another might gather by
looking at them, is an idle question. It is not resemblance but
relevance and closeness of adaptation that render a language expressive
or an expression true. We read nature as the English used to read Latin,
pronouncing it like English, but understanding it very well. If all
other traditions of Latin euphony had been lost, there would have been
no means of discovering in what respect the English pronunciation was a
distortion, although the judicious would have suspected that the Romans
could not have had an Oxonian accent. So each tribe of animals, each
sense, each stage of experience and science, reads the book of nature
according to a phonetic system of its own, with no possibility of
exchanging it for the native sounds: but this situation, though hopeless
in one sense, is not unsatisfactory practically, and is innocently
humorous. It adds to the variety, if not to the gaiety, of experience;
and perhaps a homely accent in knowledge, as in Latin, renders learning
more savoury and familiar, and makes us more willing to read.
It is just because the images given in sense are so very original and
fantastic that understanding can enlarge knowledge by correcting,
combining, and discounting those appearances. Sensible qualities, like
pet names, do very well at home, when no consistent or exact description
of things is required, but only some familiar signal. When it comes to
public business, however, more serious and legal designations have to be
used, and these are what we call science. The description is not less
symbolic but more accurate and minute. It may also involve—as in optics
and psychology—a discovery of the images of sense as distinct from their
original uses as living visions of things; and we may then learn that
our immediate experience was but a diving-board, on which we hardly knew
we were standing in plunging into the world. It was indeed essentially a
theoretic eminence, a place of outlook, intended to fortify and prepare
us for the plunge. Accordingly the symbols of sense are most relevant to
their object at the remove and on the scale on which our daily action
encounters it. In science, analogies and hypotheses, if not microscopes
and telescopes, supply ideas of things more immediate or more remote.
Thus the warmth and the cold felt at once in the same water inform me
more directly about the water in relation to my two hands, than about my
temperature, my brain, or my intuitions; and yet these things too are
involved in that event and may be discovered in it by science. But
science and sense, though differing in their scope, are exactly alike in
their truth; and the views taken by science, though more penetrating and
extensive, are still views: ground plans, elevations, and geometric
projections taking the place of snapshots. All intuitions, whether in
sense or thought, are theoretic: all are appropriate renderings, on some
method and on some scale, of the circumstances in which they arise, and
may serve to describe those circumstances truly: but experience and tact
are requisite, as in the use of any language or technique of art, in
distributing our stock symbols, and fitting the image to the occasion
and the word to the fact.
The notion of essence also relieves the weary philosopher of several
other problems, even more scholastic and artificial, concerning
sensations and ideas, particulars and universals, the abstract and the
concrete. There are no such differences in essences as they are given:
all are equally immediate and equally unsubstantial, equally ideal and
equally complete. Nothing could be more actual and specific than some
unpleasant inner feeling or sentiment, as it colours the passing moment;
yet nothing could be less descriptive of anything further, or vaguer in
its significance, or more ephemeral an index to processes and events
which it does not disclose but which are all its substance. And the
clearest idea—say a geometrical sphere—and the most remote from sense
(if we mean by sense the images actually supplied by the outer organs)
is just such a floating presence, caught and lost again, an essence that
in itself tells me nothing of its validity, nor of a world of fact to
which it might apply. All these current distinctions are extraneous to
essences, which are the only data of experience. The distinctions are
borrowed from various ulterior existential relations subsisting between
facts, some mental and some material, but none of them ever given in
intuition. The mental facts, namely the intuitions to which the essences
appear, may be confused by psychologists with those essences, as the
material things supposed to possess those essences as qualities may be
confused with them by the practical intellect, and both may be called by
the same names; a double equivocation which later enables the
metaphysician, by a double hypostasis of the datum, to say that the
material thing and the mental event are one and the same _given fact_.
We may innocently speak of given facts, meaning those posited in
previous perceptions or referred to in previous discourse: but no fact
can be a given fact in the sense of being a datum of intuition. And it
is entirely on relations between facts not given that those current
distinctions rest. They may often express truly the relative scope of
intuitions, or the manner in which they take place amongst the general
events in nature or arise in the animal body: but in respect to
essences, which are the only terms of actual thought, they are perfectly
unmeaning.
Suppose, for instance, that I see yellow, that my eyes are open, and
that there is a buttercup before me; my intuition (not properly the
essence “yellow” which is the datum) is then called a sensation. If
again I see yellow with my eyes closed, the intuition is called an idea
or a dream—although often in what is called an idea no yellow appears,
but only words. If yet again I see yellow with my eyes open, but there
is no buttercup, the intuition is called a hallucination. These various
situations are curious, and worth distinguishing in optics and in
medical psychology, but for the sceptical scrutiny of experience they
make no difference. What can inform me, when I see yellow simply,
whether my eyes are open or shut, or whether I am awake or dreaming, or
what functions material buttercups may have in psycho-physical
correlation, or whether there is anything physical or anything psychical
in the world, or any world at all? These notions are merely
conventional, imported knowledge or imported delusion. Such extraneous
circumstances, whether true or false, cannot alter in the least the
essence which I have before me, nor its sort of reality, nor its status
in respect to my intuition of it.
Suppose again that I am at sea and feel the ship rocking. This feeling
is called external perception; but if I feel nausea, my feeling is
called internal sensation, or emotion, or introspection; and there are
sad psychologists to conclude thence that while the ship rocking is
something physical, and a mere appearance, nausea is something
psychical, and an absolute reality. Why this partiality in distributing
metaphysical dignities amongst things equally obvious? Each essence that
appears appears just as it is, because its appearance defines it, and
determines the whole being that it is or has. Nothing given is either
physical or mental, in the sense of being intrinsically a thing or a
thought; it is just a quality of being. Essences (like “rocking”) which
serve eventually to describe material facts are given in intuitions
which are just as mental as those which supply psychological terms for
describing mental discourse. On the other hand, essences (like “nausea”)
used first perhaps for describing discourse, mark crises in the flux of
matter just as precisely as those which are used to describe material
facts directly; because discourse goes on in animals subject to material
influences. But in neither case can the intuitions—which constitute
discourse and the mental sphere—be ever given in intuition. They are
posited in memory, expectation, and dramatic psychology. The rocking I
feel is called physical, because the essence before me—say coloured
planes crossing—serves to report and designate very much more
complicated and prolonged movements in the ship and the waves; and the
nausea I also feel is called psychical, because it reports nothing
(unless my medical imagination intervenes) but is endured pathetically,
with a preponderating sense of time, change, and danger, as it largely
consists in feeling how long this lasts, how upset I am, and how sick I
am about to be.
Again, if I see yellow once, my experience is called a particular
impression, and its object, yellow, is supposed to exist and to be a
particular too; but if I see yellow again, yellow has mysteriously
become a universal, a general idea, and an abstraction. Yet the datum
for intuition is throughout precisely the same. No essence is abstract,
yet none is a particular thing or event, none is an object of belief,
perception, or pursuit, having a particular position in the context of
nature. Even the intuition, though it is an event, cannot become an
object of pursuit or perception; and its conventional place in history,
when it has been posited and is believed to have occurred, is assigned
to it only by courtesy, at the place and time of its physical support,
as a wife in some countries takes her husband’s name. Not the data of
intuition, but the objects of animal faith, are the particulars
perceived: they alone are the existing things or events to which the
animal is reacting and to which he is attributing the essences which
arise, as he does so, before his fancy. These data of intuition are
universals; they form the elements of such a description of the object
as is at that time possible; they are never that object itself, nor any
part of it. Essences are not drawn out or abstracted from things; they
are given before the thing can be clearly perceived, since they are the
terms used in perception; but they are not given until attention is
stretched upon the thing, which is posited blindly in action; and they
come as revelations, or oracles, delivered by that thing to the mind,
and symbolising it there. In itself, as suspended understanding may
suffer us to recognise it in reflection, each essence is a positive and
complete theme: it is impossible that for experience anything should be
more concrete or individual than is this exact and total appearance
before me. Having never been parts of any perceived object, it is
impossible that given essences should be abstracted from it. Being
obvious and immediate data they cannot even have that congenital
imperfection, that limp, which we might feel in a broken arch, or in the
half of anything already familiar as a whole. But given essences are
indeed visionary, they are unsubstantial; and in that respect they seem
strange and unearthly to an animal expecting to work amongst things
without realising their appearance. Yet ghostly as his instinct may deem
them, they are perfect pictures, with nothing abstract or abstruse in
their specious nature. The abstract is a category posterior to
intuition, and applicable only to terms, such as numbers and other
symbols of mathematics, which have been intentionally substituted for
other essences given earlier, by which they were suggested; but even
these technical terms are abstract only by accident and in function;
they have a concrete essence of their own, and are constitutive elements
of perfectly definite structures in their own plane of being, forming
patterns and running into scales there, like so much music.
Similarly, nothing given in sensation or thought is in the least vague
in itself. Vagueness is an adventitious quality, which a given
appearance may be said to possess in relation to an object presumed to
have other determinations: as the cloud in _Hamlet_ is but a vague camel
or a vague weasel, but for the landscape-painter a perfectly definite
cloud. The vague is merely the _too_ vague for some assumed purpose; and
philosophers with a mania for accuracy, who find all discourse vague
that is discourse about anything in the world of practice, are like
critics of painting who should find all colours and forms vague, when
they had been touched by aerial perspective, or made poetical by the
rich dyes of fancy and expression. That sort of vagueness is perfection
of artistic form, as the other sort of vagueness may be perfection of
judgement: for knowledge lies in thinking aptly about things, not in
becoming like them. If the standard of articulation in science were the
articulation of existence, science would be impossible for an animal
mind, and if it were possible would be useless: because nothing would be
gained for thought by reproducing a mechanism without any adaptation of
its scale and perspective to the nature of the thinker.
If the instincts of man were well adapted to his conditions, his
thoughts, without being more accurate, would not seem confused. As it
is, intuition is most vivid in the act of hunting or taking alarm, just
when mistakes are probable: and any obvious essence is then precipitated
upon the object, and quarrelled with and dismissed if the object does
not sustain it. An essence, however evident, may even be declared absent
and inconceivable, if it cannot be attributed absolutely to the
substance of the object being chased or eaten. The hungry nominalist may
well say to himself: “If the hues of the pheasant are no part of the
bird, whence should he have fetched them? Am I not looking at the very
creature I am pursuing and hoping presently to devour? And as my teeth
and hands cannot possibly add anything to the substance they will seize
upon, how should my eyes do so now? If therefore any alleged image can
be proved to be no part of my object, I must be mistaken in supposing
that I see such an image at all.” This is also the argument of the
primitive painter, who knowing that men have two eyes and their hands
five fingers, will not admit that their image might be less complete. In
this way the wand of that Queen Mab, intuition, is assimilated by a too
materialistic philosophy to a tongue or an antenna, and required to
reach out to the object and stir it up, exploring its intrinsic quality
and structure. But it is a magic wand, and calls up only wild and
ignorant visions, mischievous and gaily invented; and if ever a
philosopher dreams he has fathomed the thing before him in action, that
wand is tickling his nose. Intuition cheats in enriching him, and nature
who whispers all these tales in his ear is laughing at him and fondling
him at the same time. It is a kindly fiction; because the dreams she
inspires are very much to his mind, and the lies she invents for his
benefit are her poetic masterpiece. Practical men despise the poetry of
poets, but they are well pleased with their own. They would be ashamed
of amusements which might defeat their purposes, or mislead them about
the issue of events; but they embrace heartily the ingenuous fictions of
the senses which they almost recognise to be fictions, and even the
early myths and religions of mankind. These they find true enough for
practical and moral purposes; their playfulness is a convenient
compendium for facts too hard to understand; they are the normal poetry
of observation and policy. Fancy disorganises conduct only when it
expresses vice; and then it is the vice that does the mischief, and not
the fancy.
Even philosophers, when they wish to be very plain and economical,
sometimes fall to denying the immediate. Fact-worship, which is an
idolatry of prudence, prejudices them against their own senses, and
against the mind, which is what prudence serves, if it serves anything;
and perhaps they declare themselves incapable of framing images with
fewer determinations than they believe material things to possess. If a
material triangle must have a perfectly defined shape (although at close
quarters matter might elude such confines), or if a material house must
have a particular number of bricks and a particular shade of colour at
each point of its surface, a professed empiricist like Berkeley may be
tempted to deny that he can have an idea of a triangle, _et cetera_,
without such determinations; whereas, however clear his visual images
may have been, it is certain he never could have had, even in direct
perception, an image specifying all the bricks or all the tints of _any_
house, nor the exact measure of _any_ angle. Berkeley himself, I
suspect, was secretly intent upon essence, which in every degree of
conventional determination is its own standard of completeness. But
given essences have any degree of vagueness in respect to the material
or mathematical objects which they may symbolise, and to which Berkeley
in his hasty nominalism wished to assimilate them. He almost turned
given essences into substances, to take the place of those material
things which he had denied. Each essence is certainly not two
contradictory essences at once; but the definitions which render each
precisely what it is lie in the realm of essence, an infinite continuum
of discrete forms, not in the realm of existence. Essences, in order to
appear, do not need to beg leave of what happens to exist, or to draw
its portrait; yet here the trooping essences are, in such gradations and
numbers as intuition may lend them. It is not by hypostatising them as
they come that their roots in matter or their scope in knowledge can be
discovered.
Thus the discrimination of essence has a happy tendency to liberalise
philosophy, freeing it at once from literalness and from scepticism. If
all data are symbols and all experience comes in poetic terms, it
follows that the human mind, both in its existence and in its quality,
is a free development out of nature, a language or music the terms of
which are arbitrary, like the rules and counters of a game. It follows
also that the mind has no capacity and no obligation to copy the world
of matter nor to survey it impartially. At the same time, it follows
that the mind affords a true expression of the world, rendered in vital
perspectives and in human terms, since this mind arises and changes
symptomatically at certain foci of animal life; foci which are a part of
nature in dynamic correspondence with other parts, diffused widely about
them; so that, for instance, alternative systems of religion or science,
if not taken literally, may equally well express the actual operation of
things measured by different organs or from different centres.
CHAPTER XI
THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM
I have now reached the culminating point of my survey of evidence, and
the entanglements I have left behind me and the habitable regions I am
looking for lie spread out before me like opposite valleys. On the one
hand I see now a sweeping reason for scepticism, over and above all
particular contradictions or fancifulness of dogma. Nothing is ever
present to me except some essence; so that nothing that I possess in
intuition, or actually see, is ever _there_; it can never exist bodily,
nor lie in that place or exert that power which belongs to the objects
encountered in action. Therefore, if I regard my intuitions as knowledge
of facts, all my experience is illusion, and life is a dream. At the
same time I am now able to give a clearer meaning to this old adage; for
life would not be a dream, and all experience would not be illusion, if
I abstained from believing in them. The evidence of data is only
obviousness; they give no evidence of anything else; they are not
witnesses. If I am content to recognise them for pure essences, they
cannot deceive me; they will be like works of literary fiction, more or
less coherent, but without any claim to exist on their own account. If I
hypostatise an essence into a fact, instinctively placing it in
relations which are not given within it, I am putting my trust in animal
faith, not in any evidence or implication of my actual experience. I
turn to an assumed world about me, because I have organs for turning,
just as I expect a future to reel itself out without interruption
because I am wound up to go on myself. To such ulterior things no
manifest essence can bear any testimony. They must justify themselves.
If the ulterior fact is some intuition elsewhere, its existence, if it
happens to exist, will justify that belief; but the fulfilment of my
prophecy, in taking my present dream for testimony to that ulterior
experience, will be found only in the realm of truth—a realm which is
itself an object of belief, never by any possibility of intuition, human
or divine. So too when the supposed fact is thought of as a substance,
its existence, if it is found in the realm of nature, will justify that
supposition; but the realm of nature is of course only another object of
belief, more remote if possible from intuition than even the realm of
truth. Intuition of essence, to which positive experience and certitude
are confined, is therefore always illusion, if we allow our
hypostatising impulse to take it for evidence of anything else.
In adopting this conclusion of so many great philosophers, that all is
illusion, I do so, however, with two qualifications. One is emotional
and moral only, in that I do not mourn over this fatality, but on the
contrary rather prefer speculation in the realm of essence—if it can be
indulged without practical inconvenience—to alleged information about
hard facts. It does not seem to me ignominious to be a poet, if nature
has made one a poet unexpectedly. Unexpectedly nature lent us existence,
and if she has made it a condition that we should be poets, she has not
forbidden us to enjoy that art, or even to be proud of it. The other
qualification is more austere: it consists in not allowing exceptions. I
cannot admit that some particular essence—water, fire, being, atoms, or
Brahma—is the intrinsic essence of all things, so that if I narrow my
imagination to that one intuition I shall have intuited the heart and
the whole of existence. Of course I do not deny that there is water and
that there is being, the former in most things on earth, and the latter
in everything anywhere; but these images or words of mine are not the
things they designate, but only names for them. Desultory and partial
propriety these names may have, but no metaphysical privilege. No more
has the expedient of some modern critics who would take illusion as a
whole and call it the universe; for in the first place they are probably
reverting to belief in discourse, as conventionally conceived, so that
their scepticism is halting; and in the second place, even if human
experience could be admitted as known and vouched for, there would be an
incredible arrogance in positing it as the whole of being, or as itself
confined to the forms and limits which the critic assigns to it. The
life of reason as I conceive it is a mere romance, and the life of
nature a mere fable; such pictures have no metaphysical value, even if
as sympathetic fictions they had some psychological truth.
The doctrine of essence thus renders my scepticism invincible and
complete, while reconciling me with it emotionally.
If now I turn my face in the other direction and consider the prospect
open to animal faith, I see that all this insecurity and inadequacy of
alleged knowledge are almost irrelevant to the natural effort of the
mind to describe natural things. The discouragement we may feel in
science does not come from failure; it comes from a false conception of
what would be success. Our worst difficulties arise from the assumption
that knowledge of existences ought to be literal, whereas knowledge of
existences has no need, no propensity, and no fitness to be literal. It
is symbolic initially, when a sound, a smell, an indescribable feeling
are signals to the animal of his dangers or chances; and it fulfils its
function perfectly—I mean its moral function of enlightening us about
our natural good—if it remains symbolic to the end. Can anything be more
evident than that religion, language, patriotism, love, science itself
speak in symbols? Given essences unify for intuition, in entirely
adventitious human terms, the diffuse processes of nature; the aesthetic
image—the sound, the colour, the expanse of space, the scent, taste, and
sweet or cruel pressure of bodies—wears an aspect altogether unlike the
mechanisms it stands for. Sensation and thought (between which there is
no essential difference) work in a conventional medium, as do literature
and music. The experience of essence is direct; the expression of
natural facts through that medium is indirect. But this indirection is
no obstacle to expression, rather its condition; and this vehicular
manifestation of things may be knowledge of them, which intuition of
essence is not. The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a
sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement
to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form; and much in
the same way the human medium of knowledge can perform its pertinent
synthesis and make its pertinent report all the better when it frankly
abandons the plane of its object and expresses in symbols what we need
to know of it. The arts of expression would be impossible if they were
not extensions of normal human perception. The Greeks recognised that
astronomy and history were presided over by Muses, sisters of those of
tragic and comic poetry; had they been as psychological as modern
reflection has become, they might have had Muses of sight, hearing, and
speech. I think they honoured, if they did not express, this
complementary fact also, that all the Muses, even the most playful, are
witnesses to the nature of things. The arts are evidences of wisdom, and
sources of it; they include science. No Muse would be a humane
influence, nor worthy of honour, if she did not studiously express the
truth of nature with the liberty and grace appropriate to her special
genius.
Philosophers would not have overlooked the fact that knowledge is, and
ought to be, symbolical, if intuition did not exist also, giving them a
taste of something which perhaps they think higher and more satisfying.
Intuition, when it is placid and masterful enough to stand alone, free
from anxiety or delusion about matters of fact, is a delightful
exercise, like play; it employs our imaginative faculty without warping
it, and lets us live without responsibility. The playful and godlike
mind of philosophers has always been fascinated by intuition;
philosophers—I mean the great ones—are the infant prodigies of
reflection. They often take intuition of essence for their single ideal,
and wish to impose it on the workaday thoughts of men; they make a
play-world for themselves which it is glorious to dominate, much as
other men of genius, prolonging the masterfulness of childhood, continue
to play at this or at that in their politics and their religion. But
knowledge of existence has an entirely different method and an entirely
different ideal. It is playful too, because its terms are intuitive and
its grammar or logic often very subjective. Perception, theory,
hypothesis are rapid, pregnant, often humorous; they seize a fact by its
skirts from some unexpected quarter, and give it a nickname which it
might be surprised to hear, such as the rainbow or the Great Bear. Yet
in the investigation of facts all this play of mind is merely
instrumental and indicative: the intent is practical, the watchfulness
earnest, the spirit humble. The mind here knows that it is at school;
and even its fancies are docile. Its nicknames for things and for their
odd ways of behaving are like those which country people give to
flowers; they often pointedly describe how things look or what they do
to us. The ideas we have of things are not fair portraits; they are
political caricatures made in the human interest; but in their partial
way they may be masterpieces of characterisation and insight. Above all,
they are obtained by labour, by investigating what is not given, and by
correcting one impression by another, drawn from the same object—a thing
impossible in the intuition of essences. They therefore conduce to
wisdom, and in their perpetual tentativeness have a cumulative truth.
Consider the reason why, instead of cultivating congenial intuitions, a
man may be drawn to the study of nature at all. It is because things, by
their impact, startle him into attention and a new thought. Such
external objects interest him for what they do, not for what they are;
and knowledge of them is significant, not for the essence it displays to
intuition (beautiful as this may be) but for the events it expresses or
foreshadows. It matters little therefore to the pertinent knowledge of
nature that the substance of things should remain recondite or
unintelligible, if their movement and operation can be rightly
determined on the plane of human perception. It matters little if their
very existence is vouched for only by animal faith and presumption, so
long as this faith posits existence where existence is, and this
presumption expresses a prophetic preadaptation of animal instincts to
the forces of the environment. The function of perception and natural
science is, not to flatter the sense of omniscience in an absolute mind,
but to dignify animal life by harmonising it, in action and in thought,
with its conditions. It matters little if the news these methods can
bring us of the world is fragmentary and is expressed rhetorically; what
matters is that science should be integrated with art, and that the arts
should substitute the dominion of man over circumstances, as far as this
is possible, for the dominion of chance. In this there is no sacrifice
of truth to utility; there is rather a wise direction of curiosity upon
things on the human scale, and within the range of art. Speculation
beyond those limits cannot be controlled, and is irresponsible; and the
symbolic terms in which it must be carried on, even at close quarters,
are the best possible indications for the facts in question. All these
inadequacies and imperfections are proper to perfect signs, which should
be brief and sharply distinguished.
Complete scepticism is accordingly not inconsistent with animal faith;
the admission that nothing given exists is not incompatible with belief
in things not given. I may yield to the suasion of instinct, and
practise the arts with a humble confidence, without in the least
disavowing the most rigorous criticism of knowledge or hypostatising any
of the data of sense or fancy. And I need not do this with a bad
conscience, as Parmenides and Plato and the Indians seem to have done,
when they admitted illusion or opinion as an epilogue to their tight
metaphysics, on the ground that otherwise they would miss their way
home. It is precisely by _not_ yielding to opinion and illusion, and by
_not_ delegating any favourite essences to be the substance of things,
that I aspire to keep my cognitive conscience pure and my practical
judgement sane; because in order to find my way home I am by no means
compelled to yield ignominiously to any animal illusion; what guides me
there is not illusion but habit; and the intuitions which accompany
habit are normal signs for the circle of objects and forces by which
that habit is sustained. The images of sense and science will not delude
me if instead of hypostatising them, as those philosophers did the terms
of their dialectic, I regard them as graphic symbols for home and for
the way there. That such external things exist, that I exist myself, and
live more or less prosperously in the midst of them, is a faith not
founded on reason but precipitated in action, and in that intent, which
is virtual action, involved in perception. This faith, which it would be
dishonest not to confess that I share, does no violence to a sceptical
analysis of experience; on the contrary, it takes advantage of that
analysis to interpret this volatile experience as all animals do and
must, as a set of symbols for existences that cannot enter experience,
and which, since they are not elements in knowledge, no analysis of
knowledge can touch—they are in another realm of being.
I propose now to consider what objects animal faith requires me to
posit, and in what order; without for a moment forgetting that my
assurance of their existence is only instinctive, and my description of
their nature only symbolic. I may know them by intent, based on bodily
reaction; I know them initially as whatever confronts me, whatever it
may turn out to be, just as I know the future initially as whatever is
coming, without knowing what will come. That something confronts me
here, now, and from a specific quarter, is in itself a momentous
discovery. The aspect this thing wears, as it first attracts my
attention, though it may deceive me in some particulars, can hardly fail
to be, in some respects, a telling indication of its nature in its
relation to me. Signs identify their objects for discourse, and show us
where to look for their undiscovered qualities. Further signs, catching
other aspects of the same object, may help me to lay siege to it from
all sides; but signs will never lead me into the citadel, and if its
inner chambers are ever opened to me, it must be through sympathetic
imagination. I might, by some happy unison between my imagination and
its generative principles, intuit the essence which is actually the
essence of that thing. In that case (which may often occur when the
object is a sympathetic mind) knowledge of existence, without ceasing to
be instinctive faith, will be as complete and adequate as knowledge can
possibly be. The given essence will be the essence of the object meant;
but knowledge will remain a claim, since the intuition is not satisfied
to observe the given essence passively as a disembodied essence, but
instinctively affirms it to be the essence of an existence confronting
me, and beyond the range of my possible apprehension. Therefore the most
perfect knowledge of fact is perfect only pictorially, not evidentially,
and remains subject to the end to the insecurity inseparable from animal
faith, and from life itself.
Animal faith being a sort of expectation and open-mouthedness, is
earlier than intuition; intuitions come to help it out and lend it
something to posit. It is more than ready to swallow any suggestion of
sense or fancy; and perhaps primitive credulity, as in a dream, makes no
bones of any contradiction or incongruity in successive convictions, but
yields its whole soul to every image. Faith then hangs like a pendulum
at rest; but when perplexity has caused that pendulum to swing more and
more madly, it may for a moment stop quivering at a point of unstable
equilibrium at the top; and this vertical station may be likened to
universal scepticism. It is a more wonderful and a more promising
equilibrium than the other, because it cannot be maintained; but before
declining from the zenith and desisting from pointing vertically at
zero, the pendulum of faith may hesitate for an instant which way to
fall, if at that uncomfortable height it has really lost all animal
momentum and all ancient prejudice. Before giving my reasons—which are
but prejudices and human—for believing in events, in substances, and in
the variegated truths which they involve, it may be well to have halted
for breath at the apex of scepticism, and felt all the negative
privileges of that position. The mere possibility of it in its purity is
full of instruction; and although I have, for my own part, dwelt upon it
only ironically, by a scruple of method, and intending presently to
abandon it for common sense, many a greater philosopher has sought to
maintain himself acrobatically at that altitude. They have not
succeeded; but an impossible dwelling-place may afford, like a
mountain-top, a good point of view in clear weather from which to map
the land and choose a habitation.
CHAPTER XII
IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES
Human beliefs and ideas (which in modern philosophy are called human
knowledge) may be arranged systematically in various different series or
orders. One is the _order of genesis_. The origin of beliefs and ideas,
as of all events, is natural. All origins lie in the realm of matter,
even when the being that is so generated is immaterial, because this
creation or intrusion of the immaterial follows on material occasions
and at the promptings of circumstance. It is safe to say this, although
it may sound dogmatical, since an immaterial being not grafted in this
way upon material events would be undiscoverable; no place, time, or
other relations in nature could be assigned to it, and even if by chance
it existed it would have to exist only for its own benefit, unreported
to any one else. It is accordingly in the realm of matter, in the order
of events in animal life, that I must distribute human beliefs and ideas
if I wish to arrange them in the order of their genesis.
Beliefs and ideas might also be surveyed in the _order of discovery_, as
within the field of human grammar and thought they come to be
discriminated. Such a survey would be a biography of reason, in which I
should neglect the external occasions on which ideas and beliefs arise
and study only the changing patterns which they form in the eye of
thought, as in a kaleidoscope. What would probably come first in the
order of discovery would be goods and evils; or a romantic metaphysician
might turn this experience into a fable, referring goods and evils to a
transcendental will which should pronounce them (for no reason) to be
such respectively. Will or moral bias is actually the background on
which images of objects are gradually deciphered by an awakening
intellect; they all appear initially loaded with moral values and
assigned to rival camps and quarters in the field of action. Discovery
is essentially romantic; there is less clearness in the objects that
appear than there is vehemence in the assertion and choice of them. The
life of reason is accordingly a subject to be treated imaginatively, and
interpreted afresh by every historian with legitimate variations; and if
no theme lies nearer to the heart of man, since it is the history of his
heart, none is more hopelessly the sport of apperception and of dramatic
bias in the telling.
Finally, beliefs and ideas may be marshalled in the _order of evidence_;
and this is the only method that concerns me here. At any juncture in
the life of reason a man may ask himself, as I am doing in this book,
what he is most certain of, and what he believes only on hearsay or by
some sort of suggestion or impulse of his own, which might be suspended
or reversed. Alternative logics and creeds might thus suggest
themselves, raised in different styles of architecture upon the
bed-rock, if there is a bed-rock, of perfect certitude. I have already
discovered what this bed-rock of perfect certitude is; somewhat
disconcertingly, it turns out to be in the regions of the rarest ether.
I have absolute assurance of nothing save of the character of some given
essence; the rest is arbitrary belief or interpretation added by my
animal impulse. The obvious leaves me helpless; for among objects in the
realm of essence I can establish none of the distinctions which I am
most concerned to establish in daily life, such as that between true and
false, far or near, just now and long ago, once upon a time, and in five
minutes. All these terms of course are found there, else I could not
mention them, but they are found only as pictures; each is present only
in essence, without any reason for choosing, asserting, or making it
effective. The very opposite terms, if I am only willing to think of
them, lie sleeping side by side with these which I happen first to have
come upon. All essences and combinations of essences are brother-shapes
in an eternal landscape; and the more I range in that wilderness, the
less reason I find for stopping at anything, or for following any
particular path. Willingly or regretfully, if I wish to live, I must
rouse myself from this open-eyed trance into which utter scepticism has
thrown me. I must allow subterranean forces within me to burst forth and
to shatter that vision. I must consent to be an animal or a child, and
to chase the fragments as if they were things of moment. But which
fragment, and rolling in what direction? I am resigned to being a
dogmatist; but at what point shall my dogmatism begin, and by what first
solicitation of nature?
Starting, as here I should, from absolute certitude—that is, from the
obvious character of some essence—the first object of belief suggested
by that assurance is the _identity_ of this essence in various instances
and in various contexts. This identity in divers cases is not
tautological, as identity would be if I spoke of the identity of any
essence with itself. Identity, to be significant, must be problematical.
I must pick up my pebble twice, so that a juggler might without my
knowledge have substituted another pebble for it in the interval; and
when I say confidently, _the same pebble_, I may always be deceived. My
own thought is not at all unlikely to play this trick on me; it is good
at legerdemain. In attending a second time to what I call the same
essence, I may really summon a different essence before me; my memory
need not retain the first intuition so precisely that its disparity from
the present one can be sensible to me now. Identity of essences given at
different times evidently presupposes time—an immense postulate; and
besides, it presupposes ability in thought to traverse time without
confusion, so that having lived through two intuitions I may correctly
distinguish them as events, whilst correctly identifying their common
object. These are ambitious and highly questionable dogmas. Yet there is
a circumstance in pure intuition of any essence which can insensibly
lead me to those elaborate conclusions, and can lead me at the same time
to posit the natural existence of myself, the possible dupe, having
those intuitions and surviving them, and even the existence of my
natural object, the persisting pebble, which those intuitions described
unanimously.
This circumstance is closely connected with the property of essence
which is most ideal and remote from existence, namely, its eternity.
Eternity, taken intrinsically, has nothing to do with time, but is a
form of being which time cannot usher in nor destroy; it is always
equally real, silent, and indestructible, no matter what time may do, or
what time it may be. But intuition peruses eternal being in time;
consequently, so long as I am attending to an essence, this essence
seems to me _to endure_; and when, after an interval, I revert to it or
to any feature of it, this feature seems to me _to be identical_ with
what it was. This identity and this duration are not properly predicated
of essence in its own realm; they are superfluous epithets essentially,
and almost insults, because they substitute a questionable for an
unquestionable subsistence in the essence. Yet the epithets are well
meant, and indicate fairly enough the aspect which essences present to
moving thought when it plays upon them. Intuition finds essence by
watching, by exerting animal attention. Now when he watches, an animal
thinks that what he watches is watching him with the same intensity and
variability of attention which he is exerting; for attention is
fundamentally an animal uneasiness, fostered by the exigences of life
amid other material beings that can change and jump. Stillness or
constancy in any object accordingly does not seem to an animal eternity
in an essence; it seems rather a suspension of motion in a thing, a
pause for breath, an ominous and awful silence. He is superstitious
about the eternity of essences, as about all their other properties.
This breathless and ghostly duration which he attributes to essences,
treating them like living things, is his confused temporal translation
of their eternity, mixing it with existence, which is the negation of
eternity. Thus he assimilates it to the quasi-permanence in himself
which is transfused with change; for of course he is far from perceiving
that if essences were not natively eternal and nonexistent, it would be
impossible for crawling existence to change from one form to another.
This illusion is inevitable. The dubious and iterative duration proper
to animal life, when the lungs breathe and the mind is appetitive, seems
to this mind a pulsation in all being.
Moreover, in watching any image, it is often possible to observe one
feature in it persisting while another disappears. The man not only says
to himself, “This, and still this,” but he ventures to say, “This, and
again this with a variation.” A variation in _this_? Here, from the
point of view of essence, is a sheer absurdity. _This_ cannot change its
nature, though what we have before us a moment later may be something
but slightly different from _this_; and of course the essence now
brought to view can be slightly different from the one formerly in
evidence only because each is eternally itself, so that the least
variant from it marks and constitutes a different essence. Material
categories such as existence, substance, and change, none of which are
applicable to pure data, are thus insinuated by the animal intellect
into contemplation. They transform intuition into belief; and this
belief, as if it would reinforce essences when they appear and annul
them when they disappear, ultimately posits an imaginary shuffling of
sensible existences—hypostatised essences—dancing about us as we watch
the scene. Even if this hypostasis is retracted afterwards by the
critic, the postulate remains that he is steadily perusing the _same
essence_, or returning to reconsider it. Without this postulate it would
be impossible to say or think anything on any subject. No essence could
be recognised, and therefore no change could be specified. Yet this
necessary belief is one impossible to prove or even to defend by
argument, since all argument presupposes it. It must be accepted as a
rule of the game, if you think the game worth playing.
What shall I say of the probable truth of such fundamental assumptions?
Shall I think them false, because groundless, and shall I say that they
invalidate the whole edifice of natural faith which is raised upon them?
Or shall I say that the experienced security of this edifice justifies
them and implies their truth? Neither; because the happy results and
fertility of an assumption do not prove it true literally, but only
prove it to be suitable, to be worth cultivating as an art and repeating
as a good myth. The axioms of sanity and art must correspond _somehow_
to truth, but the correspondence may be very loose and very partial.
Moreover, the circumstance that even this symbolic rightness is vouched
for only by an experience which would be false in all its records and
memories if this assumption were false, robs such experimental tests of
all logical force. Corroboration is no new argument; if I am deceived
once, I may all the more readily be deceived again. In the perspectives
of experience I cannot, except in these very perspectives, reach the
terms which they posit as self-existent, in order to see whether my
perspectives were rightly drawn. I am in the region of belief mediated
by symbols, in the region of animal faith.
CHAPTER XIII
BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION
The essence which is the object of intuition is probably not simple.
Perhaps nothing that has a character recognisable in reflection can be
utterly simple. The datum may seem purely qualitative, like a smell or
like absolute Being, and yet some plurality may lurk in its very
diffuseness or continuity, giving a foothold for discrimination of
different moments or parts within it. Usually this inward complexity of
given essences is very marked, and a chief element in their nature; but
it is not at all incompatible with the æsthetic and logical
individuality which makes them terms for possible recognition and
discourse. Essences, like things, may be perfectly unambiguous objects
to name or to point to, and may be counted as units, without prejudice
to their internal complexity. My dog is one and the same dog
unmistakably, without prejudice to the possibly infinite complexity of
his organism or the interpenetration of his qualities. In the same way
Euclidean space is a single and definite essence; yet its character is
subject to analysis. I may say it has three dimensions, is necessarily
infinite, without scale, etc. These implications, which I may enumerate
successively, lie in the essence together, and lie there from the
beginning, even if my intuition is slow to disentangle them, or never
does so at all. The simplicity of the essence given at first was a
pregnant simplicity; it had enough character to be identified with the
total and unitary aspect of another essence—Euclidean space
analysed—which may appear later.
Intuition therefore is a view of essence, attention fixed upon it, and
not that essence itself. When I say Euclidean space has three
dimensions, I am counting them; I am proceeding from one specious plane,
or felt direction of motion, to another, and perhaps back again, for the
sake of verification. If this operation is to be a valid survey of the
essence proposed, the plane or directions specified must, so to speak,
stay in their places. Each must remain itself, so that in passing from
it to another, as I do in counting, I may pass to something truly
different, and may be able to revert from this to the original element,
and find it still there, identical with its former self. But, as I have
already discovered, this self-identity of a term to which I revert
cannot be given either in the first intuition of it, nor in the second.
All that either intuition can yield while it endures is the nature of
the datum there, with the terms and relations which are displayed there
within it. Intuition can never yield the relation of its total datum to
anything not given. It cannot refer to the latent at all, since its
object, by definition, is just what is given immediately. To take the
leap from one intuition to another, and assert that they view the same
essence, or have the same intent, I must take my life in my hands and
trust to animal faith. Otherwise all dialectic would be arrested.
Let me assume in the first place that I may steadily peruse the same
essence, and may revert to it on occasion. Let me assume further that in
so doing I may turn passive intuition into analysis, and analysis into
some fresh synthesis of the elements identified and distinguished in the
given essence. Intuition will thus pick up and group together, in
various ways, terms which by hypothesis are identical in these various
settings. It will scrutinise essences piecemeal and successively,
although in their own realm they compose a simultaneous and eternal
manifold. Suppose, for instance, I have reached the conclusion of a
calculation, and the final equation is before me: the inner relations
between its terms are parts of a given essence. Intuition, not
demonstration, synthesises this manifold. This synthetic essence is
therefore no conclusion; it is not an answer nor a deduction; it is not
true. It is simply the pattern of terms which it is; no one of these
terms, for aught I know, having ever figured in any other equation. Thus
any survey which is analytic, so that it gives foothold for
demonstration, or any definition following upon such analysis,
presupposes the repetition of the same essences in different contexts.
This presupposition cannot be justified by the intuition occupying the
mind at any one time. No more can the assurance that a term remains the
same in two successive instances and in two different contexts, nor that
what is asserted by a predicate is asserted of the very subject which
before had been intuited without that predicate. Explication is a
process, a deduction is an event; and although the force of logical
analysis or synthesis does not depend on assuming that fact, but rather
on ignoring it, this fact may be deduced from faith in the validity of
demonstration, which would lapse if this fact were denied. The validity
of demonstration is accordingly a matter of faith only, depending on the
assumption of matters of fact incapable of demonstration. I must believe
that I noted the terms of the argument separately and successively if I
am to assert anything in identifying them or pronouncing them
equivalent, or if the conclusion in which they appear now is to be
relevant in any way to the premises in which they appeared originally.
The force of dialectic, then, lies in identifying terms in isolation
with the same terms in relation; so that even an analytic judgement is
synthetic. To say, for instance, that in “extended colour” “extension”
is involved is analysis; yet to identify the element of extension
abstracted from the first essence with the second essence as a whole, is
synthesis; and it is far from inconceivable that this synthesis should
be erroneous. In the identification of an essence given in one intuition
with something given in another intuition in a superadded context, there
is a postulate that in transcendent intent I am hitting a hidden target.
It is not two similar intuitions taken existentially that are
identified; they are not only admittedly distinct numerically and as
events in the world, but they have, by hypothesis, different total data
before them. It is mind, a spiritual counterpart of attitude and action,
that intends in both cases to consider the same essence. There is
repetition posited; and repetition, if actual, involves adventitious
differences accruing to a term that remains individually identical.
There is a difference in the setting of the same essence here and its
setting there. In judgement, accordingly, there is more than intuition;
there is assumed discourse, involving time, transcendent reference, and
various adventitious surveys of identical objects. Thus if I wish to
believe that any demonstration whatsoever is significant or correct, I
must assume (what I can never demonstrate) that there is an active
intelligence at work, capable of reverting to an old idea like the dog
returning to his vomit: an operation utterly extraneous to the timeless
identity of each element recovered.
In other words, demonstration is an event, even when the thing
demonstrated is not an event. Without adventitious choice of some
starting-point, without selective and cumulative advance, and without
recapitulation, there would be no dialectic. Premises and conclusions
would all be static and separate terms; the dialectical nerve of their
relation would not be laid bare and brought to intuition. I should know
nothing about essence, in the sense of possessing such sciences of it as
mathematics or rhetoric, if the argument were not adventitious to the
subject-matter, casting the light of intuition now along this path and
now along that in a field posited as static, so as to enlarge and
confirm my apprehension of it; for if I lost at one end all that I
gained at the other, my progress would not enrich apprehension, nor ever
twice mean the same thing. Dialectic therefore is a two-edged sword: on
the one hand, if valid, it involves a realm of essence, independent of
it, over which it may range; and on the other hand it involves its own
temporal and progressive existence; since it is a name for the fact that
some part of that realm of essence has been chosen for perusal,
considered at leisure, folded upon itself, as it were, and recognised as
having this or that articulation. Even pure intuition shares (as I shall
try to show presently) this spiritual existence, distinct from the
logical or æsthetic being proper to the essences it apprehends;
intuition itself can hardly be prolonged without winking or re-survey.
But this coming and going of attention, in flashes and in varied
assaults, is even more conspicuous in dialectic; and the validity and
advance of insight in such cases depends on the essences in hand being
constant, in spite of the pulsations of attention upon them and the
variety of relations disclosed successively.
Thus belief in the existence of mental discourse (which is a sort of
experience), whilst of course not demonstrable in itself, is involved in
the validity of any demonstration; and I come to the interesting insight
that dialectic would lose all its force if I renounced my instinctive
faith in my ability to pick up old meanings, to think consecutively, to
correct myself without changing my subject-matter, and in fine to
discourse and to live rationally. Challenge this faith, and
demonstration collapses into the illusion that a demonstration has been
made. If I confine myself to the given essence without admitting
discourse about it, I exclude all analysis of that essence, or even
examination of it. I must simply stare at it, in a blank and timeless
æsthetic trance. If this does not happen, the reason is not dialectical.
No logic could drive me from the obvious, unless I read omens in it
which are not there. The reason for my proclivity to play with ideas, to
lose them and catch them, and pride myself on my ability to keep them
circling without confusion in the air, is a vital reason. This logic is
a fly-wheel in my puffing engine; it is not logic at all. The animal
life which underlies discourse is concerned to discharge its
predetermined responses, which are but few, whenever an occasion
presents itself which will at all do; and all such occasions it calls
the same. It claps some recurrent name on different objects, which is
one source of error or of perpetual inaccuracy in its knowledge of
things; but even before that, in identifying the various instances of
that name, alleging the essence present now to be the same present
before, it runs a risk of error and may slip into self-contradiction. Is
the round square an essence? Certainly; but not in the geometry of
Euclid, because in his geometry the square is one essence and the circle
another, definitely and irreparably distinct from it. The round square
is an essence of comic discourse, actualised when, having confused
names, definitions and ideas, a fumbling or an impudent mind sets about
to identify two incompatibles; and this attempt is no more impossible to
a mind—which is subject to animal vapours—than it is impossible for such
a mind to look for a lost word. The psyche has the lost word in store,
as it has the intuitions of the circle and the square; but the loss of
memory or the confusion of ideas may arise notwithstanding, because the
movement in discourse which should culminate in those intuitions may be
intercepted mechanically, and arrested at a stage where the name is not
yet recovered, or where the words circle and square have fused their
associations and are striving to terminate in the intuition of both as
one. Such stammerings and contradictions make evident the physical basis
of thought and the remote level from which it turns to its ideal object,
like the moth to the star; but this physical basis is really just as
requisite for correcting a logical error as for falling into it. Thus
dialectic, which in intent and deliverance does not trespass beyond the
realm of essence, but only defines some fragment of the same, yet in
fact, if it is to be cogent, must presuppose time, change, and the
persistence of meanings in progressive discourse.
Belief in demonstration, when it is admitted, has inversely some
steadying influence on belief in matters of fact. When poetic idealists
cry that life is a dream, they are indulging in a hyperbole, if they
still venture to compare one illusion with another in beauty or in
duration. Poetry, like demonstration, would not be possible if intuition
of essences could not be sustained and repeated in various contexts. The
poet could not otherwise express cumulative passions nor develop
particular themes. But life is no dream, if it justifies dialectic;
because dialectic explores various parts of the realm of essence—where
everything is steadfast, distinct, and imperishable—with a continuous
and coherent intent, and reaches valid insight into their structure; and
this amount of wakefulness and sanity the dialectical or poetic mind
would have in any case, even in the absence of a material world, of all
moral interests, and of any life except the life of discourse itself.
Nevertheless, if discourse were always a pellucid apprehension of
essential relations, its existence would be little noted; only a very
scrupulous philosopher would insist on it, in view of the selective
order and direction of survey which discourse adds to its
subject-matter. There is, however, a much louder witness to the fact
that discourse exists and is no part of essence, but rather a function
of animal life; and this witness is error. Thought becomes obvious when
things betray it; as they cannot have been false, something else must
have been so, and this something else, which we call thought, must have
existed and must have had a different status from that of the thing it
falsified. Error thus awakens even the laziest philosophy from the dream
of supposing that its own meanderings are nothing but strands in the
texture of its object.
I have now, by the mere consideration of the way in which essence
presents itself, managed to snatch from the jaws of scepticism one
belief familiar to me before I encountered that romantic dragon; namely,
belief in the existence of discourse, or of mind thinking. But be it
observed that I have so far seen reason for reinstating this belief only
in a very attenuated form. Thought here means nothing more than the fact
that some essence is contemplated, and discourse means only that this
essence is approached and surveyed repeatedly or piecemeal, with
partiality, succession, and possible confusion in describing it. Save
for this distinction of intuition from the essence intuited, I have as
yet no object before me that claims existence or solicits belief. The
whole datum is still simply an essence; but by the mere study of that
datum, when this study is reflected upon and admitted, I have
reintroduced a belief which relieves me of what was most obnoxious to
the flesh in my radical scepticism. I have found that even when no
change is perceived in the image before me, my discourse changes its
phases and makes progress in surveying it; so that in discourse I now
admit a sphere of events in which real variations are occurring. I may
now assert, when I perceive a motion, that this intuition of change is
_true_; that is, that it has actually followed upon the intuition of a
static first term, from which my attention has passed to this intuition
of change; and this I may now assert without confusing the essences
given successively, or trying, like animal perception, to knead one
concrete thing out of their incompatible natures. The existence of
changing things or events in nature I may still deny or doubt or ignore;
in the object I shall, with perfect clearness, see only an essence, and
if this happens to be the essence of change, and to present the image of
some motion, that theme will seem to me as determinate, as ideal and as
unchanging as any other, and as little prone to lapse into any different
theme. Any motion seen will be but a fixed image of motion. Actual flux
and actual existence will have their appropriate and sufficient seat in
my thought; I shall conceive and believe, when I reflect on my rapt
contemplations, that I have been ruminating, and passing from one to
another; but these objects will be only the several essences, the
several images or tunes or stories, each always itself, which my mind
picks up or invents or reconsiders.
CHAPTER XIV
ESSENCE AND INTUITION
To believe nothing and live immersed in intuition might be the privilege
of a disembodied spirit; and if a man could share it he would not only
be relieved from doubt but would, in one dimension, lose nothing in the
scope of his experience, since the realm of essence, which would still
be open to him, is absolutely infinite, and contains images of all the
events that any existing world could enact, or that all possible worlds
could enact together. Yet all this variety and richness would form a
mosaic, a marble effigy of life, or chronicle of ancient wars. The pangs
and horrors would be there, as well as the beauties, but each would burn
in its eternal place, balancing all the rest, and no anxious eye would
glance hurriedly from one to the other, wondering what the next might
be. The spirit that actually breathes in man is an animal spirit,
transitive like the material endeavours which it expresses; it has a
material station and accidental point of view, and a fevered preference
for one alternative issue over another. It thirsts for news; and this
curiosity, which it borrows of course from the insecurity and
instinctive anxiety of the animal whose spirit it is, is strangely
self-contradictory; because the further it ranges in the service of
animal will, the more the spectacle it discloses rebukes that animal
will and tends to neutralise it. It would indeed not be spirit at all if
it did not essentially tend to discount its accidental point of view,
and to exchange the material station to which it finds itself
unaccountably attached in its birth. In so far as it is spirit, and is
not called back by its animal allegiance to pleasures and ambitions
which pure spirit could not share (since they imply ignorance), it
accordingly tends to withdraw from preoccupation with animal life, from
the bias of time and place, and from all thought of existence. In so
doing, far from perishing, it seems to acquire a more intense, luminous,
and placid being. Since the roots of spirit, at least in man, are in
matter, this would seem to be an illusion; yet the experience is normal,
and no illusion need attach to it, if once the nature of intuition is
understood.
At the vanishing-point of scepticism, which is also the acme of life,
intuition is absorbed in its object. For this reason, philosophers
capable of intense contemplation—Aristotle, for instance, at those
points where his thought becomes, as it were, internal to spirit—have
generally asserted that in the end essence and the contemplation of
essence are identical. Certainly the intuition of essence is oblivious
of itself, and cognisant of essence only, to which it adds nothing
whatever internally, either in character or in intensity; because the
intensity of a thunder-clap is the chief part of its essence, and so the
peculiar intolerableness of each sort of pain, or transitiveness of each
sort of pleasure. If in fact when any such essence is given there had
been nothing prior to this intuition, nothing beside it existentially,
and nothing to follow upon it, this obliviousness to the intuition
itself, as distinct from the given essence, would not be an oversight;
it would be rather an absence of illusion. For it would then have been
an illusion to suppose, as I should in calling the presence of that
essence an intuition of it, that a soul with a history and with other
adventitious qualities had come to contemplate that essence at one
moment in its career. There would really be the essence only, with no
relations other than those perfectly irreversible internal ones to other
essences which define it in its own realm. Those very high numbers, for
instance, which nobody has ever thought of specifically, have no other
relations than those which they have eternally in the series of whole
numbers; they have no place in any man’s life. So too those many forms
of torment for which nature does not provide the requisite instrument,
and which even hell has neglected to exemplify; they remain essences
only, of which fortunately there is no intuition. Evidently the being of
such numbers or such torments is constituted by their essence only, and
has not attained to existence. Yet it is this essential being alone
that, if there was intuition of those numbers or those torments, would
be revealed in intuition; for no external adventitious relations, such
as the intuition has in the life of some soul, would be presented within
it, if (as I assume) nothing but these essences was then given.
It is therefore inevitable that minds singly absorbed in the
contemplation of any essence should attribute the presence and force of
that essence to its own nature, which alone is visible, and not to their
intuition, which is invisible. Thought as it sinks into its object rises
in its deliverance out of the sphere of contingency and change, and
loses itself in that object, sublimated into an essence. This
sublimation is no loss; it is merely absence of distraction. It is the
perfect fruition and fulfilment of that experience. In this manner I can
understand why Aristotle could call the realm of essence, or that part
of it which he had considered, a deity, and could declare sublimely that
its inalienable being was an eternal life. More strictly, it would have
been an eternal actualisation of cognitive life only; animal life would
have ceased, because animal life requires us to pick up and drop the
essences we consider, and to attribute temporal as well as eternal
relations to them; in other words, to regard them not as essences but as
things. But though cognitive life begins with this attention to
practical exigences and is kindled by them, yet its ideal is
sacrificial; it aspires to see each thing clearly and to see all things
together, that is to say, under the form of eternity, and as sheer
essences given in intuition. To cease to live temporally is
intellectually to be saved; it is ἀθανατίζειν, to fade or to brighten
into the truth, and to become eternal. It is the inmost aim and highest
achievement of cognition to cease to be knowledge for a self, to abolish
the bias and transcend the point of view by which knowledge establishes
its perspectives, so that all things may be present equally, and the
truth may be all in all.
All this comes about, however, only subjectively, in that vital and
poetic effort of the mind to understand which begins with a candid
self-forgetfulness and ends in a passionate self-surrender. Seen from
outside, as it takes place psychologically, the matter wears an entirely
different aspect. In reality, essence and the intuition of essence can
never be identical. If all animal predicaments were resolved, there
would be no organ and no occasion for intuition; and intuition ceasing,
no essences would appear. Certainly they would not be abolished by that
accident in their own sphere, and each would be what it would have
seemed if intuition of it had arisen; but they would all be merely
logical or æsthetic themes unrehearsed, as remote as possible from life
or from the intense splendour of divinity. Essence without intuition
would be not merely non-existent (as it always is), but what is worse,
it would be the object of no contemplation, the goal of no effort, the
secret or implicit ideal of no life. It would be valueless. All that joy
and sense of liberation which pure objectivity brings to the mind would
be entirely absent; and essence would lose all its dignity if life lost
its precarious existence.
I believe that Aristotle, and even more mystical spokesmen of the
spirit, would not have ignored this circumstance if they had not taken
so narrow a view of essence. They see it only through some peep-hole of
morals, grammar, or physics; the small part of that infinite realm which
thus becomes visible they take for the whole; or if they feel some
uneasiness at the obvious partiality of this survey, they rather blot
out and blur the part before them, lest it seem arbitrary, instead of
imagining it filled out with all the rest that, in the realm of essence,
cannot help surrounding it. Even Spinoza, who so clearly defines the
realm of essence as an infinite number of kinds of being, each having an
infinite number of variations, calls this infinity of being _substance_;
as if at once to weight it all with existence (a horrible possibility)
and to obliterate its internal distinctions; but distinction, infinitely
minute and indelible distinction of everything from everything else, is
what essence means. Yet people suppose that whatever is non-existent is
nothing—a stupid positivism, like that of saying that the past is
nothing, or the future nothing, or everything nothing of which I happen
to be ignorant. If people reflected that the non-existent, as Leibniz
says, is infinite, that it is everything, that it is the realm of
essence, they would be more cautious in regarding essence as something
selected, superior in itself, and worthy of eternal contemplation. They
would not conceive it as the power or worth in things actual, but rather
as the form of everything and anything.
Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence by virtue of the
interest which somebody takes in it, as being the part relevant to his
own life. If the organ of this life comes to perfect operation, it will
reach intuition of that relevant part of essence. This intuition will be
vital in the highest degree. It will be absorbed in its object. It will
be unmindful of any possibility of lapse in that object, or defection on
its own part; it will not be aware of itself, of time, or of
circumstances. But this intuition will continue to exist, and to exist
in time, and the pulsations of its existence will hardly go on without
some oscillation, and probably a quick evanescence. So the intuition
will be an utterly different thing from the essence intuited: it will be
something existent and probably momentary; it will glow and fade; it
will be perhaps delightful; that is, no essences will appear to it which
are not suffused with a general tint of interest and beauty. The life of
the psyche, which rises to this intuition, determines all the characters
of the essence evoked, and among them its moral quality. But as pure
intuition is life at its best, when there is least rasping and thumping
in its music, a prejudice or presumption arises that _any_ essence is
beautiful and life-enhancing. This platonic adoration of essence is
undeserved. The realm of essence is dead, and the intuition of far the
greater part of it would be deadly to any living creature.
The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular
life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of that
life. If the cosmos were a single animal, as the ancients supposed, and
had an aim and a life which, like human life, could be fulfilled in the
contemplation of certain essences, then a life like that of Aristotle’s
God would be involved in the perfection of nature, if this perfection
was ever attained. Or if, with Aristotle, we suppose that the cosmos has
always been in perfect equilibrium, then a happy intuition of all
relevant essence on the part of the cosmos would actually exist and
would be that sustained, ecstatic, divine life which Aristotle speaks
of. Yet even then the cosmic intuition of essence would not be the
essence it beheld. The intuition would be a natural fact, by accident
perpetual and necessarily selective; because the cosmos _might_ stop
turning at any moment, and certainly the music of those spheres, even
while they rolled well, would not be every sort and any sort of noise,
nor even of music. A different cosmos would have had, or might elsewhere
be having, a different happiness. Each, however, would be a divine life,
as the ancients conceived divinity. It would have such a natural basis
as any life must have, and the consequent warmth and moral colour; for
natural operations lend these values to the visions in which they rest.
The love of certain special essences which animates existence is an
expression of the direction which the movement of existence happens to
have. If the cosmos were a perfect animal—and in its unknown secular
pulsations it may possibly be one—the cosmic intellect in act would not
be the whole of the realm of essence, nor any part of it. It would be
the intuition of so much of essence as that cosmos had for its goal.
The external and naturalistic point of view from which all this appears
is one I have not yet justified critically: I have anticipated it for
the sake of rendering the conception of essence perfectly unambiguous.
But if we start from the realm of essence, which demands no belief, we
may at once find conclusive reasons for believing that sundry intuitions
of parts of it exist in fact. One reason is the selectiveness of
discourse. All essences are always at hand, ready to be thought of, if
any one has the wit to do so. But my discourse takes something up first,
and then, even if it is purely dialectical, passes to some implication
or complement of that idea; and it never exhausts its themes. It
traverses the realm of essence as, in a mosque, some ray of light from
some high aperture might shoot across the sombre carpets: it is a brief,
narrow, shifting, oblique illumination of something vast and rich. The
fact that intuition has a direction is an added proof of its existential
character, and of its complete diversity in nature from the essences it
lights up. Life begins unaccountably and moves irreversably: when it is
prosperous and intelligent, it accumulates its experience of things in a
personal perspective, largely alien to the things themselves. When the
objects surveyed are essences, no one can be prior to any other in their
own sphere: they do not arise at all, and lie in no order of precedence.
When one essence includes another as number two includes number one, it
is as easy and as proper to reach one by dividing two as to reach two by
repeating one. In themselves essences have no genesis; and to repeat one
would be impossible if duality were not begged at the start, as well as
unity, to institute the possibility of repetition. In seizing upon any
particular essence first, discourse is guided by an irrational fatality.
Some chance bit is what first occurs to the mind: I run up against this
or that, for no logical reason. This arbitrary assault of intuition upon
essence is evidence that something not essence, which I call intuition,
has come into play. Thus all discourse, even if it traces ideal
implications, is itself contingent to them, and in its existence
irrational. Animal life is involved in the perusal of essence, just as
animal faith is involved in the trust I put in demonstration. If I
aspired to be a disembodied spirit, I ought to envisage all essences
equally and at once—a monstrous requirement. If I aspire instead to
dwell in the presence only of the pertinent, the beautiful, and the
good, I confess that I am but a natural creature, directed on a small
circle of interests and perfections; and that my intuition in particular
exercises an adventitious choice, and has a private method, in its
survey of essence.
The first existence, then, of which a sceptic who finds himself in the
presence of random essences may gather reasonable proof, is the
existence of the intuition to which those essences are manifest. This is
of course not the object which the animal mind first posits and believes
in. The existence of things is assumed by animals in action and
expectation before intuition supplies any description of what the thing
is that confronts them in a certain quarter. But animals are not
sceptics, and a long experience must intervene before the problem arises
which I am here considering, namely, whether anything need be posited
and believed in at all. And I reply that it is not inevitable, if I am
willing and able to look passively on the essences that may happen to be
given: but that if I consider what they are, and how they appear, I see
that this appearance is an accident to them; that the principle of it is
a contribution from my side, which I call intuition. The difference
between essence and intuition, though men may have discovered it late,
then seems to me profound and certain. They belong to two different
realms of being.
CHAPTER XV
BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE
I have now agreed to believe that discourse is a contingent survey of
essence, partial, recurrent, and personal, with an arbitrary
starting-point and an arbitrary direction of progress. It picks up this
essence or that for no reason that it can assign. However dialectical
the structure of the theme considered may be, so that its various parts
seem to imply one another, the fact that this theme rather than any
other is being considered is a brute fact: and my discourse as a whole
is a sheer accident, initiated, if initiated at all, by some ambushed
power, not only in its existence, but in its duration, direction, and
scope.
Nevertheless this fatality does not raise any problem in that discourse
itself, because it occasions no surprise. Problems are created after
discourse is in full swing, by contradictory presumptions or aching
voids arising within it. There are no problems in nature, and none in
the realm of essence. Existence—the most inexplicable of surds—is itself
no problem in its own eyes: it takes itself blandly for granted, so long
as it is prosperous. This is a healthy dulness on its part, because if
there is no reason why a particular fact should exist rather than any
other, or none at all, there is also no reason why it should not exist.
The philosopher who has learned to make nature the standard of
naturalness will not wonder at it. He will repeat on a large scale that
act of ready submission to fate which every new-born intuition performs
spontaneously. It does not protest against its sudden existence. It is
not surprised at the undeserved favour that has fallen to its share. It
modestly and wisely forgets itself and notes only the obvious,
profoundly self-justified essence which appears before it. That this
essence might just as well, or might far better, have been replaced by
some other is not a suggestion to be possibly gathered from that essence
itself. Nor is the psyche (the ambushed power from which the intuition
actually comes) less self-satisfied and at peace. The psyche, too, takes
her own idiosyncrasy for granted, singular and highly determinate as
this is, and extraordinarily censorious concerning all other things. Her
nature seems to her by right everlasting, and that to which it is the
obvious duty of all other things to adjust themselves. God, too, if we
refer these agreeable fatalities ultimately to his decrees, is conceived
in like manner never to wonder why he exists although evidently nothing
could have previously demanded his existence, or prepared the way for
it, or made it intelligible. Nevertheless the mortal psyche perhaps
thinks she sees the secret even of that, because it was necessary that
God should exist in order to make her own existence perfectly safe,
legitimate, and happy for ever. This assurance is needed, because there
are unfortunately some circumstances that might suggest the opposite.
Before turning to these circumstances, it may be well to observe that
actual discourse, as distinguished from the internal dialectic of
essences, may have any degree of looseness; that is, the terms which it
takes up in succession may have nothing to do with one another
essentially. There is no added paradox in this: what is groundless and
irrational in its inception may well be groundless and irrational in its
procedure, and an appearance that has no reason for arising has no
reason for not yielding to any other appearance, or to vacancy. And yet
sometimes the course of appearances does produce wonder and discontent.
How can this be? If I am not surprised at beginning to exist, or at
finding something before me, since present being cannot contain any
presumption or contradiction against itself, so it would seem that I
should not be surprised at any changes in existence, however radical and
complete. Often, indeed, I am not surprised, but follow the development
of discourse, as in a dream, with perfect acquiescence, or even with a
distinct premonition of what is coming, and eagerness that it should
come. If I were a pure spirit, or even an open mind, this ought to be
always the case. However different essences may be, they cannot in their
own realm exclude or contradict one another; there, infinite diversity
provokes no conflict and imposes no alternatives, and the being of
anything, far from impeding that of other things, seems positively to
invite and to require it, somewhat as every part of Euclidean space, far
from denying the other parts, implies them. Irrelevance is, as it were,
mere distance; and there is nothing strange or evil in quickness of
thought, that should jump from one essence to another altogether
dissimilar to it, or even contrary.
And yet I cannot prolong or intensify discourse without soon coming upon
what I call interruption, confusion, doubt, or contradiction. An impulse
to select, to pursue, and to reject specific essences insinuates itself
into discourse. Why this animosity or this impatience? I do not
disparage, nor subordinate, nor remove the circle from the realm of
essence, when I think of the square and say it is no circle. Why then
should I be angry if I find the one rather than the other? Evidently my
discourse here is not pure contemplation. Of course, no essence is any
other essence; but a clear spirit would not call any two essences
incompatible. Their diversity is part of their being; they _are_
because, each being eternally itself, the two are eternally different.
If they are incompatible, I must ask: Incompatible for what purpose?
Even in calling them contradictory, I am surreptitiously speaking for
some hidden interest, which cannot put up with them both. There is an
inertia or prior direction somewhere, in the region of what I call
myself, that demands one of them, and rejects the other for the innocent
crime of not being that one. The incongruous essence appearing offends
me because I am wedded to an old one, and to its close relations. I will
tolerate nothing but what I meant should come, what fills my niche, and
falls in with my undertaking.
Irrelevance, incongruity, and contradiction are accordingly possible in
discourse only because discourse is not a play of essences but a play of
attention upon them; which attention is no impartial exercise of spirit
but a manifestation of interest, intent, preference, and preoccupation.
A hidden life is at work. If I deny this, because my scepticism eschews
everything hidden, I must consistently abandon all dialectic and revert
to undirected dreaming, without comments on my dream intended to be
veridical: because if the least comment on my dreams were veridical I
must begin at once to reject, in my comments, all the essences
suggesting themselves which deviate from that particular dream I mean to
describe. Meaning, which is my guide in discriminating one suggestion
from another as being the right one, springs from beneath the surface;
it is a nether influence. It is a witness to my psychic life going on
beneath, which can be disturbed by the intrusion of one event, or
furthered by another; and this subterranean impulse breaks out into
judgements about the rightness and wrongness of essences—utterly absurd
and unmeaning judgements if the essences were considered simply in
themselves. If I feel that they clash, if I make a stumbling-block of
their irrelevance or diversity, I prove that I am discoursing about them
for an ulterior purpose, in the service of some alien interest. I am
stringing my pearls; therefore I require them to be of a particular
quality. I am a collector, not a poet; and what concerns me, even in the
purest dialectic or the most desultory dream, is not to explore essence,
but to gather _experience_. The psyche below is busy selecting her food,
fortifying her cave, and discriminating her friends from her enemies;
and in these meanderings of mine over the realm of essence, in spite of
myself, I am only her scout.
By experience I understand a fund of wisdom gathered by living. I call
it a fund of wisdom, rather than merely memory or discursive ideation,
because experience accrues precisely when discrimination amongst given
essences is keenest, when only the relevant is retained or perhaps
noticed, and when the psyche sagaciously interprets data as omens
favourable or unfavourable to her interests, as perilous or inviting,
and, if she goes wrong, allows the event to correct her interpretation.
I think it mere mockery to use the word experience for what is not
learning or gathering knowledge of facts; if experience taught me
nothing it would not be experience, but reverie. Experience accordingly
presupposes intent and intelligence, and it also implies, as will appear
presently, a natural world in which it is possible to learn to live
better by practising the arts.
Intuition is an event, although it reveals only an essence; and in like
manner discourse is an experience, even when its deliverance is mere
dialectic. It is an experience for two reasons: first, because it is
guided unawares by the efforts of the psyche to explore, not the realm
of essence, but the world that controls her fortunes; and secondly,
because the essences unrolled before it, apparently at random and for no
reason, really convey knowledge; in reality they are manifestations to
the psyche of that surrounding world which it concerns her to react upon
wisely. Discourse is hers; and it is full of the names—since images not
auditory may be names also—which she gives to her friends and enemies,
and of her ingenious imaginations concerning their ways. However
original the terms of discourse may be, under the control of the psyche
and her environment they fall into certain rhythms; they run into
familiar sequences; they become virtual and available knowledge of
things, persons, nature, and the gods. Imagination would be very
insecure and inconstant in these constructions, and they would not
become automatic habits in discourse, if instinct within and nature
without did not control the process of discourse, and dictate its
occasions. So controlled, discourse becomes experience.
That discourse is secretly an experience, and may be turned into
knowledge, becomes particularly evident when it is interrupted by
_shocks_. Not only may an essence suddenly present itself which was not
the essence I expected or should have welcomed, but the whole placid
tenor of my thoughts may be arrested or overwhelmed. I may suffer a sort
of momentary and conscious death, in that I survive to feel the
extinction of all that made up my universe, and to face a blank, or a
precipice. When in my placid discourse one thing seemed to contradict
another, they were but rival images in the same field, and I had but to
choose between them, and proceed with the argument. Shock contradicts
nothing, but uproots the whole experience. The lights go out on the
stage, and discourse loses its momentum.
In the sense of contradiction there is probably some element of shock.
The purest æsthetic or logical contemplation hardly goes on without a
throbbing accompaniment of interest, haste, reversals, and
satisfactions; but these dramatic notes are merged in the counterpoint
of the themes surveyed, and I think, prove, and enjoy without noticing
that I do so. But when a clap of thunder deafens me, or a flash of
lightning at once dazzles and blinds me, the fact that something has
_happened_ is far more obvious to me than just what it is that has
occurred; and there are perhaps shocks internal to the psyche in which
the tension of the event reaches a maximum, whilst the nature of it
remains so obscure that perhaps my only sense of it is a question, a
gasp, or a recoil. The feeling present in such a case is, with but
little further qualification, the sheer feeling of experience.
Now experience of the most brutal and dumbest sort may be theoretically
described, and described exhaustively, in terms of the successive
intuition of essences; for loudness, dazzlingness, pain, or terror are
essences or elements of essences like any other data; and when such
essences are present, all is present that it is possible ever to feel in
that direction, and with any degree of intensity. Utter blankness,
intolerable strain, shrieking despair, are just the essences they are,
and they are unrolled and revealed to intuition like any other essences.
But such intuitions, being those proper to the most brutal and
rudimentary life, have a suasion in them out of all proportion to their
articulation, or rather, we might almost say, inversely proportional to
it; as if the more an experience meant the less it cried out, and the
more it cried out the less it meant. The purest discourse is (without
noticing it) an experience, and the blindest experience (also without
noticing it) is a discourse, since we should not call it experience if
it contained no sense of passage, no experiential perspective; but in
proportion as shock cancels discourse and obliterates its own
background, experience becomes mere experience, and inarticulate.
In brute experience, or shock, I have not only a clear indication, for
my ulterior reflection, that I exist, but a most imperious summons at
that very moment to _believe_ in my existence. Discourse, as I first
disentangled the evidence for it from the pure intuition of essence,
seemed to be a progressive observation of the permanent—studious
attention perusing and registering the essential mutual relations of
given terms. But now, when shock interrupts me, discourse suffers
violence. The subject-matter itself takes up arms; one object leaves me
in the lurch, while another, quite irrelevantly, assaults me. And since
my discourse witnesses and records this revolution, I must now assert it
to be a permanent knowledge of the changing.
Shocks _come_: if they did not _come_, if I had not pre-existed, if I
had never been anything more than the intuition of this shock, then this
shock would not be a shock in fact, but only the illusion of a shock,
only the essence of shock speciously persuading me that something had
happened, when in fact nothing had occurred. If the sense of shock does
not deceive me, I must have passed from a state in which the shock was
not yet, into the state in which the shock first startled me; and I must
since have passed from that startled state into another, in which my
intuition covers synthetically the coming, the nature, and the
subsidence of that shock; so that I am aware how startled I was, without
being startled afresh now. A wonderful and ambiguous presence of the
absent and persistence of the receding, which is called _memory_. My
objects have receded, yet I continue to consider them. They are no
longer essences, but facts, and my consideration is not intuition of
something given but faith in something absent, and a persistent
indication of it as still the same object, although my image of it is
constantly changing, is perhaps intermittent, and probably grows
fainter, vaguer, and more erroneous at every instant.
Experience of shock, if not utterly delusive, accordingly establishes
the validity of memory and of transitive knowledge. It establishes
realism. If it be true that I have ever had any experience, I must not
only have existed unawares in order to gather it, but I am justified in
explicitly asserting a whole realm of existence, in which one event may
contain realistic knowledge of another. Experience, even conceived most
critically as a series of shocks overtaking one another and retained in
memory, involves a world of independent existences deployed in an
existing medium. Belief in experience is belief in nature, however
vaguely nature may as yet be conceived, and every empiricist is a
naturalist in principle, however hesitant his naturalism may be in
practice.
Nevertheless shock, like any other datum, intrinsically presents an
essence only, and _might_ be nothing more; but in that case the dogmatic
suasion of it (which alone lends interest to so blank an experience)
would be an illusion. The intuition would be what it is, but it would be
nobody’s intuition, and it would mean nothing. For I should not be a
self, if that intuition made up my whole being, so that it involved no
change in my condition, but was perhaps itself the whole universe. Shock
will not suffer me, while it lasts, to entertain any such hypothesis. It
is itself the most positive, if the blindest, of beliefs; it loudly
proclaims an event; so that if by chance the change which I feel were
merely a feeling within the unity of apperception, shock would be an
illusion, in the only sense in which this can be said of any intuition:
it would incite me to a false belief that something like the given
essence existed. If the change has really occurred, and not merely been
imagined, shock is not only intuition of change, but trouble in a
process of change enveloping that intuition. I am right in positing a
desultory experience in which this intuition is an incident. I am not a
spectator watching this cataract, but a part of the water precipitated
over the edge. Thus if being shocked was, as perhaps it ought to be, the
first sensation in life, it proclaimed the existence of a previous state
without sensation. Unless it is an illusion, which I cannot admit while
I feel it, it implies variation in a voluminous vegetative life in which
the sense of surprise is a true indication of novelty.
Before I had noticed shock, or consented to accept its witness, I had
already admitted, on dialectical grounds, that discourse was a process;
but now that I observe how shocks, more or less violent, interrupt
discourse at every moment, I can call discourse experience. For now I
see that in endeavouring to trace dialectical relations discourse is not
itself dialectical. Sheer chance decides whether it shall pursue
faithfully the theme it may have picked out, as sheer chance decided
that it should pick up that theme in particular. In my theoretical
bewilderment and helplessness before this absolute contingency of all
themes and all data, I am steadied only by animal presumptions, habits,
expectations, or omens, all of which my sceptical reflection must
condemn as utterly arbitrary. I can only say that I am the sport of an
unfathomable destiny; that in these shocks that fall upon me thick and
fast, and in the calmer stretches between them, miscellaneous essences
are revealed to me, most of them gratuitous and mutually irrelevant; and
that if the current of them did not carry me, somewhat congenially, into
a vortex of work and play, I should be condemned for ever to blank
watching and to sheer wonder. The very belief in experience is a
suggestion of instinct, not of experience itself. The steadfastness of
my nature, doggedly retaining its prejudices and assuming its power,
supplies and imposes a routine upon my experience which is far from
existing in my direct intuitions, very shifty in their quality (even
when signs of the same external object) and much mixed with dream. Even
the naturalist has to make up by analogy and presumption (which perhaps
he calls induction) the enormous spaces between and beyond his actual
observations.
Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more
plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised
himself to his earthly eminence: it opens the gates of nature to him,
both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his
apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science. This
is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and
remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable
virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day
only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the
end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in
the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in
experience.
CHAPTER XVI
BELIEF IN THE SELF
Experience, when the shocks that punctuate it are reacted upon
instinctively, imposes belief in something far more recondite than
mental discourse, namely, a person or self; and not merely such a
transcendental ego as is requisite intrinsically for any intuition, nor
such a flux of sentience as discourse itself constitutes, but a
substantial being preceding _all_ the vicissitudes of experience, and
serving as an instrument to produce them, or a soil out of which they
grow.
Shock is the great argument of common sense for the existence of
material things, because common sense does not need to distinguish the
order of evidence from the order of genesis. If I know already that a
tile has fallen on my head, my sore head is a proof to me that the tile
was real; but if I start from the pain itself in all innocence, I cannot
draw any inference from it about tiles or the laws of gravity. By common
sense experience is conceived as the effect which the impact of external
things makes on a man when he is able to retain and remember it. As a
matter of fact, of course, shocks usually have an external origin,
although in dreams, madness, apparitions, and in disease generally,
their cause is sometimes internal. But all question concerning the
source of a shock is vain for the sceptic; he knows nothing of sources;
he is asking, not whence shocks come, but to what beliefs they should
lead. In the criticism of knowledge the _argumentum baculaneum_ is
accordingly ridiculous, and fit only for the backs of those who use it.
Why, if I am a spirit beholding essences, should I not feel shocks? Why
are not novelties and surprises as likely themes for my entertainment as
the analysis or synthesis of some theorem or of some picture? All
essences are grist for the mill of intuition, and any order or disorder,
any quality of noise or violence, is equally appropriate in an
experience which, for all I know or as yet believe, is absolute and
groundless. And I call it experience, not because it discloses anything
about the environment which produced it, but because it is composed of a
series of shocks, which I survey and remember.
If, however, consenting to listen to the voice of nature, I ask myself
what a shock can signify, and of what it brings me most unequivocal
evidence, the least hazardous answer will be: evidence of prepossessions
on my part. What shock proves, if it proves anything, is that I have a
nature to which all events and all developments are not equally welcome.
How could any apparition surprise or alarm me, or how could interruption
of any sort overtake me, unless I was somehow running on in a certain
direction, with a specific rhythm? Had I not such a positive nature, the
existence of material things and their most violent impact upon one
another, shattering the world to atoms, would leave me a placid observer
of their movement; whereas a definite nature in me, even if disturbed
only by cross-currents or by absolute accidents within my own being,
would justify my sense of surprise and horror. A self, then, not a
material world, is the first object which I should posit if I wish the
experience of shock to enlarge my dogmas in the strict order of
evidence.
But what sort of a self? In one sense, the existence of intuition is
tantamount to that of a self, though of a merely formal and transparent
one, pure spirit. A self somewhat more concrete is involved in
discourse, when intuition has been deployed into a successive survey of
constant ideal objects, since here the self not only sees, but adds an
adventitious order to the themes it rehearses; traversing them in
various directions, with varying completeness, and suspending or picking
up the consideration of them at will; so that the self involved in
discourse is a thinking mind. Now that I am consenting to build further
dogmas on the sentiment of shock, and to treat it, not as an essence
groundlessly revealed to me, but as signifying something pertinent to
the alarm or surprise with which it fills me, I must thicken and
substantialise the self I believe in, recognising in it a nature that
accepts or rejects events, a nature having a movement of its own, far
deeper, more continuous and more biassed than a discoursing mind: the
self posited by the sense of shock is a living psyche.
This is a most obscure subterraneous object; I am venturing into the
nether world. It is alarming and yet salutary to notice how near to
radical scepticism are the gates of Hades. I shall have occasion later
to consider what the psyche is physically, when I have learned more
about the world in which she figures; she has some stake in it, since
she welcomes or strives against sundry events. So anxious a being must
have but precarious conditions of existence, and yet some native
adaptation to them, since she manages to exist at all. Here I need admit
only this: that the pure spirit involved in any intuition of essence is
in my case repeatedly and somewhat consecutively actualised in a running
mental discourse; that, further, it is employed in remembering, loving,
and hating, so that it almost seems to spring like a wild beast upon its
visions, as upon its prey, and to gnaw and digest them into its own
substance. Spirit, as I shall soon find, is no substance, and has no
interests; all this absurd animal violence may still be nothing but a
dream; and the fact, now agreed upon, that discourse is going on, may
suffice to dispose of these passionate movements. Music, which is
ethereal in its being and, in the objective direction, terminates in
pure essence, nevertheless in its play with pure essence is full of
trepidation, haste, terror, potentiality, and sweetness. If mere sound
can carry such a load, why should not discourse do likewise, in which
images of many other sorts come trooping across the field of intuition?
This is no idle doubt, since the whole Buddhist system is built on
accepting it as a dogma; and transcendentalism, though it talks much of
the self, denies, or ought to deny, its existence, and the existence of
anything; the transcendental self is pure spirit, incoherently
identified with the principle of change, preference, and destiny which
this philosophy calls Will, but which in truth, as I shall find, is
matter. The Buddhists too, in denying the self, are obliged to introduce
an ambiguous equivalent in the heritage of guilt, ignorance, and
illusion which they call Karma. These are ulterior mystifications, which
I mention here only lest I should proceed to posit the natural psyche
without a due sense of the risks I am taking. The natural psyche, being
a habit of matter, is to be described and investigated from without,
scientifically, by a behaviourist psychology; but the critical approach
to it from within, as a postulate of animal faith, is extremely
difficult and fraught with danger. Literary psychology, to which I am
here confined, is at home only in the sentiments and ideas of the adult
mind, as language has expressed them: the deeper it tries to go, the
vaguer its notions; and it soon loses itself in the dark altogether. I
cannot hope to discover, therefore, what precisely this psyche is, this
self of mine, the existence of which is so indubitable to my active and
passionate nature. The evidence for it in shock hardly goes beyond the
instinctive assertion that I existed before, that I am a principle of
steady life, welcoming or rejecting events, that I am a nucleus of
active interests and passions. It will be easy to graft upon these
passions and interests the mental discourse which I had previously
asserted to be going on, and which made up, in this critical
reconstruction of belief, my first notion of myself. And yet here is one
of the dangers of my investigation, because mental discourse is not, and
cannot be, a self nor a psyche. It is all surface; it neither precedes,
nor survives, nor guides, nor posits its data; it merely notes and
remembers them. Discourse is a most superficial function of the self;
and if by the self I was tempted to understand a series of ideas, I
should be merely reverting sceptically to that stage of philosophic
denudation in which I found myself, before I had consented to accept the
evidence of shock in favour of my own existence. I, if I exist, am not
an idea, nor am I the fact that several ideas may exist, one of which
remembers the other. If I exist, I am a living creature to whom ideas
are incidents, like aeroplanes in the sky; they pass over, more or less
followed by the eye, more or less listened to, recognised, or
remembered; but the self slumbers and breathes below, a mysterious
natural organism, full of dark yet definite potentialities; so that
different events will awake it to quite disproportionate activities. The
self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning,
stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of
which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives.
CHAPTER XVII
THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY
Belief in memory is implicit in the very rudiments of mind; mind and
memory are indeed names for almost the same thing, since memory
furnishes most of the resources of a mind at all developed, and nothing
is ever in the mind but may reappear in memory, if the psyche can fall
again for a moment into her old paces. Mind and memory alike imply
cognisance taken of outlying things, or knowledge. When the things known
are events within the past experience of the psyche, spontaneously
imagined, knowledge is called memory; it is called mind or intelligence
when they are past, present, or future events in the environment at
large, no matter by what means they are suggested or reported. Memory
itself must report facts or events in the natural world, if it is to be
knowledge and to deserve the name of memory. An intuition by chance
repeating an intuition that had occurred earlier would not be memory or
knowledge of that earlier event. There must be belief in its previous
occurrence, with some indication of its original locus.
Intuition without memory must be assumed to have existed in the
beginning, but such intuition regards essence only. Not being directed
by memory upon the past, nor by animal faith upon the future or upon
external things, pure intuition exercises no sagacity, no transitive
intelligence, and does not think. It is merely the light of awareness
lending actuality to some essence. When identity and duration come to be
attributed to this essence, memory begins to make its claims felt,
although indirectly. When I call an essence identical I imply that I
have considered it twice, and that I possess a true memory of my past
intuition, since I know it presented this very essence. Similarly, when
I call an essence the same, but without distinguishing my two intuitions
of it, which may be continuous, I posit the truth of memory unawares;
for this sensation of living on, of having lived up to the present, is a
primary memory. It sets up a temporal perspective, believing firmly in
its recessional character; parts of the specious present are interpreted
as survivals of a receding present, a present that can never return, but
the vision of which I have not wholly lost. The perspective is not taken
to be specious only, but a true memorial of facts past and gone.
Memory deploys all the items of its inventory at some distance, yet sees
them directly, by a present glance. It makes no difference to the
directness of this knowledge how great the distance of the object may be
in the direction of the past. So also in foresight: I foresee my death
as directly as I do my dinner, not necessarily more vaguely, and far
more certainly. Memory and prophecy do in time what perception does in
space; here too the given essence is projected upon an object remote
from the living psyche which is the organ of the intuition and of the
projection. The object is indeed not remote from the _mind_, if by mind
I understand the intellectual energy of memory, prophecy, or perception
reaching to that object, and positing it there in intent; but it is
remote from the psyche, from the material agent, from me here and now. A
little less or a little more interval of time or space—and there is
always an interval—does not render less ocular and immediate the
description of a removed event by the essences it brings before me. I
see a peewit in the sky as directly as I see the watch in my hand, and I
hear his note as easily as I do the ticking of the watch against my ear.
So I remember the Scotch kilt I wore when a child as directly as the
umbrella I carried this morning. The difficulty in extending the range
of knowledge is physical only; I may be near-sighted; and the mechanism
of memory may break down, or may be choked with parasitic fancies as it
grows old.
In memory it is sometimes possible to reproduce almost exactly some
earlier scene or experience. If the psyche happens to run through the
same process twice—and being material she is compacted of habits—she
will twice have exactly the same intuition; but this precise repetition
of the past, far from constituting a perfect memory, excludes memory.
The sentiment of pastness, the receding perspective in which memory
places its data, will be wanting; and this perfect recovery of
experience will not be remembrance. Nor is any fulness or precision in
the image of the past necessary to the truth of memory. The nerve of
recollection lies elsewhere, in the projection of the given
essence—which may be vague or purely verbal—to a precise point or
nucleus of relations in the natural past. Memory is genuine if the
events it designates actually took place, and conformed to the
description, however brief and abstract, which I give of them. Pictorial
fulness and emotional reversion to the past are not important, and they
are found most often at unimportant points. Healthy memory excludes
them, and for two reasons. The bodily reaction to the old environment is
now hardly possible, and certainly not appropriate; and therefore, even
if the neurogram in the psyche could spring again into perfect life, it
would bring a dream into being, an interruption to life in the present,
rather than a sober memory filling the present appropriately with a long
perspective. The second reason is that the neurogram is likely to have
been modified by the accidents of nutrition and waste intervening, so
that the old movement cannot really be repeated, and the essence called
up will not really be the original one. That it may _seem_ to be the
original, in its very life, is nothing to the purpose. How, if vivid,
should it not seem so, when no other memory exists to control it? But if
I can control it by circumstantial evidence, I usually find that this
specious recovery of past experience is a cheap illusion. If the
reversion to the past seems complete, it is not because the facts are
remembered accurately, but because some subtle influence fills me with a
sentiment wholly foreign to my present circumstances, and redolent of a
remote past; and that dramatic shift seems to lift all the details of
the picture out of the perspective of memory into the foreground of the
present. It is the fancy that comes forward, producing a waking dream,
not the memory that sinks back into an old experience. The scent of a
cedar chest in which old finery is kept may carry me back vividly to my
earliest childhood; but the images that now seem to live again will be
creatures of my present sophisticated and literary fancy; I shall see
them romantically, not with the eyes of a child. I may truly recover
knowledge of long-forgotten facts, but I shall not re-enact a long-past
experience. And what need is there? A miraculous identity may be felt
emotionally even when the two descriptions of the identical thing differ
in _every_ sensible term, as happens in metaphors, in myths, in myself
as body and as mind, in idolatry, or in the doctrine—which expresses a
mystical experience—of transubstantiation. In such cases the vital
reaction, the deeper readjustment of the psyche, to the two appearances
is the same; therefore I feel that the thing appearing in the two ways
is identical, that the one is _really_ the other, however diverse the
two sets of symbols may be.
I have already accepted the belief in memory; indeed, without accepting
it I could not have taken the first step forward from the most
speechless scepticism. But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and
asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause to consider
somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive claims of memory are, on
which all human beliefs are reared.
The paradox of knowing the absent is posited in the past tenses of the
verb; it is the paradox of knowledge itself, since intuition of essence
is not properly called knowledge; it is imagination, since the only
object present is then non-existent and the description of it, being
creative, is infallible. The claim to knowledge everybody understands
perfectly when he makes it, which he does whenever he perceives,
remembers, or believes anything; but if we wish to paraphrase this claim
reflectively, we may perhaps say that in it attention professes to fall
on an object explicitly at a distance, being framed by other nearer
objects (though at some distance themselves) upon which attention falls
only virtually. If this foreground or frame were absent altogether, I
should live in the pictured past thinking it present; memory would
overleap its memorial office and become a dream. It would cease to be
liable to error, being no longer a report about anything else; but it
would become an idle entertainment, which a moralist might call an
illusion, on the ground that its images were irrelevant to the practice
of rational life, and its emotions wasted. But it would not misrepresent
anything, since in ceasing to be a memory it would have abandoned all
cognitive claims.
A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable to the projection
which renders a present image a vision of some past fact: I must stand
here to point there. Yet if my present station were explicitly
perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed equally in
thought, the picture would seem flat and the perspective merely painted
upon it, as upon a cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy the
claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to remember that I am
remembering; for then I should be considering myself only, and only the
present, whereas in living remembrance I am self-forgetful, and live in
the present thinking only of the past, and observe the past without
supposing that I am living in it. My recollections, my _souvenirs_, are
only essences which I read as I should the characters on this page, not
viewing them contemplatively in their own category as forms present in
their entirety, but accepting them readily (as in all knowledge) as
messengers, as signs for existences of which they furnish but an
imperfect description, for which I am perhaps hopeful of substituting a
better view. In lapsing into the past I seem to myself to be entering a
realm of shadows; and a chief part of my wakefulness, which prevents me
from actually dreaming that I am living in that other world, is
precisely this eagerness of mine to see better, to remember all, to
recover the past as it really was; and the elusive and treacherous
character of such images as come to me troubles me seriously, as a mist
distorting and shutting off the truth. My heart, as it were, is fixed on
that removed reality, and I know that my eyes see it but imperfectly.
Yet if my heart had intuition now of what that reality once was,
recollection would be superfluous, since I should possess all it could
bring me before it brought it; and on the other hand, if my heart did
not know the reality, how could I reject, criticise, or approve the
images that professed to restore its forgotten aspects? Obviously what I
am calling the heart, which is the psyche, is blind in herself:
imagination is her only light, her only language; but she is a prior
principle of choice and judgement and action in the dark; so that when
the light shines in that darkness, she comprehends it, and feels at once
whether the ray falls on the object towards which she was groping, or on
some irrelevant thing. The psyche, in the case of memory, contains all
the seeds, all the involutions and latent habits, which the past left
there in passing; any one of these may be released freely, or only
irritated and summoned to activity without being sufficiently fed, or
only to be at once thwarted and contradicted; and the _sentiment_ of
this prosperous or mutilated rendering of experience, when memory
proffers its images, enables the psyche to judge these images to be true
or false, adequate or inadequate, without possessing any other images
with which to compare them.
This felt imperfection of memory is no obstacle to the directness of
such knowledge as it does afford. Memory, however vague, transports me
to the intended scene; I walk by its wavering light through those
ancient chambers; I see again (incorrectly, no doubt) what occurred
there. But if many a detail once obvious is thereby lost or misplaced,
memory may see the chief features of the past in a truer perspective
than that in which experience placed them originally. The ghostliness of
memory carries this compensation with it, comparable to the breadth of
sympathy that compensates old age for the loss of vivaciousness; memory
is a reconstruction, not a relapse. The view which the opened chest
creates in me now of my family history may be truer than any I had when
a child. My perceptions when a child were themselves descriptions,
naïve, disjointed, limited. In reproducing my past perceptions, my
dreaming memory does not regard those perceptions—perceptions being
spiritual facts, can become objects of intent only. Memory regards the
same objects (essences or things) which the past perceptions regarded.
But the soil in which these intuitions now grow has been tilled and
watered, and, even if a little exhausted, it may yield a fairer
description of those ancient incidents than existed before, more
voluminous, better knit, more knowing. Memory has fundamentally the same
function as history and science—to review things more intelligently than
they were ever viewed. Mind would never rise out of the most helpless
animal routine if it could not forget in remembering, and could not
substitute a moral perspective for the infinite flatness of physical
experience. That much drops out is a blessing; that something creeps in,
by way of idealisation, hyperbole, and legend, is not an unmixed evil.
In spite of this admixture of fiction, memory, legend, and science
achieve a true intellectual dominion over the flux of events; and they
add a poetic life and rhythm of their own, like the senses.
This possibility of dominion proves that the images and the apperception
involved in remembering are fresh images and a fresh apperception. It
shows also that the later station in time of the act of remembering in
no way annuls the directness of the knowledge involved, nor cuts it off
from its object; on the contrary, the object being posited and chosen by
the psyche before any images or any apperception arise, these are free
to describe that object in any way they can, bringing all later
resources of the mind to illustrate it, and thereby perhaps describing
it far more truly than the senses revealed it when it was present.
Here an important detail has come into view which at first sight might
seem paradoxical, but only because the paucity of language obliges us
often to use the same word for very different things. Thus it seems
natural to say that a man may remember his own experience, and can
remember nothing else; and yet it is not his _experience_ that he
commonly remembers at all, but the usual object of his memory is the
object of his former experience, the events or the situation in which
his earlier experience occurred. Experience is intuition, it is
discourse interspersed with shocks and recapitulated; but intuition,
actual experience, is not an object of any possible intuition or
experience, being, as I have said above, a spiritual fact. Its existence
can be discovered only by moral imagination, and posited dramatically,
as the experience proper to spirit under certain real or imaginary
circumstances. And this is true of my own past or future, no less than
of the experience of others. When I remember I do not _look at_ my past
experience, any more than when I think of a friend’s misfortunes I look
at his thoughts. I imagine them; or rather I imagine something of my own
manufacture, as if I were writing a novel, and I attribute this intuited
experience to myself in the past, or to the other person. Naturally, I
can impute only such feelings as my present psyche can evoke; and she,
although creative, creates automatically and in accordance with patterns
fixed by habit or instinct; so that it is true, in a loose way, that I
can remember or conceive only what I have experienced; but this is not
because my experience itself remains within me, and can be re-observed.
Such a notion needs but to be made clear to be made ridiculous. Living
intuition cannot be preserved; and even while it lives, it cannot be
found. It is spiritual.
Recollection is accordingly incipient dreaming; it views the same
objects as the experience did which it rehearses, since the memory
arises by a renewal of the very process in the psyche by which that
experience was created originally. The psyche, in so far as she is
occupied with that dream, does not know that it is a memory, nor that
its objects are remote and perhaps no longer exist; she posits them with
all the confidence of action, as in any other dream. Yet in normal
memory the illusion is controlled and corrected, and the experience
actually given, with all its posited objects, is relegated to the past;
because this time it is framed in another experience, with more
obstinate objects and an environment to which the body is adjusted,
incompatible with the remembered environment. Hence the shadowy,
vaporous, unreal aspect of the remembered past: images chase one another
through it, as they chase one another sometimes in a cinema, or as in a
dream what was just now a white-capped wave may become a horse
galloping. Meantime reason rides the storm of seething incipient
fancies, anchored in the outer senses by the steady pull of the
instincts which bind it to the present world.
Experience cannot be remembered, a perception cannot be perceived nor
re-perceived. This fact explains both the directness of memory (since it
regards the same objects, the same environment, as the old experience,
and repeats the same emotions), and also the ghostliness of memory and
of all imagination (since the beliefs and emotions evoked are irrelevant
to the present world, and inhibited by peremptory present reactions).
There is a great difference conventionally between memory and fancy,
between history and fiction, and the two things diverge widely in their
physical significance, one regarding events in nature and the other
imaginary scenes; nevertheless psychologically they are clearly akin. It
is only by an ulterior control that we can distinguish which sort of
fancy is memory and which sort of fiction is historical. This control,
for the immediate past, is exercised by habit and sensation. The
immediate past is continuous with the present; I believe that I
remember, and do not merely imagine, the street in which I live, because
I am ready to walk out into it confidently, and by raising my eyes can
see it out of the window. It is an object continuous with the recurrent
objects of my present faith. When the past is more remote, this control,
while the same in principle, is less directly exercised; it is mainly
the _habit_ of memory that testifies to the truth of memory. I believe I
remember, and do not merely imagine, what I have always said I
remembered; just as we believe events to be historical and not invented,
when historians have always repeated them. It is consequently very easy
for a fiction, once incorporated in what, because of our practical
habits, we regard as real events, to pass for a fact for ever.
Autobiographies and religions (even when not systematically recast by
the fancy, as they usually are) contain many such involuntary
confusions. _Vice versa_, a lively fiction spontaneously takes the form
of a history or a memory. Although no junction with genuine memory or
history may be attempted in _Robinson Crusoe_ at the beginning or at the
end, many a real fact may be woven into the narrative, to add to its
verisimilitude, and absorb, as it were, the fancied details into the
romantic medley of things commonly believed. “Once upon a time,” says
the story-teller, in order vaguely to graft his imaginary events on to
the tree of memory; and in the _Thousand and One Nights_ we are
transported to one of the cities amongst cities, or to an island amongst
the isles of the sea; whereby the fiction grows more arresting, or the
real world more marvellous and large.
Criticism of memory and history is a ticklish and often a comic matter,
because only fancy can be employed to do it; and we judge the authority
of records and the reports of our past experience by the criterion of
what, at the present moment, can exercise a decided suasion over our
belief, and create a living illusion. But the principle by which we
trust memory at all is always the same, and deeply paradoxical. How can
a flux be observed at all? If flux there be, the earlier part is gone
when the latter part appears: how then can the relation, the passage, be
observed? And where is the observation? If it occupies each instant in
turn, how can it bridge them? If it stands outside, how can it touch any
of them? In any case the observation would seem to be out of the flux
which it imagines, but does not undergo: for if its being is
instantaneous, there is no flux in it; and if it is comprehensive, and
contemporary with all the instants surveyed, again it endures no change.
Indeed, analytically, it is obvious that a sense of change, falling
necessarily under a unity of apperception, transcends _that_ change,
however changeful may be the conditions of its own genesis: mind, by its
very character as mind, is timeless. Is time, then, merely a picture of
time, and can it be nothing else? And is flux, which is an essential
quality of existence, only a mere appearance, and essentially incapable
of existing in fact?
There is danger here of an enormous illusion, into which I think the
most redoubtable metaphysicians have fallen. We must admit that spirit
is not in time, that the perception of flux (or of anything else) is not
a flux, but a synthetic glance and a single intuition of relation, of
form, of quality. The seen is everywhere a universal, the seeing is
everywhere supernatural. But this admission is far from involving a
denial of flux—a denial, that is, of the deliverance of this very spirit
to which we are assigning such pompous prerogatives. The one prerogative
which we must assume spirit to possess—because we claim it in exercising
spirit at all—is that it _understands_, that it tells truly something
about something. Its own conditions of being, that it must be
immaterial, timeless, synthetic, intuitive, do not preclude it, if it is
truly intelligent, from revealing things differently constituted from
itself: much less can it prevent these non-spiritual things from
existing. What madness is this, because we may at last discern the
spirituality of spirit, to deny that there could ever have been anything
for spirit to discern? Why stultify the very faculty we are discovering
that we possess? Why tumble in this way head over heels from our little
eminence, and reduce ourselves to speechlessness in wonder at our
capacity to speak? This supernatural status and super-temporal scope of
spirit are not prerogatives; they are deprivations; they are sacrificial
conditions, from the point of view of natural existence, to which any
faculty must submit, if it is to understand. Of course understanding is
itself an achievement (though not all philosophers esteem it highly),
but it must be bought at a price: at the price of escaping into a fourth
dimension, of not being that which we understand. So when the flux, in
its rumble and perpetual superposition of movements, remembers that it
flows, it is not arrested materially; but the sense that what flows
through it at this instant has come from afar, that it has taken a fresh
shape, and is hurrying to new transformations, has itself eluded that
fate: for this sense, as distinguished from the psyche that exercises
it, is tangential to the flux it surveys, neither instantaneous nor
prolonged, but simply intelligent. How far into the past or future its
glance may reach, is a matter of accident, and of the range of
adjustments at that moment in the psyche. But spirit is virtually
omniscient: barriers of space and time do not shut it in; they are but
the boundary-stones of field and field in its landscape. It is ready to
survey all time and all existence if, by establishing some electric
connection with its seat, time and existence will consent to report
themselves to it. For spirit has no interests, no curiosity, no animal
impatience; and as it arises only when and where nature calls it forth,
so it surveys only what nature happens to spread before it.
CHAPTER XVIII
KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS
In the claims of memory I have a typical instance of what is called
knowledge. In remembering I believe that I am taking cognisance not of a
given essence but of a remote existence, so that, being myself here and
now, I can consider and describe something going on at another place and
time. This leap, which renders knowledge essentially faith, may come to
seem paradoxical or impossible like the leap of physical being from
place to place or from form to form which is called motion or change,
and which some philosophers deny, as they deny knowledge. Is there such
a leap in knowing? Am I really here and now when I apprehend some remote
thing? Certainly, if by myself I understand the psyche within my body,
which directs my outer organs, reacts on external things, and shapes the
history and character of the individual animal that bears my name. In
this sense I am a physical being in the midst of nature, and my
knowledge is a name for the effects which surrounding things have upon
me, in so far as I am quickened by them, and readjusted to them. I am
certainly confined at each moment to a limited space and time, but may
be quickened by the influence of things at any distance, and may be
readjusting myself to them. For the naturalist there is accordingly no
paradox in the leap of knowledge other than the general marvel of
material interaction and animal life.
If by myself, however, I meant pure spirit, or the light of attention by
which essences appear and intuitions are rendered actual, it would not
be true that I am confined or even situated in a particular place and
time, nor that in considering things remote from my body, my thoughts
are taking any unnatural leap. The marvel, from the point of view of
spirit, is rather that it should need to be planted at all in the
sensorium of some living animal, and that, being rooted there, it should
take that accidental station for its point of view in surveying all
nature, and should dignify one momentary phase of that animal life with
the titles of the Here and the Now. It is only spirit, be it observed,
that can do this. In themselves all the points of space-time are equally
central and palpitating, and every phase of every psyche is a focus for
actual readjustments to the whole universe. How then can the spirit,
which would seem to be the principle of universality and justice, take
up its station in each of these atoms and fight its battles for it, and
prostitute its own light in the service of that desperate blindness? Can
reason do nothing better than supply the eloquence of prejudice? Such
are the puzzles which spirit might find, I will not say in the leap of
knowledge, but in the fatality which links the spirit to a material
organ so that, in order to reach other things, it is obliged to leap; or
rather can never reach other things, because it is tethered to its
starting-point, except by its intent in leaping, and cannot even
discover the stepping-stone on which it stands because its whole life is
the act of leaping away from it. There is no reason, therefore, in so
far as knowledge is an apanage of spirit, why knowledge should not bathe
all time and all existence in an equal light, and see everything as it
is, with an equal sympathy and immediacy. The problem for the spirit is
how it could ever come to pick out one body or another for its cynosure
and for its instrument, as if it could not see save through such a
little eye-glass, and in such a violent perspective. This problem, I
think, has a ready answer, but it is not one that spirit could ever find
of itself, without a long and docile apprenticeship in the school of
animal faith. This answer is that spirit, with knowledge and all its
other prerogatives, is intrinsically and altogether a function of animal
life; so that if it were not lodged in some body and expressive of its
rhythms and relations, spirit would not exist at all. But this solution,
even when spirit is humble enough to accept it, always seems to it a
little disappointing and satirical.
Spirit, therefore, has no need to leap in order to know, because in its
range as spirit it is omnipresent and omnimodal. Events which are past
or future in relation to the phase of the psyche which spirit expresses
in a particular instance, or events which are remote from that psyche in
space, are not for that reason remote from spirit, or out of its
cognitive range: they are merely hidden, or placed in a particular
perspective for the moment, like the features of a landscape by the
hedges and turns of a road. Just as all essences are equally near to
spirit, and equally fit and easy to contemplate, if only a psyche with
an affinity to those essences happens to arise; so all existing things,
past, future, or infinitely distant, are equally within the range of
knowledge, if only a psyche happens to be directed upon them, and to
choose terms, however poor or fantastic, in which to describe them. In
choosing these terms the psyche creates spirit, for they are essences
given in intuition; and in directing her action or endeavour, backward
or forward, upon those remote events, she creates intent in the spirit,
so that the given essences become descriptions of the things with which
the psyche is then busied.
But how, I may ask, can intent distinguish its hidden object, so that an
image, distorted or faithful, may be truly or falsely projected _there_,
or used to describe _it_? How does the spirit divine that there is such
an object, or where it lies? And how can it appeal to a thing which is
hidden, the object of mere intent, as to a touchstone or standard for
its various descriptions of that object, and say to them, as they
suggest themselves in turn: You are too vague, You are absurd, You are
better, You are absolutely right?
I answer that it does so by animal presumption, positing whatsoever
object instinct is materially predisposed to cope with, as in hunger,
love, fighting, or the expectation of a future. But before developing
this reply, let me make one observation. Since intuition of essence is
not knowledge, knowledge can never lie in an overt comparison of one
datum with another datum given at the same time; even in pure dialectic,
the comparison is with a datum _believed_ to have been given formerly.
If both terms were simply given they would compose a complex essence,
without the least signification. Only when one of the terms is indicated
by intent, without being given exhaustively, can the other term serve to
define the first more fully, or be linked with it in an assertion which
is not mere tautology. An object of faith—and knowledge is one species
of faith—can never, even in the most direct perception, come within the
circle of intuition. Intuition of things is a contradiction in terms. If
philosophers wish to abstain from faith, and reduce themselves to
intuition of the obvious, they are free to do so, but they will thereby
renounce all knowledge, and live on passive illusions. No fact, not even
the fact that these illusions exist, would ever be, or would ever have
been, anything but the false idea that they had existed. There would be
nothing but the realm of essence, without any intuition of any part of
it, nor of the whole: so that we should be driven back to a nihilism
which only silence and death could express consistently; since the least
actual assertion of it, by existing, would contradict it.
Even such acquaintance with the realm of essence as constitutes some
science or recognisable art—like mathematics or music—lies in intending
and positing great stretches of essence not now given, so that the
essences now given acquire significance and become pregnant, to my vital
feeling, with a thousand things which they do not present actually, but
which I know where to look for eventually, and how to await. Suppose a
moment ago I heard a clap of thunder, loud and prolonged, but that the
physical shock has subsided and I am conscious of repose and silence. I
may find some difficulty, although the thing was so recent, in
_rehearsing_ even now the exact volume, tone, and rumblings of that
sound; yet I _know_ the theme perfectly, in the sense that when it
thunders again, I can say with assurance whether the second crash was
longer, louder, or differently modulated. In such a case I have no
longer an intuition of the first thunder-clap, but a memory of it which
is knowledge; and I can define on occasion, up to a certain point and
not without some error, the essence given in that particular past
intuition. Thus even pure essences can become objects of intent and of
tentative knowledge when they are not present in intuition but are
approached and posited indirectly, as the essences given on another
particular occasion or signified by some particular word. The word or
the occasion are natural facts, and my knowledge is focussed upon them
in the first instance by ordinary perception or conception of nature:
and the essence I hope to recover is elicited gradually, imaginatively,
perhaps incorrectly, at the suggestion of those assumed facts, according
to my quickness of wit, or my familiarity with the conventions of that
art or science. In this way it becomes possible and necessary to learn
about essences as if they were things, not initially by a spontaneous
and complete intuition, but by coaxing the mind until possibly, at the
end, it beholds them clearly. This is the sort of intuition which is
mediated by language and by works of fine art; also by logic and
mathematics, as they are learned from teachers and out of books. It is
not happy intuition of some casual datum: it is laborious recovery, up
to a certain point, of the _sort_ of essence somebody else may have
intuited. Whereas intuition, which reveals an essence directly, is not
knowledge, because it has no ulterior object, the designation of some
essence by some sign does convey knowledge, to an intelligent pupil, of
what that essence was. Obviously such divination of essences present
elsewhere, so that they become present here also, in so far as it is
knowledge, is trebly faith. Faith first in the document, as a genuine
natural fact and not a vapid fancy of my own; for instance, belief that
there is a book called the Bible, really handed down from the ancient
Jews and the early Christians, and that I have not merely dreamt of such
a book. Faith then in the significance of that document, that it means
some essence which it is not; in this instance, belief that the sacred
writers were not merely speaking with tongues but were signifying some
intelligible points in history and philosophy. Faith finally in my
success in interpreting that document correctly, so that the essences it
suggests to me now are the very essences it expressed originally: in
other words, the belief that when I read the Bible I understand it as it
was meant, and not fantastically.
I revert now to the question how it is possible to posit an object which
is not a datum, and how without knowing positively what this object is I
can make it the criterion of truth in my ideas. How can I test the
accuracy of descriptions by referring them to a subject-matter which is
not only out of view now but which probably has never been more than an
object of intent, an event which even while it was occurring was
described by me only in terms native to my fancy? If I know a man only
by reputation, how should I judge if the reputation is deserved? If I
know things only by representations, are not the representations the
only things I know?
This challenge is fundamental, and so long as the assumptions which it
makes are not challenged in turn, it drives critics of knowledge
inexorably to scepticism of a dogmatic sort, I mean to the assertion
that the very notion of knowledge is absurd. One assumption is that
knowledge should be intuition: but I have already come to the conclusion
that intuition is not knowledge. So long as a knowledge is demanded that
shall be intuition, the issue can only be laughter or despair; for if I
attain intuition, I have only a phantom object, and if I spurn that and
turn to the facts, I have renounced intuition. This assumption alone
suffices, therefore, to disprove the possibility of knowledge. But in
case the force of this disproof escaped us, another assumption is at
hand to despatch the business, namely, the assumption that in a true
description—if we grant knowledge by description—the terms should be
identical with the constituents of the object, so that the idea should
_look like_ the thing that it knows. This assumption is derived from the
other, or is a timid form of it: for it is supposed that I know by
intuiting my idea, and that unless that idea resembled the object I wish
to know, I could not even by courtesy be said to have discovered the
latter. But the intuition of an idea, let me repeat, is not knowledge;
and if a thing resembling that idea happened to exist, my intuition
would still not be knowledge of it, but contemplation of the idea only.
Plato and many other philosophers, being in love with intuition (for
which alone they were perhaps designed by nature), have identified
science with certitude, and consequently entirely condemned what I call
knowledge (which is a form of animal faith) or relegated it to an
inferior position, as something merely necessary for life. I myself have
no passionate attachment to existence, and value this world for the
intuitions it can suggest, rather than for the wilderness of facts that
compose it. To turn away from it may be the deepest wisdom in the end.
What better than to blow out the candle, and to bed! But at noon this
pleasure is premature. I can always hold it in reserve, and perhaps
nihilism is a system—the simplest of all—on which we shall all agree in
the end. But I seem to see very clearly now that in doing so we should
all be missing the truth: not indeed by any false assertion, such as may
separate us from the truth now, but by dumb ignorance—a dumb ignorance
which, when proposed as a solution to actual doubts, is the most radical
of errors, since it ignores and virtually denies the pressure of those
doubts, and their living presence. Accordingly, so long as I remain
awake and the light burning, that total dogmatic scepticism is evidently
an impossible attitude. It requires me to deny what I assert, not to
mean what I mean, and (in the sense in which seeing is believing) not to
believe what I see. If I wish, therefore, to formulate in any way my
actual claim to knowledge—a claim which life, and in particular memory,
imposes upon me—I must revise the premisses of this nihilism. For I have
been led to it not by any accidental error, but by the logic of the
assumption that knowledge should be intuition of fact. It is this
presumption that must be revoked.
Knowledge is no such thing. It is not intramental nor internal to
experience. Not only does it not require me to compare two given terms
and to find them similar or identical, but it positively excludes any
intuitive possession of its object. Intuition subsists beneath
knowledge, as vegetative life subsists beneath animal life, and within
it. Intuition may also supervene upon knowledge, when all I have learned
of the universe, and all my concern for it, turn to a playful or a
hypnotising phantom; and any poet or philosopher, like any flower, is
free to prefer intuition to knowledge. But in preferring intuition he
prefers ignorance. Knowledge is knowledge because it has compulsory
objects that pre-exist. It is incidental to the predicaments and labour
of life: also to its masterful explorations and satirical moods. It is
reflected from events as light is reflected from bodies. It expresses in
discourse the modified habits of an active being, plastic to experience,
and capable of readjusting its organic attitude to other things on the
same material plane of being with itself. The place and the pertinent
functions of these several things are indicated by the very attitude of
the animal who notices them; this attitude, physical and practical,
determines the object of intent, which discourse is about.
When the proverbial child cries for the moon, is the object of his
desire doubtful? He points at it unmistakably; yet the psychologist (not
to speak of the child himself) would have some difficulty in recovering
exactly the sensations and images, the gathering demands and fumbling
efforts, that traverse the child’s mind while he points. Fortunately all
this fluid sentience, even if it could be described, is irrelevant to
the question; for the child’s sensuous experience is not his object. If
it were, he would have attained it. What his object is, his fixed gaze
and outstretched arm declare unequivocally. His elders may say that he
doesn’t know what he wants, which is probably true of them also: that
is, he has only a ridiculously false and inconstant idea of what the
moon may be in itself. But his attention is arrested in a particular
direction, his appetition flows the same way; and if he may be said to
know anything, he knows there is something there which he would like to
reach, which he would like to know better. He is a little philosopher;
and his knowledge, if less diversified and congealed, is exactly like
science.
The attitude of his body in pointing to the moon, and his tears, fill
full his little mind, which not only reverberates to this physical
passion, but probably observes it: and this felt attitude _identifies
the object_ of his desire and knowledge _in the physical world_. It
determines what particular thing, in the same space and time with the
child’s body, was the object of that particular passion. If the object
which the body is after is identified, that which the soul is after is
identified too: no one, I suppose, would carry dualism so far as to
assert that when the mouth waters at the sight of one particular plum,
the soul may be yearning for quite another.
The same bodily attitude of the child _identifies the object in the
discourse of an observer_. In perceiving what his senses are excited by,
and which way his endeavour is turned, I can see that the object of his
desire is the moon, which I too am looking at. That I am looking at the
same moon as he can be proved by a little triangulation: our glances
converge upon it. If the child has reached the inquisitive age and asks
“What is that?” I understand what he means by “that” and am able to
reply sapiently “That is the moon,” only because our respective bodies,
in one common space, are discoverably turned towards one material
object, which is stimulating them simultaneously. Knowledge of discourse
in other people, or of myself at other times, is what I call literary
psychology. It is, or may be, in its texture, the most literal and
adequate sort of knowledge of which a mind is capable. If I am a lover
of children, and a good psycho-analyst, I may feel for a moment exactly
as the child feels in looking at the moon: and I may know that I know
his feeling, and very likely he too will know that I know it, and we
shall become fast friends. But this rare adequacy of knowledge, attained
by dramatic sympathy, goes out to an object which in its existence is
known very indirectly: because poets and religious visionaries feel this
sort of sympathy with all sorts of imaginary persons, of whose existence
and thoughts they have only intuition, not knowledge. If I ask for
evidence that such an object exists, and is not an _alter ego_ of my
private invention, I must appeal to my faith in nature, and to my
conventional assumption that this child and I are animals of the same
species, in the same habitat, looking at the same moon, and likely to
have the same feelings: and finally the psychology of the tribe and the
crowd may enable me half to understand how we know that we have the same
feelings at once, when we actually share them.
The attitude of the child’s body also _identifies the object for him, in
his own subsequent discourse_. He is not likely to forget a moon that he
cried for. When in stretching his hand towards it he found he could not
touch it, he learned that this bright good was not within his grasp, and
he made a beginning in the experience of life. He also made a beginning
in science, since he then added the absolutely true predicate “out of
reach” to the rather questionable predicates “bright” and “good” (and
perhaps “edible”) with which his first glimpse had supplied him. That
active and mysterious thing, co-ordinate with himself, since it lay in
the same world with his body, and affected it—the thing that attracted
his hand, was evidently the very thing that eluded it. His failure would
have had no meaning and would have taught him nothing—that is, would not
have corrected his instinctive reactions—if the object he saw and the
object he failed to reach had not been identical; and certainly that
object was not brightness nor goodness nor excitements in his brain or
psyche, for these are not things he could ever have attempted or
expected to touch. It is only things on the scale of the human senses
and in the field of those instinctive reactions which sensation calls
forth, that can be the primary objects of human knowledge: no other
things can be discriminated at first by an animal mind, or can interest
it, or can be meant and believed in by it. It is these instinctive
reactions that select the objects of attention, designate their locus,
and impose faith in their existence. But these reactions may be modified
by experience, and the description the mind gives of the objects reacted
upon can be revised, or the objects themselves discarded, and others
discerned instead. Thus the child’s instinct to touch the moon was as
spontaneous and as confident at first as his instinct to look at it; and
the object of both efforts was the same, because the same external
agency aroused them, and with them the very heterogeneous sensations of
light and of disappointment. These various terms of sense or of
discourse, by which the child described the object under whose
attractions and rebuffs he was living, were merely symbols to him, like
words. An animal naturally has as many signs for an object as he has
sensations or emotions in its presence. These signs are miscellaneous
essences—sights, sounds, smells, contacts, tears, provocations—and they
are alternative or supplementary to one another, like words in different
languages. The most diverse senses, such as smell and sight, if summoned
to the same point in the environment, and guiding a single action, will
report upon a single object. Even when one sense brings all the news I
have, its reports will change from moment to moment with the distance,
variation, or suspension of the connection between the object and my
body: and this without any relevant change in the object itself. Nay,
often the very transformation of the sensation bears witness that the
object is unchanged; as music and laughter, overheard as I pass a
tavern, are felt and known to continue unabated, and to be no merriment
of mine, just because they fade from my ears as I move away.
The object of knowledge being that designated in this way by my bodily
attitude, the æsthetic qualities I attribute to it will depend on the
particular sense it happens to affect at the moment, or on the sweep and
nature of the reaction which it then calls forth on my part. This
diversity in signs and descriptions for a single thing is a normal
diversity. Diversity, when it is not contradiction, irritates only
unreasonably dogmatic people; they are offended with nature for having a
rich vocabulary, and sometimes speaking a language, or employing a
syntax, which they never heard at home. It is an innocent prejudice, and
it yields easily in a generous mind to pleasure at the wealth of
alternatives which animal life affords. Even such contradictions as may
arise in the description of things, and may truly demand a solution,
reside in the implication of the terms, not in their sensuous or
rhetorical diversity: they become contradictory only when they assign to
the object contrary movements or contrary effects, not when they merely
exhibit its various appearances. Looking at the moon, one man may call
it simply a light in the sky; another, prone to dreaming awake, may call
it a virgin goddess; a more observant person, remembering that this
luminary is given to waxing and waning, may call it the crescent; and a
fourth, a full-fledged astronomer, may say (taking the æsthetic essence
before him merely for a sign) that it is an extinct and opaque
spheroidal satellite of the earth, reflecting the light of the sun from
a part of its surface. All these descriptions envisage the same
object—otherwise no relevance, conflict, or progress could obtain among
them. What that object is in its complete constitution and history will
never be known by man; but that this object exists in a known space and
time and has traceable physical relations with all other physical
objects is a fact posited from the beginning; it was posited by the
child when he pointed, and by me when I saw him point. If it did not so
exist and (as sometimes happens) he and I were suffering from a
hallucination, in thinking we were pointing at the moon we should be
discoverably pointing at vacancy: exploration would eventually satisfy
us of that fact, and any bystander would vouch for it. But if in
pointing at it we were pointing to it, its identity would be fixed
without more ado; disputes and discoveries concerning it would be
pertinent and soluble, no matter what diversity there might be in the
ideal essences—light, crescent, goddess, or satellite—which we used as
rival descriptions of it while we pointed.
I find that the discrimination of essence brings a wonderful clearness
into this subject. All data and descriptions—light, crescent, goddess,
or satellite—are equally essences, terms of human discourse, in-existent
in themselves. What exists in any instance, besides the moon and our
various reactions upon it, is some intuition, expressing those
reactions, evoking that essence, and lending it a specious actuality.
The terms of astronomy are essences no less human and visionary than
those of mythology; but they are the fruit of a better focussed, more
chastened, and more prolonged attention turned upon what actually
occurs; that is, they are kept closer to animal faith, and freer from
pictorial elements and the infusion of reverie. In myth, on the
contrary, intuition wanders idly and uncontrolled; it makes epicycles,
as it were, upon the reflex arc of perception; the moonbeams bewitch
some sleeping Endymion, and he dreams of a swift huntress in heaven.
Myth is nevertheless a relevant fancy, and genuinely expressive; only
instead of being guided by a perpetual fresh study of the object posited
by animal faith and encountered in action, it runs into marginal
comments, personal associations, and rhetorical asides; so that even if
based originally on perception, it is built upon principles internal to
human discourse, as are grammar, rhyme, music, and morals. It may be
admirable as an expression of these principles, and yet be egregiously
false if asserted of the object, without discounting the human medium in
which it has taken form. Diana is an exquisite symbol for the moon, and
for one sort of human loveliness; but she must not be credited with any
existence over and above that of the moon, and of sundry short-skirted
Dorian maidens. She is not other than they: she is an image of them, the
best part of their essence distilled in a poet’s mind. So with the
description of the moon given by astronomers, which is not less
fascinating; this, too, is no added object, but only a new image for the
moon known even to the child and me. The space, matter, gravitation,
time, and laws of motion conceived by astronomers are essences only, and
mere symbols for the use of animal faith, when very enlightened: I mean
in so far as they are alleged to constitute knowledge of a world which I
must bow to and encounter in action; for if astronomy is content to be a
mathematical exercise without any truth, an object of pure intuition,
its terms and its laws will, of course, be ultimate realities, apart
from what happens to exist: realities in the realm of essence. In the
description of the natural world, however, they are mere symbols,
mediating animal faith. Science at any moment may recast or correct its
conceptions (as it is doing now) giving them a different colour; and the
nerve of truth in them will be laid bare and made taut in proportion as
the sensuous and rhetorical vesture of these notions is stripped off,
and the dynamic relations of events, as found and posited by material
exploration, are nakedly recorded.
Knowledge accordingly is belief: belief in a world of events, and
especially of those parts of it which are near the self, tempting or
threatening it. This belief is native to animals, and precedes all
deliberate use of intuitions as signs or descriptions of things; as I
turn my head to see who is there, before I see who it is. Furthermore,
knowledge is true belief. It is such an enlightening of the self by
intuitions arising there, that what the self imagines and asserts of the
collateral thing, with which it wrestles in action, is actually true of
that thing. Truth in such presumptions or conceptions does not imply
adequacy, nor a pictorial identity between the essence in intuition and
the constitution of the object. Discourse is a language, not a mirror.
The images in sense are parts of discourse, not parts of nature: they
are the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things; but
these spontaneous images, like the sounds of the voice, may acquire the
function of names; they may become signs, if discourse is intelligent
and can recapitulate its phases, for the things sought or encountered in
the world. The truth which discourse can achieve is truth in its own
terms, appropriate description: it is no incorporation or reproduction
of the object in the mind. The mind notices and intends; it cannot
incorporate or reproduce anything not an intention or an intuition. Its
objects are no part of itself even when they are essences, much less
when they are things. It thinks the essences, with that sort of
immediate and self-forgetful attention which I have been calling
intuition; and if it is animated, as it usually is, by some ulterior
interest or pursuit, it takes the essences before it for messages,
signs, or emanations sent forth to it from those objects of animal
faith; and they become its evidences and its description for those
objects. Therefore any degree of inadequacy and originality is tolerable
in discourse, or even requisite, when the constitution of the objects
which the animal encounters is out of scale with his organs, or quite
heterogeneous from his possible images. A sensation or a theory, no
matter how arbitrary its terms (and all language is perfectly
arbitrary), will be true of the object, if it expresses some true
relation in which that object stands to the self, so that these terms
are not misleading as signs, however poetical they may be as sounds or
as pictures.
Finally, knowledge is true belief grounded in experience, I mean,
controlled by outer facts. It is not true by accident; it is not shot
into the air on the chance that there may be something it may hit. It
arises by a movement of the self sympathetic or responsive to
surrounding beings, so that these beings become its intended objects,
and at the same time an appropriate correspondence tends to be
established between these objects and the beliefs generated under their
influence.
In regard to the original articles of the animal creed—that there is a
world, that there is a future, that things sought can be found, and
things seen can be eaten—no guarantee can possibly be offered. I am sure
these dogmas are often false; and perhaps the event will some day
falsify them all, and they will lapse altogether. But while life lasts,
in one form or another this faith must endure. It is the initial
expression of animal vitality in the sphere of mind, the first
announcement that anything is going on. It is involved in any pang of
hunger, of fear, or of love. It launches the adventure of knowledge. The
object of this tentative knowledge is things in general, whatsoever may
be at work (as I am) to disturb me or awake my attention. The effort of
knowledge is to discover what sort of world this disturbing world
happens to be. Progress in knowledge lies open in various directions,
now in the scope of its survey, now in its accuracy, now in its depth of
local penetration. The ideal of knowledge is to become natural science:
if it trespasses beyond that, it relapses into intuition, and ceases to
be knowledge.
CHAPTER XIX
BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE
All knowledge, being faith in an object posited and partially described,
is belief in substance, in the etymological sense of this word; it is
belief in a thing or event subsisting in its own plane, and waiting for
the light of knowledge to explore it eventually, and perhaps name or
define it. In this way my whole past lies waiting for memory to review
it, if I have this faculty; and the whole future of the world in the
same manner is spread out for prophecy, scientific or visionary, to
predict falsely or truly. Yet the future and the past are not ordinarily
called substances; probably because the same material substance is
assumed to run through both. Nevertheless, from the point of view of
knowledge, every event, even if wholly psychological or phenomenal, is a
substance. It is a self-existing fact, open to description from the
point of view of other events, if in the bosom of these other events
there is such plasticity and intent as are requisite for perception,
prophecy, or memory.
When modern philosophers deny material substance, they make substances
out of the sensations or ideas which they regard as ultimate facts. It
is impossible to eliminate belief in substance so long as belief in
existence is retained. A mistrust in existence, and therefore in
substance, is not unphilosophical; but modern philosophers have not
given full expression to this sceptical scruple. They have seldom been
disinterested critics, but often advocates of some metaphysic that
allured them, and whose rivals they wished to destroy. They deny
substance in favour of phenomena, which are hypostatised essences,
because phenomena are individually wholly open to intuition; but they
forget that no phenomenon can intuit another, and that if it contains
knowledge of that other, it must be animated by intent, and besides
existing itself substantially must recognise its object as another
substance, indifferent in its own being to the cognisance which other
substances may take of it. In other words, although each phenomenon in
passing is an object of intuition, all absent phenomena, and all their
relations, are objects of faith; and this faith must be mediated by some
feature in the present phenomenon which faith assumes to be a sign of
the existence of other phenomena elsewhere, and of their order. So that
in so far as the instinctive claims and transcendent scope of knowledge
are concerned, phenomenalism fully retains the belief in substance. In
order to get rid of this belief, which is certainly obnoxious to the
sceptic, a disinterested critic would need to discard all claims to
knowledge, and to deny his own existence, and that of all absent
phenomena.
For my own part, having admitted discourse (which involves time and
existences deployed in time, but synthesised in retrospect), and having
admitted shocks that interrupt discourse and lead it to regard itself as
an experience, and having even admitted that such experience involves a
self beneath discourse, with an existence and movement of its own—I need
not be deterred by any _a priori_ objections from believing in substance
of any sort. For me it will be simply a question of good sense and
circumstantial evidence how many substances I admit, and of what sort.
In the genesis of human knowledge (which I am not attempting to trace
here) the substance first posited is doubtless matter, some alluring or
threatening or tormenting thing. The ego, as Fichte tells us, unaware of
itself, posits a non-ego, and then by reflection posits itself as the
agent in that positing, or as the patient which the activity posited in
the non-ego posits in its turn. But all this positing would be mere
folly, unless it was an intelligent discovery of antecedent facts. Why
should a non-existent ego be troubled with the delirious duty of
positing anything at all? And, if nothing else exists, what difference
could it make what sort of a world the ego posited, or whether it
posited a thousand inconsequential worlds, at once or in succession?
Fichte, however, was far from sharing that absolute freedom in madness
which he attributes to the creative ego; he had a very tight tense mind,
and posited a very tense tight world. His myths about the birth of
knowledge (or rather of systematic imagination) out of unconscious egos,
acts, and positings concealed some modest truths about nature. The
actual datum has a background, and Fichte was too wise to ignore so
tremendous a fact. Romantic philosophy, like romantic poetry, has its
profound ways of recognising its own folly, and so turning it into
tragic wisdom. As a matter of fact, the active ego is an animal living
in a material world; both the ego and the non-ego exist substantially
before acquiring this relation of positing and being posited. The
instinct and ability to posit objects, and the occasion for doing so,
are incidents in the development of animal life. Positing is a symptom
of sensibility in an organism to the presence of other substances in its
environment. The sceptic, like the sick man, is intent on the symptom;
and positing is his name for felt plasticity in his animal responses. It
is not a bad name; because plasticity, though it may seem a passive
thing, is really a spontaneous quality. If the substance of the ego were
not alive, it would not leap to meet its opportunities, it would not
develop new organs to serve its old necessities, and it would not kindle
itself to intuition of essences, nor concern itself to regard those
essences as appearances of the substances with which it was wrestling.
The whole life of imagination and knowledge comes from within, from the
restlessness, eagerness, curiosity, and terror of the animal bent on
hunting, feeding, and breeding; and the throb of being which he
experiences at any moment is not proper to the datum in his mind’s eye—a
purely fantastic essence—but to himself. It is out of his organism or
its central part, the psyche, that this datum has been bred. The living
substance within him being bent, in the first instance, on pursuing or
avoiding some agency in its environment, it projects whatever (in
consequence of its reactions) reaches its consciousness into the locus
whence it feels the stimulus to come, and it thus frames its description
or knowledge of objects. In this way the ego really and sagaciously
posits the non-ego: not absolutely, as Fichte imagined, nor by a
gratuitous fiat, but on occasion and for the best of reasons, when the
non-ego in its might shakes the ego out of its primitive somnolence.
Belief in substance is accordingly identical with the claim to
knowledge, and so fundamental that no evidence can be adduced for it
which does not presuppose it. In recognising any appearance as a witness
to substance and in admitting (or even in rejecting) the validity of
such testimony, I have already made a substance of the appearance; and
if I admit other phenomena as well, I have placed that substance in a
world of substances having a substantial unity. It is not to external
pressure, through evidence or argument, that faith in substance is due.
If the sceptic cannot find it in himself, he will never find it. I for
one will honour him in his sincerity and in his solitude. But I will not
honour him, nor think him a philosopher, if he is a sceptic only
histrionically, in the wretched controversies of the schools, and
believes in substance again when off the stage. I am not concerned about
make-believe philosophies, but about my actual beliefs. It is only out
of his own mouth, or rather out of his own heart, that I should care to
convince the sceptic. Scepticism, if it could be sincere, would be the
best of philosophies. But I suspect that other sceptics, as well as I,
always believe in substance, and that their denial of it is sheer
sophistry and the weaving of verbal arguments in which their most
familiar and massive convictions are ignored.
It might seem ignominious to believe something on compulsion, because I
can’t help believing it; when reason awakes in a man it asks for reasons
for everything. Yet this demand is unreasonable: there cannot be a
reason for everything. It is mere automatic habit in the philosopher to
make this demand, as it is in the common man not to make it. When once I
have admitted the facts of nature, and taken for granted the character
of animal life, and the incarnation of spirit in this animal life, then
indeed many excellent reasons for the belief in substance will appear;
and not only reasons for using the category of substance, and positing
substance of some vague ambient sort, but reasons for believing in a
substance rather elaborately defined and scientifically describable in
many of its habits and properties. But I am not yet ready for that. Lest
that investigation, when undertaken, should ignore its foundations or be
impatient of its limits, I must insist here that trust in knowledge, and
belief in anything to know, are merely instinctive and, in a manner,
pathological. If philosophy were something prior to convention rather
than (as it is) only convention made consistent and deliberate,
philosophy ought to reject belief in substance and in knowledge, and to
entrench itself in the sheer confession and analysis of this belief, as
of all others, without assenting to any of them. But I have found that
criticism has no first principle, that analysis involves belief in
discourse, and that belief in discourse involves belief in substance; so
that any pretensions which criticism might set up to being more profound
than common sense would be false pretensions. Criticism is only an
exercise of reflective fancy, on the plane of literary psychology, an
after-image of that faith in nature which it denies; and in dwelling on
criticism as if it were more than a subjective perspective or play of
logical optics, I should be renouncing all serious philosophy.
Philosophy is nothing if not honest; and the critical attitude, when it
refuses to rest at some point upon vulgar faith, inhibits all belief,
denies all claims to knowledge, and becomes dishonest; because it itself
claims to know.
Does the process of experience, now that I trust my memory to report it
truly, or does the existence of the self, now that I admit its
substantial, dynamic, and obscure life underlying discourse, require me
to posit any other substances? Certainly it does. Experience, for animal
faith, begins by reporting what is not experience; and the life of the
self, if I accept its endeavours as significant, implies an equally
substantial, dynamic, ill-reported world around it, in whose movements
it is implicated. In conveying this feeling, as in all else, experience
_might_ be pure illusion; but if I reject this initial and fundamental
suasion of my cognitive life, it will be hard to find anything better to
put in its place. I am unwilling to do myself so much useless violence
as to deny the validity of primary memory, and assert that I have never,
in fact, had any experience at all; and I should be doing myself even
greater violence if I denied the validity of perception, and asserted
that a thunder-clap, for instance, was only a musical chord, with no
formidable event of any sort going on behind the sound. To be startled
is to be aware that something sudden and mysterious has occurred not far
from me in space. The thunder-clap is felt to be an event in the self
and in the not-self, even before its nature as a sound—its æsthetic
quality for the self—is recognised at all; I first know I am shaken
horribly, and then note how loud and rumbling is the voice of the god
that shakes me. That first feeling of something violent and resistless
happening in the world at large, is accompanied by a hardly less
primitive sense of something gently seething within me, a smouldering
life which that alien energy blows upon and causes to start into flame.
If this be not the inmost texture of experience, I do not know what
experience is. To me experience has not a string of sensations for its
objects; what it brings me is not at all a picture-gallery of clear
images, with nothing before, behind, or between them. What such a
ridiculous psychology (made apparently by studying the dictionary and
not by studying the mind) calls hypotheses, intellectual fictions, or
tendencies to feign, is the solid body of experience, on which what it
calls sensations or ideas hang like flimsy garments or trinkets, or play
like a shifting light and shade. Experience brings belief in substance
(as alertness) _before_ it brings intuition of essences; it is
appetition _before_ it is description. Of course sensation would precede
idea, if by sensation we understood contact with matter, and by idea
pure reverie about ideal things; but if idea means expectation, or
consciousness having intent, and if sensation means æsthetic
contemplation of data without belief, then idea precedes sensation:
because an animal is aware that something is happening long before he
can say to himself what that something is, or what it looks like. The
ultimate datum to which a sceptic may retreat, when he suspends all life
and opinion, some essence, pure and non-existent and out of all relation
to minds, bodies, or events—surely that is not the stuff out of which
experience is woven: it is but the pattern or picture, the æsthetic
image, which the tapestry may ultimately offer to the gazing eye,
incurious of origins, and contemptuous of substance. The radical stuff
of experience is much rather breathlessness, or pulsation, or as Locke
said (correcting himself) a certain uneasiness; a lingering thrill, the
resonance of that much-struck bell which I call my body, the continual
assault of some masked enemy, masked perhaps in beauty, or of some
strange sympathetic influence, like the cries and motions of other
creatures; and also the hastening and rising of some impulse in me in
response. Experience, at its very inception, is a revelation of
_things_; and these things, before they are otherwise distinguished, are
distinguishable into a here and a there, a now and a then, nature and
myself in the midst of nature.
It is a mere prejudice of literary psychology, which uses the grammar of
adult discourse, like a mythology, in which to render primitive
experience—it is a mere prejudice to suppose that experience has only
such categories as colour, sound, touch, and smell. These essences are
distinguished eventually because the senses that present them can be
separated at will, the element each happens to furnish being thus
flashed on or cut off, like an electric light: but far more primitive in
animal experience are such dichotomies as good and bad, near and far,
coming and going, fast and slow, just now and very soon. The first thing
experience reports is the existence of something, merely as existence,
the weight, strain, danger, and lapse of being. If any one should tell
me that this is an abstraction, I should reply that it would seem an
abstraction to a parrot, who used human words without having human
experience, but it is no abstraction to a man, whose language utters
imperfectly, and by a superadded articulation, the life within him.
Aristotle, who so often seems merely grammatical, was not merely
grammatical when he chose substance to be the first of his categories.
He was far more profoundly psychological in this than the British and
German psychologists who discard the notion of substance because it is
not the datum of any separate sense. None of the separate data of sense,
which are only essences, would figure at all in an experience, or would
become terms in knowledge, if a prior interest and faith did not
apprehend them. Animal watchfulness, lying in wait for the signals of
the special senses, lends them their significance, sets them in their
places, and retains them, as descriptions of things, and as symbols in
its own ulterior discourse.
This animal watchfulness carries the category of substance with it,
asserts existence most vehemently, and in apprehension seizes and throws
on the dark screen of substance every essence it may descry. To grope,
to blink, to dodge a blow, or to return it, is to have very radical and
specific experiences, but probably without one assignable image of the
outer senses. Yet a nameless essence, the sense of a moving existence,
is there most intensely present; and a man would be a shameless, because
an insincere, sceptic, who should maintain that this experience exists
_in vacuo_, and does not express, as it feels it does, the operation of
a missile flying, and the reaction of a body threatened or hit: motions
in substance anterior to the experience, and rich in properties and
powers which no experience will ever fathom.
Belief in substance, taken transcendentally, as a critic of knowledge
must take it, is the most irrational, animal, and primitive of beliefs:
it is the voice of hunger. But when, as I must, I have yielded to this
presumption, and proceeded to explore the world, I shall find in its
constitution the most beautiful justification for my initial faith, and
the proof of its secret rationality. This corroboration will not have
any logical force, since it will be only pragmatic, based on begging the
question, and perhaps only a bribe offered by fortune to confirm my
illusions. The force of the corroboration will be merely moral, showing
me how appropriate and harmonious with the nature of things such a blind
belief was on my part. How else should the truth have been revealed to
me at all? Truth and blindness, in such a case, are correlatives, since
I am a sensitive creature surrounded by a universe utterly out of scale
with myself: I must, therefore, address it questioningly but trustfully,
and it must reply to me in my own terms, in symbols and parables, that
only gradually enlarge my childish perceptions. It is as if Substance
said to Knowledge: My child, there is a great world for thee to conquer,
but it is a vast, an ancient, and a recalcitrant world. It yields
wonderful treasures to courage, when courage is guided by art and
respects the limits set to it by nature. I should not have been so cruel
as to give thee birth, if there had been nothing for thee to master; but
having first prepared the field, I set in thy heart the love of
adventure.
CHAPTER XX
ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE
According to those philosophers who look for the foundations of the
universe in their own minds, substance is but a dead and fantastic
thing—a ghost or abstracted shadow of many sensations, impossibly fused
and objectified. These philosophers, in their intense introspection, try
to catch thought alive, and the nearer they come to doing so, the more
unstable and unsubstantial they find it to be. It exists only in the act
of dominating or positing or meaning something; and before this
something can be specified exhaustively, something else has taken its
place, the limits of vision having expanded or its centre shifted. Such
self-observation may be profound, or at least sincere, although what is
true of life in one animal or at one moment might well be false of life
in another instance, and mere nonsense to a different mind. In myself, I
find experience so volatile that no insistence on its unsubstantial
flux, maniacally creative, seems to me exaggerated. But before such
observations of life in the quick can be turned into arguments against
the existence of substance, three assumptions must be made silently, all
three of which are false: first, that thought observes itself; secondly,
that if thought is itself in flux it can observe nothing permanent; and
lastly, that if direct observation offered no illustration of the
permanent, nothing permanent could exist in fact, or could be reasonably
believed to exist.
In the first place, living thought is so far from observing itself, that
some philosophers deny its existence, and the others find the greatest
difficulty in distinguishing it from its various objects. The terms of
pure thought, in which observation is couched and in which it rests, I
have found to be not thoughts but essences; and the objects of thought,
when thought relapses into its animal form of belief, are again not
thoughts but things. If later I contrast the order, rate, and natural
locus of discourse with the movement of events in general which
discourse is considering, I may begin to understand what a curious thing
discourse is, and to have assurance of its existence. The introspection
into which I may ultimately plunge, when I seem to be creating the world
as I think it, is a violently artificial exercise, in which the wheels
of life are reversed; and the knowledge I thus gain of my imaginative
operations would itself be sheer raving, creating a dream about
dreaming, unless these operations were domiciled in a natural being, and
expressed his history and vulgar situation in the natural world; so that
my eventual description, or rather dramatic reconstruction, of my own
experience, is one of the latest forms of my knowledge, and its object
one of the most derivative and insecure. It is a theme for literary
psychology, of which transcendental self-consciousness, or
autobiography, is one variety.
In the second place, permanence rather than change is native to the
prime objects of thought. The only data observable directly are essences
absolutely immutable in their nature, even if the one observed happens
to be the essence of change; since even this, so long as it is present
at all, presents change and nothing but change for ever. Attention of
course is continually drawn from one essence to another; but this
inconstancy in intuition could not be noticed, and could not actually
exist, if the essence which drops out of view and that which succeeds it
were not different, and each, therefore, always itself. Furthermore,
granting that an animal mind is probably always changing in some
respect, it by no means follows that no essence can be retained for more
than one instant under the light of attention. On the contrary, change
that was complete, and that substituted one totally new object for
another totally destroyed, would afford no inkling of its own existence:
only the permanent would ever appear to the mind. What happens is that
some detail changes in a field that does not change, and for that reason
the new element attracts attention, surprise, or joy. To hold something
fast, to watch, to stare, to wait and lie low in the presence of a felt
incubus, are primitive experiences; and the length of crawling time
through which a strain endures is a conspicuous feature in sensation,
especially in pain. This sense of duration doubtless involves the sense
of something changing at the same time—of something coming or continuing
to come as it threatened or as it was demanded—of some pulse of feeling
recurring and mounting towards increased potency or increased fatigue.
Yet in all this setting of cumulative change (which is but a perspective
in the fancy) there often shines a fixed focus of interest; and the
sense of something which lasts, and which remains itself whether I
approach or elude it, is one of the first and loudest notes of
awareness. Perhaps, when my mood is clear and musical, there is some
permanent essence clearly revealed that arouses my curiosity and wonder;
or when the stream runs thick and turbid, the obscure life of the psyche
itself rises to the surface, and yields the primary criterion of
happiness and naturalness in events. In either case in mastering,
recognising, and positing what I find or what I want, I know the
beginnings of speculative joy and of participation in eternity. The flux
touches the eternal at the top of every wave. Whatever thwarts this
achievement, or disturbs the deep rhythms of the life slumbering
beneath, seems illegitimate; and until acquisitive or sexual impulses
are aroused, the dozing animal counts on a perpetual well-being, and any
change seems to it as hateful as it is incredible.
In this way change itself, when it is rhythmic and regular, wears to
intuition the form of sustained being. The life of the body, by its
latent operation, sets a measure and scale for the duration of any
passing vision. There is an ever-present background felt as permanent,
myself always myself; and there is a large identity in the universe
also, familiar and limited in spite of its agitation, like a cage full
of birds. Everything seems to be more or less prolonged; comfort,
digestive warmth, the past still simmering, the brooding potentiality of
things to come, shaping themselves in fancy before they have occurred.
Both sleep and watchfulness are long drawn out, so is the very sense of
movement. Though change be everywhere, it remains everywhere strange and
radically unwelcome: for even when, as in destructive passion or
impatience, it is imperatively sought, it is sought as an escape from an
uncomfortable posture, in the hope of restoring a steady life, and
resting in safety.
Thus the notion of permanence behind change—which is a chief element in
the notion of substance—is trebly rooted in experience; because every
essence that appears is eternally what it is; because many congenial
images and feelings appear lastingly; and because whatever interrupts
the even flow and luxurious monotony of organic life is odious to the
primeval animal.
In the third place, even if direct experience did not illustrate the
permanent, the order of events when reflected on would suggest and
impose a belief in it. I reserve for another occasion all discussion of
the laws of nature or of the constant quantities of matter or energy:
the most ordinary recognition of things being as they were, and
remaining always at hand, posits their substantial nature. Suppose all
intuition was instantaneous; and in one sense it may be said always to
be so, because specious durations have no common scale, and the most
prolonged may be treated as a single moment, as the dome of St. Peter’s
may be seen through a keyhole. Instantaneous intuition, when suspended,
may be suspended only for a moment, and instantly recovered, as when I
blink. Such brief interruptions to perception are bridged over in
primary memory, and do not break the specious identity and continuity of
the object. It does not follow, however, that the interruption is not
felt. On the contrary, it is felt and resented just because beneath it
the object is sensibly continuous. There is a stock optical experiment
in which a pencil is made to cross the field of vision between the eye
and a book, without ever hiding any part of the page. What binocular
vision does in that instance, the persistence of impressions does in the
case of an intermittent stimulus. The interruption is startling and
obvious, but the continuity of the object is obvious too. This
experience may be repeated on a larger scale. The psyche, being
surrounded by substances, is adapted to them, and does not suspend her
adjustments or her beliefs whenever her sensations are interrupted.
Children recognise and identify things and persons more readily than
they distinguish them. As intuition is addressed to terms in discourse
which are eternal in their nature, though the intuition of them is
desultory, so faith and art are addressed to _habits_ in substance,
which without arresting the perpetual and pervasive flux of experience
(nor perhaps that of substance itself) manifest its dynamic permanence;
and, of course, it is on its dynamic side, not pictorially or
intuitively, that substance is conceived, posited, measured, and
trusted.
Hence the discovery, big with scientific consequences, that an existing
thing may endure unchanged, although my experience of it be
intermittent. The object of these recurrent observations is not
conceived, as a sophistical psychology would have it, by feigning that
the _observations_ are not discrete. Every one knows, when he shuts and
opens his eyes, that his vision has been interrupted; the interruption
is the point of the game. The notion that the thing persists was there
from the beginning; until I blinked, I had found it persisting, and I
find it persisting still after I open my eyes again. In considering the
fortunes of the object posited, I simply discard the interruption, as
voluntary and due to a change in myself which I can repeat at will. In
spontaneous thought I never confuse the changes which the thing may
undergo in its own being with the variations in my attention nor (when I
have a little experience) with shifts in my perspectives. I therefore
recognise it to be permanent in relation to my intermittent glimpses of
it; and this without in the least confusing or fusing my different
views, or supposing them to be other than discrete and perhaps
instantaneous.
On the same principle, as education advances, a thing which stimulates
different senses at once or successively is easily recognised to be the
same object; and this, again, is done without in the least fusing or
confusing colour with hardness or sound with shape. And with the growth
of the arts and of experience of the world, the persisting and
continuous engine of nature is clearly conceived as the common object
which all my senses and all my theories describe in their special
languages at their several awakenings. That the syllables are broken
does not make their messages conflicting; on the contrary, they
supplement one another’s blindness, and correct one another’s
exuberance. Substance was their common object from the beginning, faith
in substance not being a consequence of reasoning about appearances, but
an implication of action, and a conviction native to hunger, fear,
feeding, and fighting; as an aid and guide to which the organs of the
outer senses are developed, and rapidly paint their various symbols in
the mind. The euphony and syntax of sense, far from disproving the
existence of substance, arise and change in the act of expressing its
movement, and especially the responsive organisation of that part of it
which is myself.
So much for the objections to the belief in substance which may be
raised from the point of view of self-consciousness, when this is
regarded as the principle of knowledge or even of universal existence,
neither of which it is.
Objections to the belief in substance may also come from a different
quarter (or one ostensibly different), in the name of critical sense and
economy in the interpretation of appearances. Suppose, the empiricist
may say, that your substance exists: how does it help you to explain
anything? You never have seen, and you never will see, anything but
appearances. If you trust your memory (as it is reasonable to do, since
you must, if you are to play the game of discourse at all) you may
assume that appearances have come in a certain order; and if you trust
expectation (for the same bad reason) you may assume that they will come
in somewhat the same order in future. These assumptions are not founded
on any proof or on any real probability, but it is intelligible that you
should make them, because the mind can hardly be asked to discredit its
vistas, when it has nothing else by which to criticise them. But why
should you interpolate amongst appearances, or posit behind them,
something that you can never find? That seems a gratuitous fiction, and
at best a hypostasis of grammar and names. You want a substance because
you use substantives, or because your verbal logic talks in subjects and
predicates.
But let us grant, the empiricist will go on, that your substance is
possible, since everything is possible where ignorance is complete. In
what terms can you conceive it, save in terms of appearance? Or if you
say it exists unconceived, or is inconceivable, it will simply encumber
your philosophy with a metaphysical world, in addition to the given one,
and with the hopeless problem of relating the two.
These empirical objections to the belief in substance might in
strictness be ruled out, since (in so far as they deny substance) they
rest on the same romantic view of self-consciousness as the source of
knowledge and being as do the transcendental objections just considered.
Empiricism, however, has the advantage of being less resolute in folly.
Such terms as appearance, phenomenon, given fact (meaning given essence
_plus_ thing posited), and perception (meaning intuition _plus_ belief)
are all used sophistically to cover the muddles of introspection. They
are not analysed critically, but are allowed to retain in solution many
of the assumptions of common sense. The essence given is confused with
the intuition of it which is not given, but which common sense knows is
implicated. This intuition is then confused with the belief, prompted by
animal impulse and, for analysis, utterly gratuitous, that a thing or
event exists definable by the essence given. This belief finally is
confused with the existence of its object, which it merely posits and
cannot witness. This object, in psychological idealism, is some ulterior
intuition or (as it is called by common sense, which assumes a material
object producing it) some ulterior perception. But it is utterly
impossible that one perception should perceive another, and it is
improper to call an intuition a perception when it has no existing
object.
In consequence of this halting criticism of immediate experience,
empiricism admits the existence of many feelings or ideas deployed in
time and referred to in memory and in social intercourse; and in
admitting this (let me repeat) it admits substance in principle. Such a
flux of feelings or ideas is a permanent hidden substance for purposes
of knowledge, even if each of them, being a momentary life, might not be
called by that name. Each feeling or idea is substantial, however, in
respect to any memory or theory, contained in some other moment, which
may refer to it; and this memory or theory is an appearance of that
substantial but remote fact.
Let us suppose that David Hume, in spite of his corpulence, was nothing
but a train of ideas. Some of these composed his philosophy, and I, when
I endeavour to learn what it was, create in my own mind a fresh train of
ideas which refer to those in the mind of Hume: and for me his opinions
are a substance of which my apprehension is an appearance. My
apprehension, in this case, is conceived to be an apprehension of a
matter of fact, namely, the substance of Hume at some date; and in
studying his philosophy I am learning nothing but history. This is an
implication of empiricism, but is not true to the facts. For when I try
to conceive the philosophy of Hume I am not considering any particular
ideas which may have constituted Hume at one moment of his career; I am
considering an _essence_, his total system, as it would appear when the
_essences_ present in his various reflective moments are collated; and,
therefore, I am really studying and learning a system of philosophy, not
the presumable condition of a dead man’s mind at various historical
moments.
If empiricists were a little more sceptical, they would perceive that in
admitting knowledge of historical facts they have admitted the principle
that the beliefs they call ideas may report the existence of natural
substances. If the substance of this world is a flux, and even a flux of
feelings, it is none the less substantial, like the fire of Heraclitus,
and the existing object of such ideas as may describe it. But this
reasonable faith is obscured by the confusions I mentioned above. The
empiricist forgets that he is asserting the existence of outlying facts,
because he half identifies them with the living fact of his present
belief in them: and, further, because he identifies this living fact,
his belief now, with the essence which it is attributing to those remote
existences. He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much
better at believing than at seeing.
Apart from this unconscious admission of the existence of substances,
the empirical objections to substance in the singular express a distrust
of metaphysics with which I sympathise, and they show a love of home
truths which deserves to be satisfied.
In the first place, the substance in which I am proposing to believe is
not metaphysical but physical substance. It is the varied stuff of the
world which I meet in action—the wood of this tree I am felling, the
wind that is stirring its branches, the flesh and bones of the man who
is jumping out of the way. Belief in substance is not imported into
animal perception by language or by philosophy, but is the soul of
animal perception from the beginning, and the perpetual deliverance of
animal experience. Later, as animal attention is clarified, and animal
experience progresses, the description of these obvious substances may
be refined: the tree, the wind, and the man may reveal their elements
and genesis to more patient observation, and the first aspect they wore
may be found to be a fused and composite appearance of many elaborate
processes within them. But the more diffused substances in operation
which I shall then come upon will be simply the constituents of the
tree, the wind, and the man; they will be just as truly (though more
calculably) the realities I confront and may use in action. They will be
just as open to perception, although instruments or hypotheses may be
required to extend the accidental range of my senses in observing them;
and they will be just as much substances and not essences, that is,
objects of belief posited in action, not images given in intuition. My
notions of substance will therefore be subject to error, and capable of
reform: I may arrive at the belief that earth, air, water, and fire are
the substances in all things; later I may discover that fire is not a
substance, but a form of motion; for earth, air, and water I may come to
substitute the four or five score elements of chemistry, or more or
less; and I may remain in doubt whether light and space and ether are
substances or not. But all these opinions would be equally fantastic,
and equally devoid of truth or falsehood, if there were no substance
before me in the first instance which I was attempting to describe.
By a substance I understand what modern philosophers often call an
“independent object”—a most unfortunate phrase, because precisely at the
moment when a substance or an essence becomes my object, by becoming the
theme of my discourse, it ceases to be independent of me in that
capacity: and when this happens, before the cognitive relation between
me and my object is established, a dynamic relation has probably arisen
between the substance of that object and the substance of myself,
causing me to make that intrusive substance the object of my attention.
When a thing becomes my object it becomes dependent on me ideally, for
being known, and I am probably, directly or indirectly, dependent on it
materially, for having been led to know it. What is independent of
knowledge is substance, in that it has a place, movement, origin, and
destiny of its own, no matter what I may think or fail to think about
it. This self-existence is what the name object jeopardises, and what
the name substance indicates and asserts.
If abuses of language were not inevitable, I should be tempted to urge
philosophers to revert to the etymological and scholastic sense of the
words object and objective, making them refer to whatever is placed
before the mind, as a target to be aimed at by attention. Objective
would then mean present to imagination; and things would become objects
of thought in the same incidental way in which they become objects of
desire. But I will content myself with returning in my own person to the
correct use of the word substance for whatever is self-existent, and
with bestowing the term object on occasion upon any substance, essence,
event, or truth, when it becomes incidentally the theme of discourse.
Substances are called things when found cut up into fragments which move
together and are recognisable individually; and things are called
substances when their diffuse and qualitative existence is thought of
rather than their spatial limits. Flour is a substance and a loaf of
bread is a thing; but there is nothing metaphysical about flour, nor is
there any difference of physical status between a thing and the
substance of it.
But is not the _materia prima_ of Aristotle metaphysical? Is not the
substance of Spinoza metaphysical? Are not souls and Platonic Ideas,
which are also reputed to be substances, perfectly metaphysical?
Of course: and I shall have occasion, when surveying the realm of
matter, to show that these and other metaphysical entities are only
nominal essences, and cannot be the substance of anything.
I think these explanations will suggest to the reader a sufficient
answer to the other points raised by the empiricists against belief in
substance. Substance does not reduplicate natural objects, but is
identical with them. What it might be said to reduplicate (or rather to
back up and to render significant) would be given essences. Certainly
known substances, and other known objects, require to be posited by
animal faith on occasion of intuitions, as that which these intuitions
report. But there is hardly any reduplication here. Such representation
as there is, is probably quite heterogeneous in aspect from its
original, and even when—as in memory or a historical romance—some
specious similarity is presumed, it is a highly selective and idealised
reproduction, in a wholly different medium from the represented facts,
and possessing utterly different functions and conditions of being.
Nature in being discovered is not reproduced, but acquires a new
dimension, and is extraordinarily enriched. Matters are ludicrously
reversed if it is imagined that a pure spirit contemplating essences
could _invent_ a body and a world of matter surrounding it; the body
exists first, and in reacting on its environment kindles intuitions
expressive of its vicissitudes; and the commentary is like that which
any language or chronicle or graphic art creates by existing. Substance
is the speaker and substance is the theme; intuition is only the act of
speaking or hearing, and the given essence is the audible word.
Substance is on the same plane of being as trees and houses, but, like
trees and houses, it is on an entirely different plane of being from the
immediate terms of experience (which are essences) and from experience
itself (which is spirit thinking).
As to the reproach that substance, because it is not an appearance
presented exhaustively, must remain unconceived and inconceivable, it
rests on a false ideal of human knowledge. Intuition of essence is not
knowledge, but fancy and mental sport: and if logic and mathematics are
called sciences, they are such only as expansions of given hypotheses
according to given rules may be sciences, as there is a science of
chess. They are not _true_ nor human, except in the special form in
which actual discourse and actual bodies happen to illustrate them. A
preference for dialectic over knowledge of fact (which is knowledge of
substance) may manifest a poetical and superior spirit, as might a
preference for music over conversation; but it would be vain and
suicidal for human knowledge to transfer that ideal to the general
interpretation of experience. Substance being the object set before me
in action, pursuit, and investigation cannot be antecedently in my
possession, either materially or intellectually; it confronts me as
something challenging respect and demanding study; and its intrinsic
essence must remain always problematical, since I approach it only from
the outside and experimentally. The essences by which it is revealed to
me, and the hypotheses I frame about its nature, are so many
provocations for me to manipulate and examine it, and to call it by
various humorous names, expressive to me of its strange habits. My
natural curiosity, if I am a healthy young animal, will prompt me to do
this eagerly, and to turn my first luminous impressions into triumphant
dogmas; but to pure spirit, when that awakes, all this faith and
knowingness will seem childish.
To pure spirit substance and all its ways must remain always dark,
alien, and impertinent. From the transcendental point of view, which is
that of spirit, substance is an unattainable goal, or object-as-such,
being posited, not possessed. Only essences please this jealous lover of
light, and seem to it sufficient; it hates faith, existence, doubt,
anything ulterior. Substance and truth offend it by their unnecessary
claims; it would gladly brush them aside as superstitious obsessions.
What ghostly thing, it says to itself, is this Speaker behind the voice,
this Meaning behind the vision, this dark Substance behind the fair
appearance? Substance interrupts and besets the spirit in its innocence,
and in its mad play; one substance, which it calls the flesh, torments
it from below, and a kindred substance, which it calls matter, prods,
crushes, and threatens it from without. God also, another substance,
looms before it, commanding and forbidding; and he is terrible in his
wrath and obscurity, until it learns his ways. Yet, as religion shows,
it is possible for the spirit to be tamed and chastened. The fear of
substance may be the beginning of wisdom; and accustomed to the steady
dispensations of that power, the spirit may grow pious and modest, and
happy to be incarnate. God will then become in its eyes a source of
protection and comfort and daily bread, as all substance is to those who
learn how to live with it. When the lessons of experience are thus
accepted, and spirit is domesticated in the world, the belief in
substance explains everything; because _if_ substance exists, a
perpetual dependence in point of destiny, and a perpetual inadequacy in
knowledge are clearly inevitable, and soon come to seem proper and even
fortunate.
As knowledge advances, my conception of substance becomes a map in which
my body is one of the islets charted: the relations of myself to
everything else may be expressed there in their true proportions, and I
shall cease to be an egotist. In the symbolic terms which my map
affords, I can then plan and test my actions (which otherwise I should
perform without knowing it) and trace the course of other events; but I
am myself a substance, moving in the plane of universal substance, not
on the plane of my map; for neither I nor the rest of substance belong
to the realm of pictures, nor exist on that scale and in that flat
dimension. How we exist and what we are substantially must accordingly
remain a problem to the end; even if by chance I should ever hit upon
the essence of substance, nothing could test or maintain that miraculous
moment of clairvoyance. The only sphere in which clairvoyance is normal
is the sphere of mental discourse, one part of which may survey another
in the very terms in which the other unrolled itself in act; as I may
faithfully rehearse my own past or future thinkings, or those of men of
my own mind. The probability of such clairvoyance diminishes as the
similarity of structure and substance between me and the other creature
diminishes; and it vanishes altogether where life dies down; so that in
respect to inorganic substance I am indeed reduced to arbitrary symbols,
at which that substance, if it could know them, would laugh. Yet for my
purposes in studying inorganic substance (which is not interesting to me
in itself) these symbols do very well: they arise on occasion of
substantial events, and therefore appear in the same historical
sequence; so that in surveying the order of my symbols I learn the order
of real events, though my pictures certainly are not portraits of their
substance. Yet even the pictorial quality of these symbols expresses
true variations and variety in the substance of myself: it falls and
rises with my life. For this reason the map I draw of the universe in my
fancy, when I grow studious, becomes a truer and truer map, rendering
the movement of substance within and without me with increasing
precision, though always in an original notation, native to my senses
and intellect.
False ideals of knowledge are also involved in the contention that the
hypothesis of substance does not help to explain appearances, and even
renders appearances inexplicable. What is explanation? In dialectic it
is the utterance, in further words or images, of relations and terms
implied in a given essence: it is the explication of meanings. But facts
have no meaning in that sense. Essences implied ideally in their
essences need never become facts too: otherwise the whole realm of
essence would have to exist in act, and it would be impossible so much
as to begin the survey of that horrible infinitude, for lack of any
principle of emphasis to give me a starting-point, and create a
particular perspective. No: facts are surds, they exemplify fragments of
the realm of essence chosen for no reason: for if a will or reason
choosing anything (say the good) were admitted, that will or reason
would itself be a groundless fact, and an absolute accident. Existence
(as the least insight into essence shows) is necessarily irrational and
inexplicable. It cannot, therefore, contain any principle of explanation
_a priori_; and substance, as I understand the term, being what exists
in itself, it must be also (to borrow the rest of Spinoza’s definition
of it) what is understood through itself, that is, by taking its own
accidental nature as the standard for all explanations. If substance
were some metaphysical principle, some dialectical or moral force, it
might be expected to “explain” existence as a whole; but it ought not
then to be called a substance; at best it would be a harmony or music
which things somehow made. Such a harmony would not exist in things
bodily and individually, rendering their essences existential, but would
supervene upon them and float through them, like those principles which
certain moody metaphysicians have dreamt of, as solving the riddle of
the universe, and have called Sin, Will, Duty, the Good, or the Idea.
Substance, as I understand the word, is nothing of that sort. It is not
metaphysical, but simply whatever the physical substance may be which is
found in things or between them. It therefore cannot “explain” these
things, since they are its parts or instances, and it is simply their
substance. They have one, since they may be cut up, ground into powder,
dissolved into gases, or caused to condense again before our eyes; and
if they are living things, we may observe them devouring and generating
one another, the flux of substance evidently running through them, and
taking on recurrent forms. When these habits of nature are taken (as
they should be taken) as the true principle of explanation, the belief
in substance does become a great means of understanding events. It helps
me to explain their place, date, quality, and quantity, so that I am
able to expect or even to produce them, when the right substances are at
hand. If they were detached facts, not forms regularly taken on by
enduring and pervasive substances, there would be no knowing when,
where, of what sort, or in what numbers they would not assault me; and
my life would not seem life in a tractable world, but an inexplicable
nightmare.
I shall be thought a silly philosopher to mention this, as if it were
not obvious; but why do so many wise philosophers ignore it, and defend
systems which contradict it?
Finally, even if, in a moment of candour, the friend of phenomena was
inclined to allow that substance, so understood, was neither
metaphysical nor undiscoverable nor useless for explaining events, he
might still urge that the belief in substance creates an insoluble
difficulty, because opposite to substance appearance rises at once like
a ghost; and how shall this ghost be laid or what room shall be found
for it in the world of substance which we have posited? In other words,
substance, by hypothesis, is the source of appearances: but how,
remaining substance, can it ever produce them?
Here again the objection arises out of false demands. As at first
substance was condemned on the ground that knowledge should possess its
object as intuition does its data (a demand which would rob knowledge of
all transitive force), so now substance is condemned on the ground that
causation should be dialectical and that reality should be uniform, so
that if substance exists nothing should exist except substance. Whence
these absurd postulates? In the first place, reality (since it includes
the realm of essence) is infinitely omnimodal; and even when reduced to
existence it may certainly take on as many dimensions and as many
varieties as it likes. Substance is not more real than appearance, nor
appearance more real than essence, but only differently real. When the
word reality is used invidiously or eulogistically, it is merely in view
of the special sort of reality which the speaker expects or desires to
find in a particular instance. So when the starving gymnosophist takes a
rope for a serpent, he misses the reality of that, which is lifeless
matter; when the tourist gazing at an Arabic scroll calls it a frieze,
he misses the reality of that, which is a pious sentiment; and when the
millionaire buys a picture for its antiquity and its reputation, he
misses the reality of that, which is a composition. When substance is
asserted, appearance is not denied; its actuality is not diminished, but
a significance is added to it which, as a bare datum, it could not have.
In the second place, in so far as causation is not sheer magic imputed
by laying a superstitious emphasis on those phases which interest me
most in the flux of things, causation is the order of generation in
nature: whatsoever grows out of a certain conjunction in things, and
only out of that conjunction, may be said to be caused by it. Nothing
that happens is groundless, since whatever antecedents it actually has
are adequate to produce it. Yet all that happens is marvellous, because
like existence itself it is unfathomable, and, if we abstract from our
familiarity with it, almost incredible. But the antecedents, the
consequents, and the connection between them are equally remarkable in
this respect, and equally perspicuous. The schoolboy will be delighted
to learn how the refraction of the sun’s rays paints the rainbow on a
shower, or on the spray of the waves; the farmer will perfectly
understand that chickens are hatched from eggs; and I for one (though
other philosophers are less fortunate) can perceive clearly that when
animals react upon things in certain ways these things appear to them in
certain forms; and the fact that they appear does not seem to me (so
simple am I) to militate against their substantial existence.
Certainly neither the awakening of intuition, nor the character of the
essences that appear, can be deduced dialectically from the state of the
substance which produces them; but dialectic traces the implication of
one essence in another and can never issue from the eternal world. It is
perfectly impotent to express, much less to explain, any change or any
existence. If dialectic ruled the world, all implications would always
have been realised, no movement would have been possible, and the very
discourse that pursues dialectic would have been congealed and
identified from the beginning with the essence which it describes.
Existence, change, life, appearance, must be understood to be
unintelligible: on any other assumption the philosopher might as well
tear his hair and go mad at once. But when that assumption has been duly
made, and dialectic has been relegated to an innocuous dignity, the
blossoming of substance into appearance becomes the most amiable of
mysteries. If instead of admitting this evident and familiar kindling of
mind in nature, which makes the charm of childhood, of morning, and of
spring, I supposed that mind could animate no material body, and that
the flame of spirit could rise from no natural hearth, I should not have
a more intelligible world on my hands, but only a very miserable and
ghostly one. I should be foolishly shutting myself up in myopic
ignorance of that great world which is not mine nor like me, although I
belong to it and feed on it unawares. Why should I think it
philosophical to be so unintelligent, or to assert that appearances are
the only possible realities, when these appearances themselves do their
very best to inform me of the opposite? For though the poor things can’t
be actually more than they are, they arrange themselves and troop
together in such a manner that, if I make the least beginning in
understanding them, I gather that they are voices of self-evolving
things, on the same plane of reality as myself. Indeed, without such a
background to lend them a subterranean influence over my own being, they
would be unmeaning creations, and every transition from one to another
of them would be arbitrary. If I am told that appearances are but
loosely and unintelligibly bound to substance, I may reply that without
substance appearances would be far more loosely and unintelligibly bound
to one another. Appearances are at least conventional transcripts of
facts; they are expressions of substance which may serve as signs of its
movements; but what relation, moral or habitual, would each appearance,
if taken absolutely and not as significant of things, retain to the
other appearances that in dreaming or waking might follow upon it? None
whatever: it is only in its organs and its objects that experience
touches anything continuous or measurable and possesses a background on
which to piece together the broken segments of its own orbit. That
substance should be capable of attaining to expression in appearance is
a proof that substance is fertile, not that it is superfluous. On the
contrary, it is certain that if I knew the essence of substance, and if
I made nature the standard of natural necessity, the emergence of
appearance in the form and on the occasions in which it emerges would
seem to me necessary and inevitable.
CHAPTER XXI
SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH
Animal faith, being an expression of hunger, pursuit, shock, or fear, is
directed upon _things_; that is, it assumes the existence of alien
self-developing beings, independent of knowledge, but capable of being
affected by action. While things are running on in the dark, they may be
suddenly seized, appropriated, or destroyed. In other words, animal
faith posits substances, and indicates their locus in the field of
action of which the animal occupies the centre. Being faith in action
and inspired by action, it logically presupposes that the agent is a
substance himself, that can act on other things and be affected by them;
although temporally the substantial existence of the self may not be
posited until later, as one of the things in the world of things.
Meantime in this animal faith, and even in the choice of one essence
rather than another to be presented to intuition, spirit suffers
violence, since spirit is inherently addressed to everything impartially
and is always, in its own principle, ready to be omniscient and just.
For by spirit I understand simply the pure light or actuality of
thought, common to all intuitions, in which essences are bathed if they
are given. At first, as we see in children, spirit is carried away by
the joy of doing or seeing anything; it adopts any passion
unquestioningly, not being a respecter of persons nor at all squeamish;
it is innocently happy in accepting any task and watching any world, if
the body welcomes it. Ultimately, however, the spirit may come to wonder
why it regards all things from the point of view of one body in
particular, which seems to have no prerogative over the others in their
common realm. Justice and charity will then seem to lie in rescinding
this illegitimate pre-eminence of one’s own body: and it may come to be
an ideal of the spirit, not only to extend its view over all time and
all existence, but to exchange its accidental point of view for every
other, and adopt every insight and every interest: an effort which, by a
curious irony, might end in abolishing all interests and all views.
Such moral enlightenment is dangerous to animal life, and incidentally
to the animal faith on which the recognition of existing things hangs in
the first place. If the qualms and ambitions of spirit prevailed in
anybody altogether, as they tend to do in the saint and even in the
philosopher, he would not be able to halt at the just sympathy by which,
preserving animal faith, he would admit and respect the natural
interests of others as he does his own. He would be hurried on to rebel
against these natural interests in himself, would call them vain or
sinful, since the spirit of itself could never justify them, and would
initiate some discipline, mortifying the body and transfiguring the
passions, so as to free himself from that ignominy and bondage. He would
not succeed: but for speculative purposes I will suppose for a moment
that he succeeded. What would occur? He would be happier fasting than
eating, freezing than loving. Not sharing the impulses of his body, he
would regard it as a ridiculous mechanism; and the bodies of others
would be ridiculous mechanisms too, with which he could feel no
sympathy. His sympathy, if it survived at all, would be sublimated into
pity for the spirits chained to those bodies by their sin and ignorance,
and perhaps not even struggling to be free, but suffering in those
prisons perpetual pain and dishonour. He might aspire to save the spirit
in others as in himself; but hardened to his own animal vicissitudes he
would be steeled to theirs (a result even easier to accomplish), and
would be all scorn and lamentations for the life of the world.
I suspend all consideration of this moral issue, and revert to the
variations which animal faith may undergo during this long and always
imperfect transformation.
Things when they are posited are known to be substances. It would be
impossible for a child to be frightened without implicitly believing in
a substance at hand; and it would be impossible for him to attempt to
frighten other people (as children like to do in play) without
implicitly assuming that he is a substance himself. But though his
assurance of substance, in both cases, is complete, his knowledge of it
is superficial. In conceiving his own nature especially, he begins
building at the wrong end, from the weathercock down, not from the
foundations up. Although in action he identifies himself with his body,
as also in vanity and all the passions, yet when he asks himself
deliberately _what_ he is, he may be tempted to say that he is his
thoughts. Or, less analytically, he may feel that he is a soul, a living
spiritual power, a deep will at work in his body and in the world; and
though what he posits in other things is primarily their physical
presence, he will conceive this substance of theirs, particularly when
they are animals, in the same moral terms in which he conceives himself.
He will imagine them to be souls, passionate powers, wills guiding
events. He will not think people spirits to the exclusion of their
bodies, but will conceive their persons confusedly, as souls inhabiting
and using bodies, or as bodies breaking out into some thought or passion
which, once existing, agitates and governs the body that bred it.
Such a thought or passion, while evidently animating the body and
expressing its situation, does not exactly lie within the body; to
localise it there with any literalness or precision is absurd; and a man
feels in his own case that his thoughts and passions _come_ into his
heart, that they are influences visiting him, perhaps demons or
obsessions. He thinks they may pass from one man to another, or perhaps
exist suspended and ambient, in the form of gods or mighty laws. Hence
the notion of spiritual substances; a self-contradictory notion at
bottom, because substance is a material and spirit is an entelechy, or
perfection of function realised; so that (if I may parody Aristotle), if
a candle were a living being, wax would be its substance and light its
spirit. Nevertheless, in the history of philosophy, and even in current
discourse, the notion of spiritual substance was unavoidable. In the
haste of practical life, I count the lights without counting the
candles. Feelings and thoughts pass for the principles of action; I
inevitably stop there, and conceive my enemy as an evil purpose, and my
contradictor as a false thought. And it is in these imagined thoughts
and purposes that I lodge the power which, in action, I am contending
with: although I should be truly contending with ghosts, and trying to
drive essences out of the realm of essence (where each is immovable) if
I did not oppose that power or defeat that purpose in the precise places
and bodies in which it operates. The spirit can be confused with
substance only when it is spirit incarnate. Animal faith could hardly
light on such metaphysical objects unless it was called forth by a
material influence, to which animal faith is the natural response; but
the mind has but vague notions of what a material influence can be, and
therefore attributes the substantiality of which it is intimately aware
to hybrid essences floating before it: hence superstition, myth,
metaphysics, and the materialisation of words.
It is a task for natural philosophy to remove these ghosts, by
discovering the true movement of that living substance on which animal
faith _means_ to be directed, the substance on which the animal depends
and on which he can act. But the human mind naturally breathes its own
atmosphere of myth and dialectic, and evidence of fact pierces this
atmosphere with difficulty, only after much experience of error.
Gradually the wiser heads see that all substances fall together into one
system called nature; and then various metaphysical substances, which at
first seem to inhabit or compose nature, are discovered to be modes of
the single familiar substance called matter. The second Book of _Realms
of Being_ will be devoted to this subject; meantime, I will here draw up
a list of the chief false substances which human faith may rest on when
the characteristic human veil of words and pictures hides the modes of
matter which actually confront the human race in action, and which
therefore, throughout, are the _intended_ object of its faith.
1. _Souls._—These are essentially moral forces, that is, passions or
interests not necessarily self-conscious, conceived as magically ruling
animal bodies and dictating their acts.
This notion fuses three different things, belonging to three distinct
realms of being. The first is a mode of matter, the inherited mechanism
and life of the body, which I am calling the psyche. This is a true
dynamic unit, forming and using the outer organs of the body, a system
of habits relatively complete and self-centred; but it is only the fine
quick organisation within the material animal, and not a different
thing. This is the original soul which savages conceive as leaving the
body in sleep or death, itself a tenuous body of similar aspect and
powers; because they feel that bodily life and action have a principle
which is not visible on the surface, and yet they have no means of
conceiving this principle except as an image or ghost of that very body
which it is needed to control. Were wandering souls and ghosts more
often met with and studied, the question of the true souls of these
creatures would present itself anew: for nothing would be found on the
surface of a ghost to explain its words or its motions, and it would
soon be observed to give up the ghost in its turn. Even in spirit-land
the judicious would have recourse in the end to a behaviourist
psychology. For at the other extreme of human philosophising, the
material psyche reappears. Observation can trace back motions only to
other motions, and outward actions to activities hidden within, but
essentially no less observable; so that the mechanism of the body and
its habits are really the only conceivable mainspring of its behaviour.
The soul again becomes a subtler body within the body: only that instead
of a shadow of the whole man, even as in life he stood, it is a
prodigious network of nerves and tissues, growing in each generation out
of a seed.
Habit, though it is a mode of matter, has a unity or rhythm which
reappears in many different instances: it is a form not of matter but of
behaviour. Matter makes a vortex which reproduces itself, and plays as a
unit amongst the other vortices near it; and the eye can follow the
pleasing figures of the dance, without discerning the atoms or the laws
that compose it. Now the habits of animals exercise a strong influence,
sympathetic or antipathetic, over the kindred observer. He feels what
those habits seek; he reads them as purposes, as tendencies, as efforts
hostile or friendly to the free play of his own habits. The soul
agitating those bodies is therefore in his eyes more than another
ghostly body, which might quit them; it is a passion or a will which is
expressed there. And this unit of discourse, which if actual belongs to
the realm of truth, he regards superstitiously as a substance and a
power. He fancies that he himself is a will and a power reacting upon
other wills and powers: as if these habits or relations could be prior
to the terms that compose them, or could create those terms. It is this
element in the notion of souls that becomes predominant in the belief in
gods and in devils. Something subjective and moral, the dramatic value
which habits in nature have for the observer, is projected by him, and
conceived as a metaphysical power creating those habits. Passions, in
men, are often arrested on words. They are often arrested, as in poetic
love, upon images. And yet the magic of images and words is vicarious:
they would be empty, did not subtle material influences flow through
them, and hide behind them, rendering them exciting to the material soul
of the observer, who in his poetic ecstasy may think he is living in a
pure world of discourse.
Finally, in the notion of souls there is a projection of mental
discourse: this, when it really exists in animals, is a mode of spirit.
Animal life sometimes reaches its entelechy in a stream of intuitions,
expressive of its modifications by the presence of other bodies, or by
the ferments of its own blood. These modes of spirit are in themselves
intangible, unobservable, volatile, and fugitive; and if anything
actual, about which truth and error may arise, may be called
unsubstantial, they are as unsubstantial as possible. But as they arise
in the operations of substance, and are read into these operations when
a sympathetic being observes them, they seem to be a part of what is
observed. But they are in quite another dimension of being, in the realm
of spirit; and spirit, or the intuitions in which it exists, is not a
part of the substance on which animal faith is directed, nor a mode of
it, nor a natural substance at all. It cannot by any possibility be met
with in action, perceived, fought with, nor (if we consider it from
within, in its own being) can it be lodged anywhere in space nor even in
time. It belongs to nature only by its individual outlook and moral
relevance: and we may say of it only by courtesy that it lodges in the
place and time which its organ occupies and in the world which, by
affecting that organ, enters into its specious perspectives. When a man
believes in another man’s thoughts and feelings, his faith is moral, not
animal. Such a spiritual dimension in the substances on which he is
reacting can be revealed to him only by dramatic imagination; only his
instant sympathy can shape, or can correct, his notion of them. In
origin, these tertiary qualities of bodies, imputed to them by literary
psychology (which is an exercise of dramatic insight) are as
superstitious and mythical as the purposes and powers of magical
metaphysics; but the intuitions assigned to other people are _possible_
existences, as those metaphysical chimeras are not; and when the
creature that imputes the intuitions and the one that has them are the
same, or closely akin and close together, he may be absolutely
clairvoyant in imputing them. The mind as conceived by literary
psychology, or as represented by dramatic historians, is hypothetical
discourse, composed of what this psychology calls sensations, ideas, and
emotions. It _may_ exist, or may have existed, very much as conceived;
it would be a substance if idealism were true; but in fact it is a
translation into moral terms, rapid, summary, and prophetic, of an
animal life going on very laboriously and persistently in the dark; and
this animal life is itself no special substance, but a special mode or
vortex in the general substance of nature.
2. _Master-types, or Platonic Ideas._—This is an assimilation of
substances to their names. Words and grammar are professedly notes
indicating the identities and relations of things; but in practice
everything, in being expressed, is conventionalised. The terms of
discourse mark only the forms which things wear on the average, or at
their best, or approximately; and in discourse these conventional terms
soon acquire their own identity and relations, and form a pattern quite
different from that of their objects. Philosophers, who necessarily
employ language, are like naturalists who should study zoology only in a
farmyard: the jungle would disconcert them. An argumentative and
dialectical mind trusts its verbal logic: but a logic, however cogent in
itself, is always of problematical application to facts, since it
describes only one possible world out of an infinite number, and (unless
it is secretly founded on observation) is not likely to describe the
actual one. The logicians themselves, when men of open mind, notice this
fact and lament it; and they bear the actual world a great grudge for
showing so little fidelity to their principles. It is false, they are
convinced, to its true nature, to the ideal it ought to realise, to the
function which you see at every turn that it is endeavouring to fulfil.
So that the dialectician can easily become an idealist of the Platonic
type, by conceiving that the substance of things is not the moving
matter that to-day is one thing and to-morrow another, and that never is
anything perfectly, but that this matter is only what the voice is to a
song, or a book to its message or spirit—a treacherous and subordinate
vehicle of expression; whereas the true object to look for, the source
of the applicability of words to facts at all, is the eternal nature
which an actual thing may illustrate: so that the form of things and not
their matter is their true substance or οὐσία.
This substantiation of ideals, besides leaning on language, leans on a
sort of pragmatism or utilitarianism. Things are called beds if people
may sleep well upon them, and bridles if they serve to rein in a horse:
this function is their essence, in so far as they are beds or bridles at
all, and they are excellent in proportion to the perfection with which
they fulfil this function. And here an ascetic and supernaturalistic
motive begins to play a part in Platonism. For since the substance and
excellence of things lie _merely_ in their moral essence, or in the
fulfilment of the function designated by their names, all superfluous
ornaments, all variations, all hybrid combinations are monstrous. Things
should have only the barely necessary matter in them, and that wholly
obedient to the mastering form. What am I saying? Need things have any
matter in them at all? What could be more ideal than the idea itself, or
more perfect than the function exercised by magic, and without an
instrument? Away, then, with all material embodiments of ideas, even if
these embodiments seem perfect for a moment. Being material, they will
be treacherous and unstable: there will be some alloy of imperfection in
them, some unreality. Fly, then, to the heaven of ideas, absolute and
eternal, as the realm of essence contains them. There at last you will
find the substance which in this world of phenomena you sought in vain.
Things are only appearances; in minding and loving them, and thinking
they can wound us, we are befooled; for the only bread that can feed the
soul is celestial, and the only death that can overtake her is moral
disintegration and the darkness of merely existing without loyalty to
what she ought to be.
This is good ethics: not because our ideal is our substance nor because
our soul in heaven is our true self, but because life is a harmony in
material motions, reproducing themselves, and happiness is a
consciousness of this harmony; so that substance would have no value and
its formations no name but for the choice they make of some eternal
essence to embody, and the purity with which they manifest it. But the
flux of substance is by no means limited to producing but one type of
perfection, or one circle of types. The infinite is open to all
variations; and any particular idea is so far from being the substance
of things, that it acquires its ideal prerogative, as a goal of
aspiration, only when substance has blindly chosen it as a practicable
harmony tending to establish itself and to recur in the local motions of
that substance; and nowhere else, and not for a moment longer, does any
eternal essence possess any authority, express any aspiration, or even
seem to exercise any power.
3. _Phenomena._—When master-types were regarded as the true objects of
knowledge, the instances of these types found in the natural world were
called their appearances or phenomena; but they were not conceived to be
unsubstantial images, thrown off by the celestial type impartially into
all parts of space, like rays from a luminary. Phenomena were understood
to be existences, confined to particular places and times; indeed, in
contrast to the superior sort of being possessed by the types in heaven,
these phenomena were existences _par excellence_: and it was to them
that the philosophy of Heraclitus, that admirable description of
existence, continued to apply. That phenomena appeared was therefore not
the doing of the types alone: these, from their eternal seats, rained
down influence and, as it were, a perpetual invitation to things to
imitate and to mirror them; but before this invitation could be
accepted, or this influence gathered and obeyed, matter must exist
variously distributed and predisposed; so that of all the Ideas, equally
radiating virtue, here one and there another might find expression, and
that imperfectly and for a time only.
Phenomena, then, for Platonism, are simply things: and they are called
appearances not because they are supposed not to exist except in the
mind, but because they are believed to be copies of an original in
heaven far more ideal and akin to the mind than themselves: and also
perhaps because they are so unstable and indefinable, that they elude
our exact knowledge and betray our affections.
Phenomena, however, were supposed to be revealed to us by sense, whereas
thought revealed their types: and this way of putting things has led to
a shift in the meaning of the word phenomenon, so that in modern times
it has been confused with what is called an idea in the mind. Sense
would not reveal phenomena in nature (where Plato supposed them to
arise) if sense meant passive intuition. It would then reveal essences
only: that is, just what Plato found thought to reveal: only that being
merely æsthetic intuition, and not thought about nature and politics and
moral life, the essences revealed would not be Platonic Ideas; for these
were only such essences as expressed the categories of Greek speech, the
perfections of animals, or the other forms of the good. But sense, as
opposed to dialectic, meant for the ancients animal perception and
faith: it included understanding, sagacity, and a belief in matter:
indeed, common speech identified immersion in sense with materialism.
Modern philosophers have conceived sense passively, as mere sensation or
feeling or vision of inert ideas: and the word phenomenon has sometimes
been attracted into the same subjective vortex, and has come to mean a
datum of intuition. So that phenomenalism suggests less a belief in the
phenomena of nature than a disbelief in them, and a reduction of all
natural events to images in particular minds.
The other, and proper, meaning of phenomenon seems to be retained by the
positivists, who deprecate metaphysics, and even literary psychology,
and wish to be satisfied with the data of science. But why use the word
phenomenon for an event or an existence that is substantial, and
manifests nothing deeper? Is it because another substance, not internal
to those events and existences, is supposed to exist somewhere and to be
unknowable? Or is it because the laws of nature, raised to a magical
authority, are made manifest or phenomenal in the facts? Or is it
because the positivists are at heart rather afraid of the psychological
critics of knowledge, and by calling things and events phenomena think
that they may pass for critics themselves, no less prudent and
scientific than if they talked of immediate experience or of ideas in
the mind? If so, it is a sorry expedient and a poor defence. If
phenomena are essences given in intuition they are not the objects nor
the themes of science, nor the facts or events in nature: and essences,
such as the absolutely unprejudiced and unpractical mind may behold
them, are the last things on which a positivist should pin his faith. As
to immediate experience, conceived as an existing process or life, and
as to ideas in the mind, they are names for discourse—the theme of just
that literary psychology which the positivist disdains. And if phenomena
are simply things, as they were to Plato, the positivist (who does not
regard things as weak efforts of nature to realise divine Ideas) should
not call them phenomena, but substances; unless indeed he is a
metaphysician without knowing it, and believes in some unknowable
substance which is not in things.
4. _Truth._—Memory presents many a scene which is not substantial, as is
the world before me now: yet this _now_ is fleeting, and the
unsubstantiality which vitiates the past is in the act of invading the
present. Is not the pre-eminence of the present, then, an illusion, and
is not the reality that panorama which all those presents would present
when equalised and seen under the form of eternity? Is not the invidious
actuality of any part of things a mere appearance, and is not the
substance of them all merely their truth?
This suggestion of memory is reinforced by the suggestions of doubt, of
disputation, and of information by hearsay. In our perplexities we seem
always to be appealing to a metaphysical plenum or standard, which we
call the truth: there all facts are not only evident, but judicial: they
settle our quarrels: they correct our ignorance: they vindicate our
faith. To the discoursing mind, therefore, present things and material
forces may come to seem of little consequence, negligible and
unsubstantial in comparison with the truth which remains immovable,
while things pass before it like clouds across the constellations.
This is legitimate tragedy: the truth is the realm of being to which the
earnest intellect is addressed. The senses and passions may feed on
matter, and fancy may sport in the wilderness of essence: to the earnest
intellect the one exercise seems instrumental and the other wasteful:
what concerns it is the truth. But why is mere experience though it may
fall short of truth, relevant to truth, and helpful in discovering it?
And why is play of fancy, or definition of mere essences, not an avenue
to truth? Because the truth, if not a substance, is a luminous shadow or
penumbra which substance, by its existence and movements, casts on the
field of essence: so that unless a substance existed which was more
physical than truth, truth itself would have no nucleus, and would fade
into identity with the infinite essence of the non-existent. The truth,
however nobly it may loom before the scientific intellect, is
ontologically something secondary. Its eternity is but the wake of the
ship of time, a furrow which matter must plough upon the face of
essence. Truth must have a subject-matter, it must be the truth about
something: and it is the character of this moving object, lending truth
and definition to the truth itself, that is substantial and fundamental
in the universe. A sign that truth is simply fact, though described
under the form of eternity, is the heat and haste of men in asserting
what they think true. It is an object of animal faith, not of pure
contemplation.
5. _Fact._—Those who appeal to fact with unction are philosophers justly
dissatisfied with theory and discourse: they are looking in the
direction of substance. Yet in the conception of fact there is an
element of an opposite kind, for fact is supposed to be obvious as well
as fundamental. Not substance, says the empirical philosopher, which
indeed would be the fact if it existed, but immediate fact, however
unsubstantial, if I can only be sure of it. Unfortunately, the immediate
datum is not a fact at all, but an essence: and even the intuition of
that essence, which he may say is the fact he means, is only a bit of
discourse or theory: the very thing of which he was so distrustful, and
from which his common sense was appealing to the facts. The love of fact
indeed has its revenges, and the word comes sometimes to be used for
inarticulate feeling or intuition of the unutterable—a perfectly
possible and rather common intuition. But at this point a triple
confusion perhaps arises between the given essence of the unutterable,
the incidental intuition of that essence, and the substance of the
natural world which the philosopher is trying to discover. The
unutterableness of the given essence is absurdly transferred to this
substance, which would need to be no less articulate than appearance, if
appearance was to arise from it or express it at all. Such a formless
substance is as far as possible from being the object of animal faith
posited in action and described in perception spontaneously and more
deliberately in theory and discourse. It is as far as possible from
being a fact. And the intuition (which _is_ a fact) will yield cold
comfort to the philosopher who wanted “facts” rather than intuitions.
The facts he wanted were things, and he has been looking for them in the
wrong direction.
More often, however, fact is a name for any pronounced and conspicuous
feature of the natural world, or event assumed to occur in that physical
medium; so that such a fact may well be a mode of substance. It
obviously could neither arise nor be discovered except in a context no
less substantial than itself; for if each fact was a detached existence
it would form a universe by itself, and the eulogistic title of fact
could not belong to it with any better right than to any intuition.
Intuitions, discourse, theories too, taken bodily, are facts; but if
they had no locus in nature, they could convey no knowledge of fact,
being insignificant sensations or isolated worlds, occurring at no
assignable time.
Fact, therefore, when honestly pointed to without metaphysical
interpretation, means a thing or an event against which the speaker has
indubitably run up: as it is a fact that the Atlantic Ocean separates
Europe from America, or that men die. If understood not to mean such
natural facts, but rather the impressions or notions of the mind that
notes them, facts become an impossible sublimation of things: either
actual intuitions, revealing not facts but essences: or alleged
intuitions postulated by literary psychology (which assumes the natural
world, without confessing it, as the field in which these intuitions are
deployed); or finally an undiscoverable atom of sentience cut off from
all relations in a metaphysical void. Such an atom, although it would be
a substance in an absolute sense, if it existed, yet could neither act
nor be acted upon, and therefore would not be the sort of substance that
a practical mind, in love with facts, would be tempted to believe in.
6. _Events._—Although things rather than events are the object of animal
faith, ordinarily it is some event that calls attention to a thing: and
it is intelligible that philosophers, reverting to the study of nature
after their long quarantine in psychological scepticism, should dare to
speak of events as constituting the woof of nature, before they dare to
speak of them as things in flux or as modes of substance. Yet events can
be nothing less. Events are changes, and change implies continuity and
derivation of event from event: otherwise there might be variety in
existence, but there could be no variation, since the phases of the
alleged changes would not follow one another. This continuity and
derivation essential to events suffice to render them events in
substance, or changes in things. Both the medium of events (requisite to
render any two events successive or contiguous) and the quantitative
heritage of each (which it derives from the quantity of its antecedents)
are substantial. Not so any event taken separately, and conceived merely
as a passage of attention from one essence to another: for though the
intuition spanning this transition would be a fact, neither it nor the
terms it played with would be events. I can imagine an exception to this
principle, if a total event exists including the whole process of
creation. Such a total event (also any minute irreducible event if such
existed) would be actually identical with a changing thing or a
substance in flux. But every intermediate event would have arbitrary
limits, being composed of minor events and embedded in greater ones.
Perhaps there is no total and no rudimentary event: the men of science
must decide that point if they can, although I am not confident, that
after they had decided it on the best of evidence, their decision would
prevent the flux of nature from stopping, if they said it must go on, or
from going on, if they said it must stop. However, the mere possibility
that there should be no comprehensive and no least event shows on what
slippery ground we stand if we attempt to make events the ultimate
objects of belief. They are really only half of what changing existence
implies: the other half is substance.
In the effort to halt at events without positing things there is some
vestige of the psychological confusion which identifies intuition with
the essences present to it. An intuition may present a specious event:
it does not follow that it is an event itself, or occurs in time.
Intuitions would indeed not be events if they had no locus in physical
time, and were not members of a series of events occurring in quite
another realm of being from the visionary events which those intuitions
might picture. In order to be events in physical time (even so to speak
by marriage) intuitions must have organs which are parts of the moving
substance of nature. Otherwise they would be pure spirits, out of time,
and out of relation to one another. They are events only because a
natural event, not an intuition, envelops them and lends them a natural
status. Were they only specious events present to another intuition they
would not be events at all, but eternal essences contemplated by an
eternal mind.
Nevertheless, the notion of events comes very near to that of things, as
posited and required in action, and as analysed in physics. The
substance of these things is, by definition, the ground of changing
appearance and the agent in perpetual action: it is therefore
essentially in flux. I cannot say whether this flux is pervasive, so
that nothing whatever in substance remains for any time unchanged, the
constant element in it being only a constant form or quantity of change:
but on the level and scale of human experience, substance is everywhere
the substance of events, not of things immutable. If Heraclitus and
modern physics are right in telling us that the most stable of the
Pyramids is but a mass of events, this truth about substance does not
dissolve substance into events that happen nowhere and to nothing: that
supposition, on the contrary, would paralyse the events. If an event is
to have individual identity and a place amongst other events, it must be
a change which substance undergoes in one of its parts. Otherwise, like
facts and truths taken hypostatically, events would be metaphysical
abstractions, utterly incompatible with that natural status which must
belong to the things posited by animal faith in the heat of action—the
only things in which there is any reason for believing.
CHAPTER XXII
BELIEF IN NATURE
Belief in substance, I have seen, is inevitable. The hungry dog _must_
believe that the bone before him is a substance, not an essence; and
when he is snapping at it or gnawing it, that belief rises into
conviction, and he would be a very dishonest dog if, at that moment, he
denied it. For me, too, while I am alive, it would be dishonest to deny
the belief in substance; and not merely dishonest, but foolish: because
if I am observant, observation will bring me strong corroborative
evidence for that belief. Observation itself, of course, assumes a
belief in discourse and in experience; it assumes that I can recognise
essences, remembering their former apparitions and contexts and
comparing the earlier with the present instance of them, or with the
different essences which now appear instead. When I survey my experience
in this way, the order of appearances, as memory or presumption sets it
before me, will confirm the suasion which these appearances exercised
singly, and will show me how very well grounded was the instinct which
told me, when I saw some casual essence, that it was a sign of something
happening in an independent, persisting, self-evolving, indefinitely
vast world. If experience, undergone, imposes belief in substance,
experience studied imposes belief in nature.
The word nature is sometimes written with a capital, as if nature were
some sort of deity or person: and in ancient philosophy and common
speech, powers and habits are attributed to nature which imply a certain
moral idiosyncrasy in that personage. Poets also praise nature, and
theologians rehearse her marvellous ways, in order to show that she
could not have fallen into them of her own accord. All this mythology
about nature is natural, and perhaps shows a better total appreciation
of what nature is than would a precise physics. The precision of physics
is mathematical; it defines an essence; and the attribution of this
mathematical essence to nature, however legitimate, is sure to overlook
many properties which belong to her just as truly, and appear in the
realms of truth or of spirit. One such property, at least, is
fundamental, and is better expressed by personifying nature than by
describing her movements mathematically, I mean, her constancy, the
assumption that we may trust her to be true to herself. In science, some
observed or some hypothetical process is studied and the method or law
of it is ascertained: but there is nothing particularly scientific in
the presumption that this process is all that is going on in the given
case, or that it will recur in other cases. What is called the
uniformity of nature is an assumption made, in respect to the future,
without any evidence, and with proportionately scanty evidence about the
past: where experience confirms it in some particular, the confirmation
itself is good for those instances, up to that time: it tells me nothing
of anything beyond, or of the future. The source of my confidence is
animal faith, the same that inspires confidence in a child towards his
parents, or towards pet animals; and the whole monstrous growth of human
religion is an extension of this sense that nature is a person, or a set
of persons, with constant but malleable characters. As experience
remodels my impulses, I assume that the world will remain amenable to my
new ways; the convert feels he is saved; the philosopher thinks he has
found the key to happiness; the astronomer tells you he has measured the
infinite, and perhaps rolled it up upon itself, and put it in his
pocket. They all express the infantile conviction that nature cannot be
false to what they have already learned or instinctively affirmed of it:
making nature a single and quasi-personal entity, bound tragically to
its past, and pledged more or less wilfully to a particular future. It
is this sense that the world, like a person, has a certain vital unity,
and remains constant or at least consequential in its moral aspects,
that is expressed by calling it nature. Like a being born of a seed, it
has a determinate form, and a normal career, a _nature_, which it cannot
change.
What evidence is there for the existence of nature, in this sense of the
word? If I speak of the universe at large, there can be no evidence. Of
course the universe must be what it is, it must have a character, it
must exemplify an essence; but taken as a whole, it may be a chaos, in
which nothing is predeterminate, nor progressive, nor persistent, and in
which the parts are self-centred and the events spontaneous. A
philosopher who took his own life as a model for conceiving all other
things, ought perhaps to incline to this view; because he is himself,
transcendentally speaking, an absolute centre, and being ignorant of the
sources of his thoughts and actions, may presume that they have no
sources. If under these circumstances he still has the weakness (for it
would be a weakness) to believe in anything else, say in other monads,
he would doubtless allow them an equal liberty; so that in his universe
of monads there would be no common space, no common time, no common type
of character or development, no mutual influence or kindred destiny. I
think the inner life of animals, if we treated each as a moral romance,
apart from its physical setting and influence, would actually present
such a chaos: especially if we imagine what may be the lives of
creatures in other parts of the stellar universe, or out of any relation
with ourselves at all. Such a loose universe could not properly be
called nature. It would not have given us birth, it would not have
nurtured us, it would not surround us with any constant influences or
familiar aspects, it would not bring any seeds to maturity for our
encouragement or warning.
Evidences for the existence of nature must be sought elsewhere, in a
region which a monadologist would regard as internal to each monad, in
that the substances posited by me in obedience to my vital instincts
seem to me to behave as if they were parts of nature. Nature is the
great counterpart of art. What I tuck under my pillow at night, I find
there in the morning. Economy increases my possessions. People all grow
old. Accidents have discoverable causes. There is a possible distinction
between wisdom and folly. But how should all this be, and how could
experience, or the shocks that punctuate it, teach me anything to the
purpose, or lend me any assurance in life not merely a reinforced
blindness and madness on my part, unless substances standing and moving
in ordered ways surrounded me, and I was living in the midst of nature?
Certainly a partial sceptic like Berkeley, closing one eye in the
interests of a sentimental religion, may conceive that nature is not a
system of evolving substances round him affecting his own growth, but a
perpetual illusion, like a dream: a story told him in the dark, a
consecutive miracle of grace or of punishment by which a divine spirit
dazzles and conducts his spirit, without any medium or any occasion. But
if this fairy-tale is to hold good, and to justify the arts of life and
maintain the distinction between vice and virtue, I must be able to
discern the ways of Providence in their routine; everything will happen
exactly as if nature existed, and unrolled itself in a mechanical,
inexorable, and often shocking way; my idealism will merely allow me to
admit miracles, and to hope that to-morrow everything will be well. If I
regard the world of appearance as a mask which the deity wears
inevitably, the very essence of the creator being to create such a
world, the difference between belief in God and belief in nature will be
merely verbal, and I may say with Spinoza, _Deus sive natura_. If on the
contrary God is approachable in himself and would prove a better
companion than nature and sweeter to commune with, why should he terrify
me or delude me with this unworthy disguise? Why should he have
preferred to manifest himself by creating appearances rather than by
creating substances? What secret necessity could have compelled him to
create anything at all, or whispered in his ear these irresponsible
designs? If nature behaves as nature would, is it not simply nature? If
God were there instead would he not behave like God? Or if I say that I
have no right to presume how God should behave, but that wisdom counsels
me to learn his ways by experience, what difference remains between God
and nature, and are they more than two names for the same thing?
If by calling nature God or the work of God, or the language in which
God speaks to us, nothing is meant except that nature is wonderful,
unfathomed, alive, the source of our being, the sanction of morality,
and the dispenser of happiness and misery, there can be no objection to
such alternative terms in the mouth of poets; but I think a philosopher
should avoid the ambiguities which a too poetical term often comports.
The word nature is poetical enough: it suggests sufficiently the
generative and controlling function, the endless vitality and changeful
order of the world in which I live.
Faith in nature restores in a comprehensive way that sense of the
permanent which is dear to animal life. The world then becomes a home,
and I can be a philosopher in it. Perhaps nature is not really constant,
nor single; unless indeed I so stretch and eviscerate the notions of
unity and constancy as to apply them to the total aspect of nature,
under the form of eternity, however incoherent and loose the structure
of that totality may be. But in this æon, in this portion or special
plane of space, a sufficient constancy is discoverable: far greater than
my scope can cover, or my interest require. It is inattention and
prejudice in men, not inconstancy in nature, that keeps them so
ignorant, and the art of government so chaotic. Whenever a little
persistent study of nature is made (as recently in the interest of
mechanical inventions) rapid progress at once follows in the arts: and
art is the true discoverer, the unimpeachable witness to the reality of
nature. The master of any art sees nature from the inside, and works
with her, or she in him. Certainly he does not know _how_ he operates,
nor, at bottom, _why_ he should: but no more does she. His mastery is a
part of her innocence. It happens so, and within limits it prospers. To
that extent he has assurance of power and of support. It is a faith
congruous with his experience that if he could bend his faculties more
accurately to their task, nature would prove indefinitely tractable: and
if a given animal with special organs and a special form of imagination
can progressively master the world, the fact proves that the world is
con-natural with him. I do not mean that it favours his endeavours, much
less that it is composed as his fancy pictures it; I mean only that his
endeavours express one of the formations which nature has fallen into,
for the time in equilibrium with the surrounding formations; and that
his ideas too are in correspondence with the sphere of his motions, and
express his real relations. The possibility of such correspondence and
such equilibrium proves that nature exists, and that the creature that
sustains them is a part of nature.
CHAPTER XXIII
EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE
The sense that nature is animate, and in particular that men and brutes
have feelings and thoughts, stands in greater need of criticism than of
defence. I assume it before my notions of substance or of nature are
clearly formed, and before I can distinguish animate from inanimate
being. I assume it, not because it is at all evident or probable in
itself, but because I fetch the materials for all my inchoate
conceptions from my own sensibility: and in discourse (which I am busy
with from the beginning) I unwittingly interweave the notion of
animation in gathering my experience of essences and of things. I
attribute an existence to these essences which is proper only to the
light of intuition travelling over them: and I attribute to these
substances moral attributes and sensuous perspectives also borrowed from
my running discourse. This subjective matrix and envelope of all my
knowledge, though I may overlook it, underlies knowledge to the end; so
that I shall never cease to conceive nature as animate and brutes and
men as walking thoughts and passions until I have advanced very far in
scepticism. Even then, except in deliberate theory, my apprehension of
nature will be fabulous and dramatic; so that now that I have officially
reinstated my faith in nature, faith in the animation of nature will
tend to slip in unannounced; somewhat as when an exile is amnestied or a
foreigner naturalised, his parasites (if any) are silently admitted too.
Yet this is not, or need not be, the law; and as it is legality in
opinion that here occupies me, I will inquire whether evidence of
animation (even supposing that nature is animate in fact) could by any
possibility be found at all; and having cleared up that point, I will
inquire further under what control, and with what chances of truth, I
may imaginatively attribute animation to nature in the absence of all
evidence.
Why do I attribute animation to myself, that is, to my body? That my
spirit discovers a world with my body in it, is not the question; the
why of that would be a metaphysical enigma obviously insoluble, arising
out of a trick of thought and inapt application of categories. The point
is why, when I feel a pain, I suppose that it is my back or my stomach
that aches, and not simply my spirit. I think we may distinguish two
reasons. One is that the pain is an element in the perception of my back
or stomach; it is instinct with the loudest and most urgent animal
faith; and it imperatively summons my attention to those obscure
regions, and makes me wonder what is happening there. The other reason
is that the pain may be associated with another observed event in which
my body appears as an integral element, as when my back aches because I
am being thrashed. My nobler thoughts are also known to animate my body
for this external reason. It is my tongue or gesture that announces
them, even to myself. Bad observers, who suppose themselves to see or to
discourse without intervention of their eyes or larynx, imagine that
they are essentially disembodied spirits, to whom all things are
directly perspicuous, and that only a hateful invention of philosophers,
called introjection or bifurcation, has put their minds inside their
bodies. Whether incarnation is or is not a hateful fatality to spirit, I
will not discuss here; but that spirit is incarnate, that it lodges in
the body and looks forth from it on the world, is a fact easily
ascertained by closing the eyes, taking a glass of wine, or blushing at
having made a fool of oneself.
Faith in memory (which is involved in dialectic and in perception) also
reveals to me what animation means, and obliges me to assert its
existence. In dialectic and in perception I assume that recurrent views
are being taken by me of an object identical with itself if an essence,
or continuous with itself if a substance. Such recurrent intuitions or
mentions of the terms of discourse are posited in primary memory, as
well as in reversion to the past after an interval of forgetfulness.
This remembrance is remembrance of animation. It posits thought,
cognitive, synthetic, immaterial; but it posits it as having occurred in
particular conjunctions at particular times, in the vicissitudes of a
particular body, my own, in a material world. These alleged past
intuitions could not be kept apart in memory, nor assumed to have been
spaced at longer or shorter intervals of time, nor to have been enacted
in a particular order, unless they were attributed to the past career of
myself, an animal in the natural world, and grafted upon recognisable
material situations and actions to which those intuitions were relevant.
Nature is the canvas on which, in memory, I paint the perspective of my
personal experience. Even a fictitious memory, or a false experience
like that of a dream, is recognisable as having had a natural occasion
and date, and as painting a particular incredible perspective of the
same world. Otherwise, I should not think I was remembering my past
thoughts, but I should be merely contemplating certain fresh essences.
By animation, then, I understand material life quickened into
intuitions, such as, if rehearsed and developed pertinently, make up a
private experience. The question whether nature is animate does not
regard its substance, but its moral individuation. In how many places is
experience being gathered? What evidence have I that nature thinks and
feels, or that the men and animals think and feel who people nature?
I must discard at once, as incompatible with the least criticism, the
notion that nature or certain parts of nature are known to be animate
because they _behave_ in certain ways. The only behaviour that can give
proof of thinking is thinking itself. If I have ever conceived intuition
or discourse at all, and obtained assurance of its existence, it has
been in my own person, by knowing what I mean and am meaning, what I
feel and have felt; and this posited discourse of mine has assumed, in
my estimation, the character of animation of my body, by virtue of two
additional dogmas which I have accepted: first, the dogma that I am a
substantial being far deeper than my discourse, a psyche or self; and
second, the dogma that this substantial being is in dynamic interplay
with a whole environing system of substances on the same plane with
itself. In this way I have come by my initial instance of animation in
nature, on the model of which I am able to conceive animation in its
other parts.
Now it is obvious that in many parts of nature, and especially in the
language and gestures of men of my own race, I find a setting for mental
discourse exactly similar to the setting into which I have put my own
intuitive experience; so that their words and actions vividly suggest to
me my own thoughts. Just as formerly I incorporated or introjected my
thoughts into my own body, so now I incorporate or introject them into
the bodies moving before me. Imitation contributes to this dramatic
understanding, because I am not confined, when I watch other people, to
remembering what I may have felt when I was in some such situation, or
spoke some such words. Their attitude and language may be novel to me,
and, as we say, a revelation: that is, they may by contagion arouse
unprecedented intuitions in me now, which I unhesitatingly attribute to
them, perhaps with indignation, swearing that such thoughts never could
enter my head, and that I am utterly incapable of such feelings. Yet
this is psychologically false; because if I understand a thought, I have
it; though it may be present as an essence only, without carrying
assent. The irony of the case is that very likely I alone have it, and
not at all the man to whom I attribute it. Even the closest similarity
in language or action is a very abstract similarity, and the concrete
and full current of our two lives, on which the quality of intuitions
depends, may be quite different. All dramatic understanding of which I
am capable is, by hypothesis, _my_ discourse. The most contagious
feelings, the clearest thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only
because I can readily make them my own. I cannot conceive deeper
thoughts than my lead can plumb, nor feelings for which I lack the
organ.
Of course by an abuse of language the word animation might be used to
designate certain kinds of behaviour; as the ancients said the world was
rational because orderly, or the stars intelligent because they kept
going round in circles. So men or women might be said to think because
they speak or because they write books; but it does not follow. The
inner patter of words which I sometimes hear in myself, and which
mystics have called inspiration or (when explosive) speaking with
tongues, is not thinking; it is an object of perception that may suggest
to me a subsequent thought, although often I see, when I try to frame
this thought, that those words make nonsense. It is very true, as I
shall find later, that the fountain of my thoughts, that is, the self
who thinks them, is my psyche, and that movements there guide my
thoughts and render them, as the case may be, intelligent, confused,
rapid, or halting; also supply my language, dictate my feelings, and
determine when my thinking shall begin and where it shall end. But the
light of thought is wanting there, which is the very thinking; and no
fine inspection of behaviour nor interweaving of objects will ever
transmute behaviour into intuition nor objects into the attention which,
falling upon them, turns them from substances or essences into objects
of actual thought. By animation I understand the incarnation in nature,
when it behaves in these ways, of a pure and absolute spirit, an
imperceptible cognitive energy, whose essence is intuition.
Animation being essentially imperceptible and not identical with any
habit or act observable in nature, I see the justification of those
philosophers who say that animals, in so far as science can study them,
are machines; the discoverable part of them is material only, just as is
the rest of nature. But this conclusion being implied only in my
transcendental approach to nature and my knowledge of her, can in no way
prejudge her real constitution, which may be as rich and superabundant
as it likes, without asking my leave or reporting to me her domestic
budget; nor is anything thereby prejudged in respect to the nature or
laws of matter, or the simplicity of its mechanism. Nature seems, at
first blush, to have many levels of habit, irreducible to one another.
As it was only the other day that a hint reached us that gravity and the
first law of motion might be forms of a single principle, so it may be
long before we hear from the biologists that chemical reaction and
animal instinct are forms of the same habit in matter. Even if they are
irreducible to a common principle, they will be two habits of matter,
and nothing more. There is a sense in which every different
manifestation of a principle makes a different principle of it, as the
language of the United States might be said not to be English; but the
alienation of form from form is not a departure from the habit of flux,
complication, dissolution, and temporary arrest which runs through all
language. So nature might be said to have as many irreducible habits as
she has forms; but she has an underlying ground of transformation as
well, on which, I suspect, all those forms are grafted, no more wilfully
diverse nor artificially identical than leaves upon a tree; and when
wiseacres, every day of every year, bring their ponderous proofs that
life is not mechanical, that the human will, by exception, is free, and
that a single disembodied purpose, by magic, makes all things dance
contrarily to their own nature, nature and I wink at each other.
The circumstance that animation, by its very essence, must be
imperceptible, and not a link in any traceable process, renders disproof
of animation anywhere as impossible as proof of it. Those
sentimentalists are short-sighted who in their desire to show that mind
is everywhere, introduce mental forces or interpolate mental links into
their account of physical economy. If thought was discoverable only in
the gaps between motions, no thoughts would be discoverable in nature at
all. I do not presume to say that nature can make no leaps; I leave her
to her own paces; but I do not conceive that, if she shows gaps (and
what is a gap but a transition?) I must hasten to fill them up for her
with alleged intuitions. She may be made up of gaps; they may be her
steps; and if her limbs have strength in them for leaping, let her leap.
Her strides are their own measure; it is only my ignorance or egotism
that can regard any of her ways as abnormal. Thought in myself has not
appeared when my system has broken down, but rather when it has
established quick connections with things about it. Thought is not a
substitute for physical force or physical life, but an expression of
them when they are working at their best. If I may read animation into
nature at all, it must be where her mechanisms are sustained, not where
they are suspended.
There are two stages in the criticism of myth, or dramatic fancy, or the
sort of idealism that sees purposes and intentions and providential
meanings in everything. The first stage treats them angrily as
superstitions; the second treats them smilingly as poetry. I think that
most of the specific thoughts which men attribute to one another are
proper only to the man who attributes them; and the fabulous psychology
of poets and theologians is easy to deride; it has no specific
justification, and the moral truth of it can be felt only by a poetic
mind. Nevertheless, when I consider the inevitable egotism that presides
over the understanding of mind in others, I fear that I am no less
likely to sin through insensibility to the actual life of nature,
because my tight little organs cannot vibrate to alien harmonies, than I
am to sin through a childish anthropomorphism which makes not only the
beasts but even the clouds and the gods discourse like myself. After
all, in attributing human thoughts (with a difference) to non-human
beings, I recognise their parity with myself; my instinct is courteous
or even humble; and my incapacity to speak any moral language but my own
is not only inevitable but healthy and manly. Sages and poets who have
known no language but their own have a richer savour and a deeper wisdom
than witlings full of miscellaneous accomplishments; and when once I
have renounced the pedantic demand that poetry should be prose, I can
allow that myth may do the life of nature less injustice than would the
only alternative open to me, which is silence.
This may be said also about myth regarding myself, I mean the attempts
of memory, self-justifying eloquence, or psycho-analysis to unfold the
riches of my own mind. How much do I know about my own animation? How
much is too fluid to be caught in the sieve of memory, and to be
officially assimilated in verbal soliloquy? When any one asks me what I
think of the weather or of the Prime Minister, does my answer report
anything that I have previously thought? Probably not; my past
impressions are lost, or obliterated by the very question put to me; and
I make bold to invent, on the spur of the moment, a myth about my
sentiments on the subject. The present play of language and fancy may
fairly bring to a head old impressions or ruling impulses; or I may have
occasion to amend my first expression, and obeying a fresh suggestion of
my fancy I may say: No, no; I meant rather this. Whereupon I may proceed
laboriously to create and modulate my opinion, groping perhaps to a
final epigram, which I say expresses just what I think, although I never
thought it before. Such is my discourse when I am really thinking; at
other times it is but the echo of language which I remember to have
formerly used, and therefore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that
even in expressing my own mind when I conceive what I have felt, I have
never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth.
The case is even worse as regards the emotions. What do I mean when I
talk of my desires, my intentions, or the motives of others? Unless
these things have been actually expressed in words which I can recover,
neither I nor my neighbours have ever had in mind anything like what I
now impute. My desire, in fact, was only a certain alacrity in doing
things which afterwards I see leading to a certain issue; my intention
(if actual at all) was a certain foresight of what the issue might be;
and the motives I assigned to others were but ulterior events imagined
by me which, if they had actually occurred, I suppose would have pleased
those people. The sensations or ideas which may really have accompanied
their actions, or the words they may really have pronounced mentally,
are not within my view; if they were they would probably go a very
little way towards preparing or covering the actions in question. These
actions would turn out to have had subjectively a totally different
complexion from that which I assign to them on seeing them performed.
The very abundance and incessant dream-like prolixity of mental
discourse render it elusive; and the discourse I officially impute to
myself or to others is a subsequent literary fiction, apt if it suggests
the events which the discourse concerned, or excites the emotions which
those events if witnessed would have produced on an observer of my
disposition, but by no means a fiction patterned on any actual former
experience in anybody. My sense of animation in nature, and all my
notions of human experience, are dramatic poetry, and nothing else.
There is therefore no direct evidence of animation in nature anywhere,
but only a strong propensity in me to imagine nature discoursing as I
discourse, because my apprehension of nature is embedded in my
miscellaneous, serried, and private thoughts, and I can hardly clear it
of the mental elements—emotional, pictorial, or dramatic—which encrust
it there. On reflection, however, and by an indirect approach, I can see
good reason for believing that some sort of animation (not at all such
animation as my fancy attributes to it at first) pervades the organic
world; because my psyche is animate; she is the source and seat, as I
have learned to believe, of all my discourse; yet she is not different,
in any observable respect, from the psyches of other animals, nor is she
composed of a different sort of substance from the common earth, light,
and air out of which she has arisen, and by which she is fed; she is but
one in the countless generations of living creatures. Accordingly the
analogy of nature would suggest that the other living creatures in the
world are animate too, and discourse privately no less assiduously and
absurdly than I do. It would even suggest that all the substance of
nature is ready to think, if circumstances allow by presenting something
to think about, and creating the appropriate organ.
The character of this universal animation, or readiness to think, is
inconceivable by me, in so far as its organs or objects differ from my
own. The forms of it are doubtless as various as the forms of material
being; a stone will think like me, in so far as it lives like me. There
are actually some men, a few, who do live like me; these also think like
me; and we can truly understand one another and impute to one another
the very thoughts we severally have. In such rare cases, human discourse
in one man may bring perfect knowledge (though no evidence) of human
discourse in another. In doing the same things and uttering the same
words we have instant assurance of unanimity, in this case not
deceptive; especially when it is not the outer stimulus that is common
to us, but the spontaneous reaction. For this reason gesture or poetry
is a better index to feeling than are events or information coming to
men from outside. What happens to people will never tell you how they
feel; the alien observer misunderstands everything; only he understands
a mind who can share its free and comic expression. For this reason too
psychology is not a science unless it becomes the science of behaviour,
when it ceases to be an account of mental discourse and traces only the
material life of the psyche. In order to communicate thought it is
necessary to impose it.
Moral communication becomes surer in proportion as the discourse to be
reproduced involves more articulation, more distinct turns by which
fidelity in the rendering may be controlled. The form of thought is more
easily transferable than its sensuous elements. Under the same sky, with
the same animal instincts, with the same experience of love, labour, and
war, one race or one age may be totally cut off from another in spirit.
The same language, on the contrary, the same myths, legends, or
histories, may be carried almost unchanged across seas and ages, and may
unite the happier moments of distant peoples. The range of such moral
unity is also easy to discover; I may learn how far languages or
religions are diffused; they create recognisable moral communities.
Indeed, they tyrannise over society, so social are they; and they often
render people who share the same spirit cruel to heretics of their own
flesh and blood. The humanities may prove inhuman; and the less
articulate, more robust instincts of mankind may take their revenge by
stamping the humanities out. Yet the barbarians, who are not divided by
rival traditions, fight all the more incessantly for food and space.
Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the same ideas.
CHAPTER XXIV
LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY
Scientific psychology is a part of physics, or the study of nature; it
is the record of how animals act. Literary psychology is the art of
imagining how they feel and think. Yet this art and that science are
practised together, because one characteristic habit of man, namely
speech, yields the chief terms in which he can express his thoughts and
feelings. Still it is not the words, any more than the action and
attitude which accompany them, that are his _understanding_ of the
words, or his sense of his attitude and action. These can evidently be
apprehended only dramatically, by imitative sympathy; so that literary
psychology, however far scientific psychology may push it back, always
remains in possession of the moral field.
When nature was still regarded as a single animal, this confusion
extended to science as a whole, and tinctured the observation of nature
with some suggestion of how a being that so acts must be minded, and
what thoughts and sentiments must animate it. Such myths cannot be true;
not because nature or its parts may not be animate in fact, but because
there is no vital analogy between the cosmos and the human organism; so
that if nature is animate as a whole, or in her minute or gigantic
cycles, animation there is sure not to resemble human discourse, which
is all we can attribute to her. Myth and natural theology are
accordingly fabulous essentially and irremediably. If literary
psychology is to interpret the universe at large, it can be only very
cautiously, after I have explored nature scientifically as far as I can,
and am able to specify the degree of analogy and the process of
concretion that connect my particular life with the universal flux.
Myth is now extinct (which is a pity) and theology discredited; but the
same confusion subsists in the quarters where it is not fashionable to
doubt. History, for instance, is partly a science, since it contains
archæological and antiquarian lore and a study of documents; but it is
also, in most historians, an essay in dramatic art, since it pretends to
rehearse the ideas and feelings of dead men. These would not be
recoverable even if the historian limited himself to quoting their
recorded words, as he would if he was conscientious; because even these
words are hard to interpret afterwards, so as to recover the living
sentiment they expressed. At least authentic phrases, like authentic
relics, have an odour of antiquity about them which helps us to feel
transported out of ourselves, even if we are transported in fact only
into a more romantic and visionary stratum of our own being. Classic
historians, however, are not content with quoting recorded words: they
compose speeches for their characters, under the avowed inspiration of
Clio; or less honestly, in modern times, they explain how their heroes
felt, or what influences were at work in the spirit of the age, or what
dialectic drove public opinion from one sentiment to another. All this
is shameless fiction; and the value of it, when it has a value, lies
exclusively in the eloquence, wisdom, or incidental information found in
the historian. Such history can with advantage be written in verse, or
put upon the stage; its virtue is not at all to be true, but to be well
invented.
Philosophy fell into the same snare when in modern times it ceased to be
the art of thinking and tried to become that impossible thing, the
science of thought. Thought can be found only by being enacted. I may
therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal
as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a
controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility
make experience or mental discourse at large the object of
investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere. I can only
surmise what it might have been, and rehearse it imaginatively in my own
fancy. It is an object of literary psychology. The whole of British and
German philosophy is only literature. In its deepest reaches it simply
appeals to what a man says to himself when he surveys his adventures,
re-pictures his perspectives, analyses his curious ideas, guesses at
their origin, and imagines the varied experience which he would like to
possess, cumulative and dramatically unified. The universe is a novel of
which the ego is the hero; and the sweep of the fiction (when the ego is
learned and omnivorous) does not contradict its poetic essence. The
composition is perhaps pedantic, or jejune, or overloaded; but on the
other hand it is sometimes most honest and appealing, like the
autobiography of a saint; and taken as the confessions of a romantic
scepticism trying to shake itself loose from the harness of convention
and of words, it may have a great dramatic interest and profundity. But
not one term, not one conclusion in it has the least scientific value,
and it is only when this philosophy is good literature that it is good
for anything.
The literary character of such accounts of experience would perhaps have
been more frankly avowed if the interest guiding them had been truly
psychological, like that of pure dramatic poetry or fiction. What kept
philosophers at this task—often quite unsuited to their powers—was
anxiety about the validity of knowledge in physics or in theology. They
thought that by imagining how their ideas might have grown up they could
confirm themselves in their faith or in their scepticism. Practising
literary psychology with this motive, they did not practise it freely or
sympathetically; they missed, in particular, the decided dominance of
the passions over the fancy, and the nebulous and volatile nature of
fancy itself. For this reason the poets and novelists are often better
psychologists than the philosophers. But the most pertinent effect of
this appeal of science to a romantic psychology was the _hypostasis of
an imagined experience_, as if experience could go on in a void without
any material organs or occasions, and as if its entire course could be
known by miracle, as the experiences of the characters in a novel are
known to the author.
Criticism of knowledge is thus based on the amazing assumption that a
man can have an experience which is past, or which was never his own.
Although criticism can have no first principle, I have endeavoured in
this book to show how, if genuinely and impartially sceptical, it may
retreat to the actual datum and find there some obvious essence,
necessarily without any given place, date, or inherence in any mind. But
from such a datum it would not be easy to pass to belief in anything;
and if the leap was finally taken, it would be confessedly at the
instance of animal faith, and in the direction of vulgar and
materialistic convictions. Modern critics of knowledge have had more
romantic prepossessions. Often they were not really critics, saying _It
seems_, but rebels saying _I find_, _I know_, or empiricists saying
_Everybody finds_, _Everybody knows_. Their alleged criticism of science
is pure literary psychology, gossip, and story-telling. They are
miraculously informed that there are many minds, and that these all have
a conventional experience. What this experience contains, they think is
easily stated. You have but to ask a friend, or make an experiment, or
imagine how you would feel in another man’s place. So confident is this
social convention, that the natural world in which these experiences are
reported to occur, and the assumed existence of which renders them
imaginable, may be theoretically resolved into a picture contained in
them. Thus the ground is removed which sustained all this literary
psychology and suggested the existence of minds and their known
experience at all; yet the groundless belief in these minds, and in
copious knowledge of their fortunes, is retained as obvious; and this
novelesque universe is called the region of facts, or of immediate
experience, or of radical empiricism. Literary psychology thus becomes a
metaphysics for novelists. It supplies one of the many thinkable systems
of the universe, though a fantastic one; and I shall return to it, under
the name of psychologism, when considering the realm of matter. Here I
am concerned only with the evidence that such masses of experience exist
or are open to my inspection.
No inspection is competent to discover anything but an essence; what
social intuition touches is therefore always a dramatic illusion of life
in others or in myself, never the actual experience that may have
unfolded itself elsewhere as a matter of fact. Yet this dramatic
illusion, like any given essence, may be a true symbol for the material
events upon which the psyche is then directed; in this case, the life of
other people, or my own past life, as scientific psychology might
describe it. A good literary psychologist, who can read people’s minds
intuitively, is likely to anticipate their conduct correctly. His
psychological imagination is not a link in this practical sagacity but a
symptom of it, a poetic by-product of fineness in instinct and in
perception. Slight indications in the attitude or temper of the persons
observed, much more than their words, will suggest to the sympathetic
instinct of the observer what those persons are in the habit of doing,
or are inclined to do; and the stock idea assigned to them, or the stock
passion attributed to them, will be but a sign in the observer’s
discourse for that true observation. I watch a pair of lovers; and it
requires no preternatural insight for me to see whether the love is
genuine, whether it is mutual, whether it is waxing or waning, irritable
or confident, sensual or friendly. I may make it the nucleus of a little
novel in my own mind; and it will be a question of my private fancy and
literary gift whether I can evolve language and turns of sentiment
capable of expressing all the latent dispositions which the behaviour of
those lovers, unconscious of my observation, suggested to me. Have I
read their minds? Have I divined their fate? It is not probable; and yet
it is infinitely probable that minds and fates were really evolving
there, not generically far removed from those which I have imagined.
The only facts observable by the psychologist are physical facts, and
the only events that can test the accuracy of his theories are material
events; he is therefore in those respects simply a scientific
psychologist, even if his studies are casual and desultory. Whence,
then, his literary atmosphere? For there is not only the medium of words
which intervenes in any science, but the ulterior sympathetic echo of
feelings truly felt and thoughts truly rehearsed and intended. I reply
that whereas scientific psychology is addressed to the bodies and the
material events composing the animate world, literary psychology
restores the essences intervening in the perception of those material
events, and re-echoes the intuitions aroused in those bodies. This
visionary stratum is the true immediate as well as the imagined
ultimate. Even in the simplest perceptions on which scientific
psychology, or any natural science, can be based, there is an essence
present which only poetry can describe or sympathy conceive. Schoolroom
experiments in optics, for instance, are initially a play of intuitions,
and exciting in that capacity; I see, and am confident and pleased that
others see with me, this colour of an after-image, this straight stick
bent at the surface of the water, the spokes of this wheel vanishing as
it turns. For science, these given essences are only stepping-stones to
the conditions under which they arise, and their proper æsthetic nature,
which is trivial in itself, is forgotten in the curious knowledge I may
acquire concerning light and perspective and refraction and the
structure of the eye. Yet in that vast, vibrating, merciless realm of
matter I am, as it were, a stranger on his travels. The adventure is
exhilarating, and may be profitable, but it is endless and, in a sense,
disappointing; it takes me far from home. I may seem to myself to have
gained the whole world and lost my own soul. Of course I am still at
liberty to revert in a lyrical moment to the immediate, to the
intuitions of my childish senses; yet for an intelligent being such a
reversion is a sort of _gran rifiuto_ in the life of mind, a collapse
into lotus-eating and dreaming. It is here that the Muses come to the
rescue, with their dramatic and epic poetry, their constructive music,
and their literary psychology. Knowledge of nature and experience of
life are presupposed; but as at first, in the beginnings of science,
intuition was but a sign for material facts to be discovered, so now all
material facts are but a pedestal for images of other intuitions. The
poet feels the rush of emotion on the other side of the deployed events;
he wraps them in an atmosphere of immediacy, luminous or thunderous; and
his spirit, that piped so thin a treble in its solitude, begins to sing
in chorus. Literary psychology pierces to the light, to the shimmer of
passion and fancy, behind the body of nature, like Dante issuing from
the bowels of the earth at the antipodes, and again seeing the stars.
Such a poetic interpretation of natural things has a double dignity not
found in sensuous intuitions antecedent to any knowledge of the world.
It has the dignity of virtual truth, because there are really intuitions
in men and animals, varying with their fortunes, often much grander and
sweeter than any that could come to me. The literary psychologist is
like some antiquary rummaging in an old curiosity shop, who should find
the score of some ancient composition, in its rude notation, and should
sit down at a wheezy clavichord and spell out the melody, wondering at
the depth of soul in that archaic art, so long buried, and now so feebly
revealed. This curious music, he will say to himself, was mighty and
glorious in its day; this moonlight was once noon. There is no illusion
in this belief in life long past or far distant; on the contrary, the
sentimentalist errs by defect of imagination, not by excess of it, and
his pale watercolours do no justice to the rugged facts. The other merit
that dignifies intuitions mediated by knowledge of things, is that they
release capabilities in one’s own soul which one’s personal fortunes may
have left undeveloped. This makes the mainspring of fiction, and its
popular charm. The illusion of projecting one’s own thoughts into remote
or imaginary characters is only half an illusion: these thoughts were
never there, but they were always here, or knocking at the gate; and
there is an indirect victory in reaching and positing elsewhere, in an
explicit form, the life which accident denied me, and thereby enjoying
it _sub rosa_ in spite of fate. And there are many experiences which are
only tolerable in this dream-like form, when their consequences are
negligible and their vehemence is relieved by the distance at which they
appear, and by the show they make. Thus both the truth and the illusion
of literary psychology are blessings: the truth by revealing the minds
of others, and the illusion by expanding one’s own mind.
These imaginative blessings, however, are sometimes despised, and
philosophers, when they suspect that they have no evidence for their
psychological facts, or become aware of their literary flavour,
sometimes turn away from this conventional miscellany of experience, and
ask what is the substantial texture of experience beneath. Suppose I
strain my introspection in the hope of discovering it; the picture (for
such a method can never yield anything but pictures) may be transformed
in two ways, to which two schools of recent literary psychology are
respectively wedded. One transformation turns experience, intensely
gaped at, into a mere strain, a mere sense of duration or tension; the
other transformation unravels experience into an endless labyrinth of
dreams. In the one case, experience loses its articulation to the extent
of becoming a dumb feeling; and it is hard to see how, if one dumb
undifferentiated feeling is the only reality, the illusion of many
events and the intuition of many pictures could be grafted upon it. In
the other case experience increases its articulation to the extent of
becoming a chaos; and the sensitive psychology that dips into these
subterranean dreams needs, and easily invents, guiding principles by
which to classify them. Especially it reverts to sexual and other animal
instincts, thus grafting literary psychology (which in this field is
called psycho-analysis) again on natural substance and the life of
animals, as scientific psychology may report it.
This natural setting restores literary psychology to its normal status;
it is no longer a chimerical metaphysics, but an imaginative version,
like a historical novel, of the animation that nature, in some
particular regions, may actually have possessed. The fineness and
complexity of mental discourse within us may well be greater than we can
easily remember or describe; and there is piety as well as ingenuity in
rescuing some part of it from oblivion. But here, as elsewhere, myth is
at work. We make a romance of our incoherence, and compose new unities
in the effort to disentangle those we are accustomed to, and find their
elements. Discourse is not a chemical compound; its past formations are
not embedded in its present one. It is a life with much iteration in it,
much recapitulation, as well as much hopeless loss and forgetfulness. As
the loom shifts, or gets out of order, the woof is recomposed or
destroyed. It is a living, a perpetual creation; and the very fatality
that forces me, in conceiving my own past or future, or the animation of
nature at large, to imagine that object afresh, with my present vital
resources and on the scale and in the style of my present discourse—this
very fatality, I say, reveals to me the nature of discourse everywhere,
that it is poetry. But it is poetry about facts, or means to be; and I
need not fear to be too eloquent in expressing my forgotten sentiments,
or the unknown sentiments of others. Very likely those sentiments, when
living, were more eloquent than I am now.
CHAPTER XXV
THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH
From the beginning of discourse there is a subtle reality posited which
is not a thing: I mean the truth. If intuition of essence exists
anywhere without discourse, the being of truth need not be posited
there, because intuition of itself is intransitive, and having no object
other than the datum, can be neither true nor false. Every essence
picked up by intuition is equally real in its own sphere; and every
degree of articulation reached in intuition defines one of a series of
essences, each contained in or containing its neighbour, and each
equally central in that infinite progression. The central one, for
apprehension, is the one that happens to appear at that moment.
Therefore in pure intuition there is no fear of picking up the wrong
thing, as if the object were a designated existence in the natural
world; and therefore the being of truth is not broached in pure
intuition.
Truth is not broached even in pure dialectic, which is only the
apprehension of a system of essences so complex and finely articulated,
perhaps, as to tax human attention, or outrun it if unaided by some
artifice of notation, but essentially only an essence like any other.
Truth, therefore, is as irrelevant to dialectic as to merely æsthetic
intuition. Logic and mathematics are not true inherently, however cogent
or extensive. They are ideal constructions based on ideal axioms; and
the question of truth or falsity does not arise in respect to them
unless the dialectic is asserted to apply to the natural world, or
perhaps when a dispute comes up as to the precise essence signified by
some word, such as, for instance, infinity.
When men first invented language and other symbols, or fixed in
reflection the master-images of their dreams and thoughts, it seemed to
them that they were discovering parts of nature, and that even in those
developments they must be either right or wrong. There was a _true_ name
for every object, a part of its nature. There was a _true_ logic, and a
_true_ ethics, and a _true_ religion. Certainly in so far as these mixed
disciplines were assertions about alleged facts, they were either right
or wrong; but in so far as they were systems of essences, woven together
in fancy to express the instincts of the mind, they were only more or
less expressive and fortunate and harmonious, but not at all true or
false. Dialectic, though so fine-spun and sustained, is really a more
primitive, a more dream-like, exercise of intuition than are animal
faith and natural science. It is more spontaneous and less responsible,
less controlled by secondary considerations, as poetry is in contrast
with prose. If only the animals had a language, or some other fixed
symbols to develop in thought, I should be inclined to believe them the
greatest of dialecticians and the greatest of poets. But as they seem
not to speak, and there is no ground for supposing that they rehearse
their feelings reflectively in discourse, I will suppose them to be very
empty-headed when they are not very busy; but I may be doing them an
injustice. In any case their dreams would not suggest to them the being
of truth; and even their external experience may hardly do so.
It might seem, perhaps, that truth must be envisaged even by the animals
in action, when things are posited; especially as uncertainty and change
of tactics and purpose are often visible in their attitudes. Certainly
truth is there, if the thing pursued is such as the animal presumes it
to be; and in searching for it in the right quarter and finding it, he
enacts a true belief and a true perception, even if he does not realise
them spiritually. What he realises spiritually, I suppose, is the
pressure of the situation in which he finds himself, and the changes in
his object; but that his belief from moment to moment was right or wrong
he probably never notices. Truth would then not come within his purview,
nor be distinguished amongst his interests. He would want to be
successful, not to be right.
So in a man, intent experience, when not reflective, need not disclose
the being of truth. Sometimes, in a vivid dream, objects suffer a
transformation to which I eagerly adapt myself, changing my feelings and
actions with complete confidence in the new facts; and I never ask
myself which view was true, and which action appropriate. I live on in
perfect faith, never questioning the present circumstances as they
appear, nor do I follow my present policy with less assurance than I did
the opposite policy a moment before. This happens to me in dreams; but
politicians do the same thing in real life, when the lives of nations
are at stake. In general I think that the impulse of action is
translated into a belief in changed things long before it reproaches
itself with having made any error about them. The recognition of a truth
to be discerned may thus be avoided; because although a belief in things
must actually be either true or false, it is directed upon the present
existence and character of these things, not upon its own truth. The
active object posited alone interests the man of action; if he were
interested in the rightness of the action, he would not be a man of
action but a philosopher. So long as things continue to be perceived in
one form or another, and can be posited accordingly, the active impulse
is released, and the machine runs on prosperously until some hitch
comes, or some catastrophe. It is then always the things that are
supposed to have changed, not the forms of folly. Even the most pungent
disappointment, as when a man loses a bet, is not regarded otherwise
than as a misfortune. It is all the fault of the dice; they might and
ought to have turned up differently. This, I say to myself, is an
empirical world; all is novelty in it, and it is luck and free will that
are to blame. My bet was really right when I made it; there was no error
about the future then, for I acted according to the future my fancy
painted, which was the only future there was. My act was a creative act
of vitality and courage; but afterwards things accountably went wrong,
and betrayed their own promise.
I am confirmed in this surmise about the psychology of action by the
reasoning of empirical and romantic philosophers, who cling to this
instinctive attitude and deny the being of truth. No substance exists,
according to their view, but only things as they seem from moment to
moment; so that it is idle to contrast opinion with truth, seeing that
there is nothing, not even things, except in opinion. They can easily
extend this view to the future of opinion or of experience, and maintain
that the future does not exist except in expectation; and at a pinch,
although the flesh may rebel against such heroic subjectivism, they may
say that the past, too, exists only in memory, and that no other past
can be thought of or talked about; so that there is no truth, other than
current opinion, even about the past. If an opinion about the past, they
say, seems problematical when it stands alone, we need but corroborate
it by another opinion about the past in order to make it true. In other
words, though the word truth is familiar to these philosophers, the idea
of it is unintelligible to them, and absent altogether from their
apprehension of the world.
The experience which perhaps makes even the empiricist awake to the
being of truth, and brings it home to any energetic man, is the
experience of other people lying. When I am falsely accused, or when I
am represented as thinking what I do not think, I rebel against that
contradiction to my evident self-knowledge; and as the other man asserts
that the liar is myself, and a third person might very well entertain
that hypothesis and decide against me, I learn that a report may fly in
the face of the facts. There is, I then see clearly, a comprehensive
standard description for every fact, which those who report it as it
happened repeat in part, whereas on the contrary liars contradict it in
some particular. And a little further reflection may convince me that
even the liar must recognise the fact to some extent, else it would not
be _that_ fact that he was misrepresenting; and also that honest memory
and belief, even when most unimpeachable, are not exhaustive and not
themselves the standard for belief or for memory, since they are now
clearer and now vaguer, and subject to error and correction. That
standard comprehensive description of any fact which neither I nor any
man can ever wholly repeat, is the truth about it.
The being of truth thus seems to be first clearly posited in
disputation; and a consequence of this accident (for it is an accident
from the point of view of the truth itself under what circumstances men
most easily acknowledge its authority)—a consequence is that truth is
often felt to be somehow inseparable from rival opinions; so that people
say that if there was no mind and consequently no error there could be
no truth. They mean, I suppose, that nothing can be correct or incorrect
except some proposition or judgement regarding some specific fact; and
that the same constitution of the fact which renders one description
correct, renders any contradictory description erroneous. “Truth” is
often used in this abstract sense for correctness, or the quality which
all correct judgements have in common; and another word, perhaps “fact”
or “reality,” would then have to be used for that standard comprehensive
description of the object to which correct judgements conform. But a
fact is not a description of itself; and as to the word “reality,” if it
is understood to mean existence, it too cannot designate a description,
which is an essence only. Facts are transitory, and any part of
existence to which a definite judgement is addressed is transitory too;
and when they have lapsed, it is only their essence that subsists and
that, being partially recovered and assigned to them in a retrospective
judgement, can render this judgement true. Opinions are true or false by
repeating or contradicting some part of the truth about the facts which
they envisage; and this truth about the facts is the standard
comprehensive description of them—something in the realm of essence, but
more than the essence of any fact present within the limits of time and
space which that fact occupies; for a comprehensive description includes
also all the radiations of that fact—I mean, all that perspective of the
world of facts and of the realm of essence which is obtained by taking
this fact as a centre and viewing everything else only in relation with
it. The truth about any fact is therefore infinitely extended, although
it grows thinner, so to speak, as you travel from it to further and
further facts, or to less and less relevant ideas. It is the splash any
fact makes, or the penumbra it spreads, by dropping through the realm of
essence. Evidently no opinion can embrace it all, or identify itself
with it; nor can it be identified with the facts to which it relates,
since they are in flux, and it is eternal.
The word truth ought, I think, to be reserved for what everybody
spontaneously means by it: the standard comprehensive description of any
fact in all its relations. Truth is not an opinion, even an ideally true
one; because besides the limitation in scope which human opinions, at
least, can never escape, even the most complete and accurate opinion
would give precedence to some terms, and have a direction of survey; and
this direction might be changed or reversed without lapsing into error;
so that the truth is the field which various true opinions traverse in
various directions, and no opinion itself. An even more impressive
difference between truth and any true discourse is that discourse is an
event; it has a date not that of its subject-matter, even if the
subject-matter be existential and roughly contemporary; and in human
beings it is conversant almost entirely with the past only, whereas
truth is dateless and absolutely identical whether the opinions which
seek to reproduce it arise before or after the event which the truth
describes.
The eternity of truth is inherent in it: all truths—not a few grand
ones—are equally eternal. I am sorry that the word eternal should
necessarily have an unction which prejudices dry minds against it, and
leads fools to use it without understanding. This unction is not
rhetorical, because the nature of truth is really sublime, and its name
ought to mark its sublimity. Truth is one of the realities covered in
the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very
properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent
witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future,
which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so
differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like
the sun. It is not necessary to offer any evidence for this eternity of
truth, because truth is not an existence that asks to be believed in,
and that may be denied. It is an essence involved in positing any fact,
in remembering, expecting, or asserting anything; and while no truth
need be acknowledged if no existence is believed in, and none would
obtain if there was no existence in fact, yet on the hypothesis that
anything exists, truth has appeared, since this existence must have one
character rather than another, so that only one description of it in
terms of essence will be complete; and this complete description,
covering all its relations, will be the truth about it. No one who
understands what is meant by this eternal being of truth can possibly
deny it; so that no argument is required to support it, but only enough
intensity of attention to express what we already believe.
Inspired people, who are too hot to think, often identify the truth with
their own tenets, to signify by a bold hyperbole how certain they feel
in their faith; but the effect is rather that they lead foolish people,
who may see that this faith may be false, to suppose that therefore the
truth may be false also. Eternal truths, in the mouth of both parties,
are then tenets which the remotest ancestors of man are reputed to have
held, and which his remotest descendants are forbidden to abandon. Of
course there are no eternal tenets: neither the opinions of men, nor
mankind, nor anything existent can be eternal; eternity is a property of
essences only. Even if all the spirits in heaven and earth had been so
far unanimous on any point of doctrine, there is no reason, except the
monotony and inertia of nature, why their logic or religion or morals
should not change to-morrow from top to bottom, if they all suddenly
grew wiser or differently foolish.
At the risk of being scholastic I will suggest the uses to which the
word eternal and the terms akin to it might be confined if they were
made exact.
A thing that occupied but one point of physical time would be
_instantaneous_. No essence is instantaneous, because none occupies any
part of physical time or space; and I doubt whether any existence is
instantaneous either; for if the mathematicians decide that the
continuous or extended must be composed of an infinite number of
inextended and non-contiguous units, in bowing to their authority I
should retain a suspicion that nothing actual is confined to any of
these units, but that the smallest event has duration and contains an
infinite number of such units; so that one event (though not one
instant) can be contiguous to another.
A given essence containing no specious temporal progression or
perspective between its parts would be _timeless_. Colour, for instance,
or number, is timeless. The timeless often requires to be abstracted
from the total datum, because round any essence as actually given there
is an atmosphere of duration and persistence, suggesting the existential
flux of nature behind the essence. Colour seems to shine, that is, to
vibrate. Number seems to mount, and to be built up. The timeless is
therefore better illustrated in objects like laws or equations or
definitions, which though intent on things in time, select relations
amongst them which are not temporal.
A being that should have no external temporal relations and no locus in
physical time would be _dateless_. Thus every given essence and every
specious present is dateless, internally considered, and taken
transcendentally, that is, as a station for viewing other things or a
unit framing them in. Though dateless, the specious present is not
timeless, and an instant, though timeless, is not dateless.
Whatsoever, having once arisen, never perishes, would be _immortal_. I
believe there is nothing immortal.
Whatsoever exists through a time infinite in both directions is
_everlasting_. Matter, time, the life of God, souls as Plato conceived
them, and the laws of nature are commonly believed to be everlasting. In
the nature of the case this can be only a presumption.
That which without existing is contemporary with all times is _eternal_.
Truth is dateless and eternal, but not timeless, because, being
descriptive of existence, it is a picture of change. It is frozen
history. As Plato said that time was a moving image of eternity, we
might say that eternity was a synthetic image of time. But it is much
more than that, because, besides the description of all temporal things
in their temporal relations, it contains everything that is not temporal
at all; in other words, the whole realm of essence, as well as the whole
realm of truth.
CHAPTER XXVI
DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT
Is the existence of spirit evident to spirit, and involved in the
presence of anything? Is its nature simple and obvious? I think there is
something of which this may be said, but not of spirit; for by spirit I
understand not only the passive intuition implied in any essences being
given, but also the understanding and belief that may greet their
presence. Even passive intuition is no datum; there is nothing evident
except the given essence itself. Yet, as I have seen above, the mere
prolongation of this presence, the recognition of this essence as
identical with itself, and the survey of its elements in various orders,
very soon impose upon me a distinction between this essence and my
intuition of it. This intuition is a fact and an event, as the essence
cannot be; so that even if spirit meant nothing but pure consciousness
or the activity of a transcendental ego, it would need to be posited, in
view of the felt continuity of discourse, and could not be an element in
the given essences. If spirit were defined as the common quality of all
appearances, distinguishing them from the rest of the realm of essence
which does not appear, spirit would be reduced to an appearance itself.
It would be like light, something seen, a luminousness in all objects,
not what I understand by it, which is the seeing; not the coloured
lights I may observe, but the exercise of sight as distinguished from
blindness.
The common quality of all appearances is not spirit but mere Being; that
simple and always obvious element to which I referred just now as given
in all essences without distinction, and which some philosophers and
saints have found so unutterably precious. This is all that is common to
all possible appearances, considered in themselves; but animal tension
is not altogether absent even in this abstruse contemplation, and the
sense that appearances are assaulting _me_ thickens my intuition of
their essence into an apprehension of existence, which existence, having
no idea of myself, I of course attribute to them, or to the abstract
common element in their essences, pure Being, which thus becomes in my
eyes absolute existence.
The present stimulus that awakens me out of my material lethargy and
keeps my attention more or less taut is not spirit, although, of course,
the birth of spirit is involved in my awakening. That stimulus is the
strain and rumble of the universal flux, audible in my little sea-shell.
It preserves the same ground-tone (that of a disturbance or a strain) no
matter what image it may bring forth, or even if it brings forth no
images but only a pervasive sense of swimming in safety and bliss. This
budding sentiment of existence is a recognition not of spirit but of
substance, of fact, of force, of an unfathomable mystery.
By spirit I understand the light of discrimination that marks in that
pure Being differences of essence, of time, of place, of value; a living
light ready to fall upon things, as they are spread out in their weight
and motion and variety, ready to be lighted up. Spirit is a fountain of
clearness, decidedly wind-blown and spasmodic, and possessing at each
moment the natural and historical actuality of an event, not the imputed
or specious actuality of a datum. Spirit, in a word, is no phenomenon,
not sharing the æsthetic sort of reality proper to essences when given,
nor that other sort proper to dynamic and material things; its peculiar
sort of reality is to be intelligence in act. Spirit, or the intuitions
in which it is realised, accordingly forms a new realm of being,
silently implicated in the apparition of essences and in the felt
pressure of nature, but requiring the existence of nature to create it,
and to call up those essences before it. By spirit essences are
transposed into appearances and things into objects of belief; and (as
if to compensate them for that derogation from their native status) they
are raised to a strange actuality in thought—a moral actuality which in
their logical being or their material flux they had never aspired to
have: like those rustics and servants at an inn whom a travelling poet
may take note of and afterwards, to their astonishment, may put upon the
stage with applause.
It is implied in these words, when taken as they are meant, that spirit
is not a reality that can be observed; it does not figure among the
_dramatis personæ_ of the play it witnesses. As the author, nature, and
the actors, things, do not emerge from the prompter’s box, or remove
their make-up so as to exhibit themselves to me in their unvarnished
persons, but are satisfied that I should know them only as artists (and
I for my part am perfectly willing to stop there in my acquaintance with
them); so the spirit in me which their art serves is content not to be
put on the stage; that would be far from being a greater honour, or
expressing a truer reality, than that which belongs to it as spectator,
virtually addressed and consulted and required in everything that the
theatre contrives. Spirit can never be observed as an essence is
observed, nor encountered as a thing is encountered. It must be enacted;
and the essence of it (for of course it has an essence) can be described
only circumstantially, and suggested pregnantly. It is actualised in
actualising something else, an image or a feeling or an intent or a
belief; and it can be discovered only by implication in all discourse,
when discourse itself has been posited. The witnesses to the existence
of spirit are therefore the same as those to the existence of discourse;
but when once discourse is admitted, the existence of spirit in it
becomes self-evident; because discourse is a perusal of essence, or its
recurring presence to spirit.
Now in discourse there is more than passive intuition; there is intent.
This element also implies spirit, and in spirit as man possesses it
intent or intelligence is almost always the dominant element. For this
reason I shall find it impossible, when I come to consider the realm of
spirit, to identify spirit with simple awareness, or with consciousness
in the abstract sense of this abused word. Pure awareness or
consciousness suffices to exemplify spirit; and there may be cold
spirits somewhere that have merely that function; but it is not the only
function that only spirits could perform; and the human spirit, having
intent, expectation, belief, and eagerness, runs much thicker than that.
Spirit is a category, not an individual being: and just as the realm of
essence contains an infinite number of essences, each different from the
rest, and each nothing but an essence, so the realm of spirit may
contain any number of forms of spirit, each nothing but a spiritual
fact. Spirit is a fruition, and there are naturally as many qualities of
fruition as there are fruits to ripen. Spirit is accordingly qualified
by the types of life it actualises, and is individuated by the occasions
on which it actualises them. Each occasion generates an intuition
numerically distinct, and brings to light an essence qualitatively
different.
Let me suppose, by way of illustration, that there was a disembodied
spirit addressed to the realm of truth in general, and seeing all things
under the form of eternity. This would be a very special kind of spirit,
and many an essence would be excluded from its intuition; for instance,
the essence of surprise. No doubt it would congratulate itself on this
incapacity, and say with Aristotle that there are things it is better
not to know than to know, at least by experience. The essence of
surprise involves ignorance of the future, and it could never be
realised, or known by intuition, in a spirit to whom the future had
always been known: and to know surprise by experience is the only way of
knowing its essence. It might indeed be known by description, and
defined as a feeling which animals have when they expect one thing and
find another. Such a description may suggest the essence of surprise to
me, who know by intuition what it is to expect and to find; but it would
never suggest that essence to a spirit that had only descriptions to go
by, and who could reach a conception of “expecting” and of “finding”
only in symbols that translated their transitive natures into synthetic
pictures. Thus the essence of surprise would remain for ever excluded
from intuition in a spirit that saw all things under the form of
eternity.
The occasions on which spirit arises in man are the vicissitudes of his
animal life: that is why spirit in him runs so thick. In intent, in
belief, in emotion a given essence takes on a value which to pure spirit
it could not have. The essence then symbolises an object to which the
animal is tentatively addressed, or an event through which he has just
laboured, or which he is preparing to meet. This attitude of the animal
may be confined to inner readjustments in the psyche, not open to gross
external observation; yet it may all the more directly be raised to
consciousness in the form of attention, expectation, deliberation,
memory, or desire. These sentiments form a moving but habitual
background for any particular essence considered; they frame it in, not
only pictorially in a sensuous perspective, but morally, by its ulterior
suggestions, and by the way in which, in surveying the whole field of
intuition, that particular feature in it is approached or attacked or
rejected. In such settings given essences acquire their felt meanings;
and if they should be uprooted from that soil and exhibited in
isolation, they would no longer mean the same thing to the spirit. Like
a note in a melody, or a word in a sentence, they appeared in a field of
essence greater than they; they were never more than a term or a feature
within it. For this reason I imagine that I see things and not essences;
the essences I see incidentally are embedded in the voluminous
ever-present essences of the past, the world, myself, the future;
master-presences which express attitudes of mine appropriate not to an
essence—which is given—but to a thing—which though not given enlists all
my conviction and concern.
Thus intelligence in man, being the spiritual transcript of an animal
life, is transitional and impassioned. It approaches its objects by a
massive attack, groping for them and tentatively spying them before it
discovers them unmistakably. It is energetic and creative, in the sense
of slowly focussing its object within the field of intuition in the
midst of felt currents with a felt direction, themselves the running
expression of animal endeavours. All this intuition of turbulence and
vitality, which a cold immortal spirit could never know, fills the
spirit of man, and renders any contemplation of essences in their own
realm only an interlude for him or a sublimation or an incapacity. It
also renders him more conscious than a purer spirit would be of his own
spirit. For just as I was able to find evidence of intuition in
discourse, which in the motionless vision of essence would have eluded
me, so in intent, expectation, belief, and emotion, the being of my
thoughts rises up and almost hides the vision of my object. Although I
myself am a substance in flux, on the same level as the material thing
that confronts me, the essences that reveal my own being are dramatic
and moral, whereas those that express the thing are sensuous; and these
dramatic and moral essences, although their presence involves spirit
exactly in the same way, and no more deeply, than the presence of the
sensuous essences does, yet seem to suggest its presence more directly
and more voluminously.
Hence the popular identification of spirit with the heart, the breath,
the blood, or the brain; and the notion that my substantial self and the
spirit within me are identical. In fact, they are the opposite poles of
my being, and I am neither the one nor the other exclusively. If I am
spiritually proud and choose to identify myself with the spirit, I shall
be compelled to regard my earthly person and my human thoughts as the
most alien and the sorriest of accidents; and my surprise and
mortification will never cease at the way in which my body and its world
monopolise my attention. If on the contrary I modestly plead guilty to
being the biped that I seem, I shall be obliged to take the spirit
within me for a divine stranger, in whose heaven it is not given me to
live, but who miraculously walks in my garden in the cool of the
evening. Yet in reality, incarnation is no anomaly, and the spirit is no
intruder. It is as much at home in any animal as in any heaven. In me,
it takes my point of view; it is the voice of my humanity; and what
other mansions it may have need not trouble me. Each will provide a
suitable shrine for its resident deity and its native oracle. It is a
prejudice to suppose that spirit is contaminated by the flesh; it is
generated there; and the more varied its instruments and sources are,
the more copiously it will be manifested, and the more unmistakably.
Spiritual minds are the first to recognise the empire of the flesh over
the spirit in the senses, the passions, and even in a too vivid
imagination; and they call these influences the snares of the adversary.
I think they are right in condemning as vain or carnal any impulses
which would disrupt the health of the soul, either directly in the
individual body, or indirectly by loosening such bonds with society as
are requisite for human happiness. I also think, however, that moralists
of this type overlook two considerations of the greatest moment, by
which all the metaphysical background of their maxims is removed, and
what is reasonable in them is put on a naturalistic basis. One
consideration is that, on a small scale and in its own key, every
impulse in man or beast bears its little flame of spirit. How much
longing, how much laughter, how much perception, how much policy and art
in those vices and crimes which the moralist thinks fatal to spirit!
They may render a finer thing impossible (which the moralist should
bethink himself to depict more attractively), but in themselves they are
full of life and light. For this reason crimes and vices, together with
horrible adventures and the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, are
the chosen theme of novelists and playwrights; and the poor public,
having hardly any other intellectual pleasure, gloats on these fictions,
as an imaginative escape from the moral penury not only of their work,
but of their religion. The poets are far more genuine lovers of spirit
in this than their mentors, whose official morality is probably quite
worldly, and insensible to any actually spiritual achievement, because
such achievements are necessarily fugitive, invisible, and
un-productive. The devil was an angel essentially; it was only in the
complicated politics of this world that he missed his way, and became an
enemy of the highest good.
The other consideration that is overlooked is that the spirit which may
discern this highest good is itself a natural passion, and not less an
expression of the flesh—though more justly and broadly—than the random
impulses it condemns. Consider, for instance, the earnestness with which
evil is condemned. If this evil is pain, the objection to it could not
be more instinctive. Why should pure spirit detest pain? A material
accident in the body here absorbs my attention, and strangely persuades
me to be utterly rebellious and impatient at being so absorbed. The
psyche, or the principle of bodily life, is somehow striving against the
event or stimulus which produced the pain (a perfectly harmless essence
to contemplate in itself), because the psyche is congenitally a system
or cycle of habits which that obnoxious event interrupts. It is this
material pressure and effort not to be stifled or rent in any of her
operations that the psyche imposes on the spirit, commanding it to
pronounce it a terrible evil that she should be rent or stifled. These
strange and irrational pronouncements of spirit, calling events good or
evil, are accordingly grounded on nothing but on a creeping or shrinking
of the flesh. If the evil is moral—the eventual defeat of some ideal I
cherish for myself, my children, or my country—what has fixed this
ideal, or declared it to be a good? Suppose this ideal is a life
glorious and unending; is it not obvious that nothing but the momentum
of life, already accidentally working in myself, my children, or my
country, could possibly demand life or determine what forms of life
would be glorious for us? I will not pursue this topic: if the reader
does not understand, he probably never will.
Let me turn to the most intellectual powers of spirit—attention,
synthesis, perception. These too are voices loudly issuing from the
heart of material existence, and proclaiming their origin there not only
by their occasions and external connections, but by their inmost moral
nature. Why does the spirit stop to collect or to recollect anything?
Why not range undisturbed and untrammelled over image after image,
without referring one to another or attempting (always in vain) to
preserve the design of vanished images, or the order of their
appearance, even through the lapse of the sensible elements that filled
them in? Because the animal is forming habits. The psyche is plastic; no
impression can endure unchanged, as if it had been a substantial little
thing in itself, and not a mode, a ripple, in an inherited,
transmissible, ever rejuvenated substance. Scarcely is the impression
received, but it merges in the general sensitiveness or responsiveness
of the organ affected, modifying its previous way of reacting on some
natural object, an object reported not by that impression alone, but by
many others: so that the synthetic unity of apperception (that most
radical of transcendental principles) obeys a compulsion peculiar to
animal economy, which no pure spirit would need to share, the compulsion
to use things as materials, to drop them and forge ahead, or to eat and
to digest them: for the drinking in of light through the eyes, or of
currents from other organs, thereby rearranging the habits of the
nervous system, is very like the consumption of food, restoring the
vegetative functions. Synthesis in thought, correlation, scope, or (as
the phrase is) taking things in, is laborious piety on the spirit’s part
in subservience to the flesh. It is the mental fruit of training, of
care: an inner possession rewarding an outer fidelity.
Pure spirit would never need to _apperceive_ at all; this is an animal
exigency that distracts it from intuition. There is unity in intuition
too, of a nebulous sort, as there must be unity in the universe, since
it is all there is, however loose its structure or unmarked its limits.
Yet in intuition, as in cloud-land, the field is in the act of changing
pervasively; every part shifts more or less. Any feature you may
distinguish fades and refashions itself irresponsibly; and pure spirit
would be perfectly content that it should do so. Perhaps, if it was a
young spirit, it would positively whip up the hoop, or blow and distend
the bubble, for the fun of seeing it run or burst more gloriously; and
it would be happy to think there was no harm done, and nothing left
over. The scene would then be cleared for something utterly fresh. The
synthetic unity of apperception is something imposed by things on
animals, when these things exercise a seductive charm or threaten
mischief. Attention cries halt, it reconnoitres, it takes note, it
throws a lassoo over the horses of Poseidon, lord of the flux. And why?
Because the organs of spirit are structures; they are mechanisms
instituted in nature to keep doing certain things, roughly appropriate
to the environment, itself roughly constant. It is to this approximate
fixity of function and habit that spirit owes its distinct ideas, the
names it gives to things, and its faith in things, which is a true
revelation of their existence—knowledge of them stored for use.
Perception, too, would be a miracle and an impossibility to a spirit
conceived as alien to matter. Perception is a stretching forth of intent
beyond intuition; it is an exercise of intelligence. Intelligence, the
most ideal function of spirit, is precisely its point of closest
intimacy with matter, of most evident subservience to material modes of
being. The life of matter (at least on the human scale, if not at every
depth) is a flux, a passage from this to that, almost forbidding
anything to be simply itself, by immediately turning it, in some
respect, into something different. If the psyche were a closed round of
motions, the spirit it generated (if it generated spirit at all) would
certainly not be perceptive or cognitive, but in some way emotional or
musical—the music of those spheres. But the round of motions which the
psyche is actually wound up to make must be executed in a changeful and
precarious environment, not to speak of changes in her own substance.
She must hunt, fight, find a mate, protect the offspring, defend the den
and the treasure. Perception, intelligence, knowledge accurately
transcribe this mode of being, profoundly alien to repose in intuition
or to drifting reverie. Perception points to what it does not, save by
pointing, know to exist; knowledge is only of the past or the future,
both of which are absent; and intelligence talks and talks to an
interlocutor—the mind of another man or god or an eventual self of one’s
own—whom it can never see and whose replies, conveyed (if at all)
through material channels, it is never sure exist morally, or could be
understood if they did exist. There is no dilemma in the choice between
animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith,
and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant
alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds. The suasion of
sanity is physical: if you cut your animal traces, you run mad.
It is impossible to say everything at once, and I have been contrasting
intelligence with intuition, as if intuition were less subject than
intelligence to physical inspiration, or had an independent source. This
is not the case; intuition is itself pathetically animal. Why should I
have awaked at all? Can anything, inwardly considered, be more
gratuitous than consciousness? I am afraid I must be constituted
differently from other people, at least in the reflective faculty,
because it astonishes me to hear so many philosophers talking of spirit
as if its existence explained itself, and denying the possibility of
matter; whereas to me it seems credible, though certainly unnecessary _a
priori_, that matter should exist without being consulted, for it cannot
help itself, suffers nothing, and has no reason to protest; and its
existence is antecedently just as plausible as its non-existence. But
the existence of spirit really demands an explanation; it is a
tremendous paradox to itself, not to say a crying scandal—I mean from a
scientific or logical point of view, because treated as a family secret
the scandal is often delicious, and privately it is in this festive and
poetic medium that I love to dwell. Spirit, since it _can_ ask how it
came to exist, has a right to put the question and to look for an
answer. And it may perhaps find an answer of a sort, although not one
which spirit, in all its moods, will think satisfactory.
Fact can never be explained, since only another fact could explain it:
therefore the existence of a universe rather than no universe, or of one
sort of universe rather than another, must be accepted without demur. In
this very irrationality or contingency of existence, which is inevitable
in any case, I find a clue to the strange presence of spirit in this
world. Spirit, the wakefulness of attention, could not have arisen of
its own accord; it contains no bias, no principle of choice, but is an
impartial readiness to know. It never could have preferred one thing to
another, nor preferred existence for itself to nonexistence, nor _vice
versa_. Attention is not a principle that can select the themes that
shall attract attention: to select them it must already have thought of
them. As far as its own nature is concerned, attention is equally ready
to fall on the just and on the unjust; spirit is equally ready to speak
any language, to quicken any body, and to adopt any interest. An
instance of spirit cannot be determined by spirit itself either in its
occasion, its intensity, or the æsthetic character of the essence
presented to it. Chance, matter, fate—some non-spiritual principle or
other—must have determined what the spirit in me shall behold, and what
it shall endure. Some internal fatality, their own brute existence and
wilfulness, must be responsible for the fact that things are as they
are, and not otherwise. If any instance of spirit was to arise anywhere,
the ground of it (if I speak of grounds at all) must have been
irrational. Spirit has the innocence of a child; it pleads not guilty;
at most it has become, without knowing how, an accomplice after the
fact. It is astonished at everything. It is essentially, wherever it may
be found, unsubstantial and expressive; it is essentially secondary.
Even if in fact some instance of spirit, some isolated intuition, sprang
miraculously into being in an absolute void, and nothing else had ever
existed or would exist, yet logically and in its own eyes that intuition
would be secondary, since no principle internal to spirit, but only
brute chance, would be expressed in the existence of that intuition, and
in the arbitrary choice of the essence that happened to appear there.
Spirit is therefore of its very nature and by its own confession the
voice of something else: it speaks not of itself, but of the Father that
sent it. I am accordingly prepared to find some arbitrary world or other
in existence; and since this arbitrary world obviously has spirit in it,
my problem is reduced to inquiring what features, in this arbitrary
existing world, can have called spirit forth, and made it their living
witness.
I postpone the detail of this inquiry, but I have already indicated how
the life of nature is expressed in the chief phases of spirit.
Wakefulness, common to all these phases, is itself a witness to animal
unrest, appetition, alarm, concern, preparation. It would be inane, as
well as impossible, for me to open my eyes, if in looking I did not
identify my spirit with my material person in its material predicaments,
raising to an actual hypostasis in consciousness its material
sensitiveness to outlying things. Electric influences issuing from these
allow my organs to adjust themselves before grosser contact occurs; and
then intuition is a premonition of material fusion. Organic systems
about to collide send forth this conscious cry or salutation. The
current established may prevent a ruder shock, or may precipitate it,
according to the prepared instinct of the receivers. The intuition
expresses the initial fusion involved in the distant response, as if a
ghostly messenger of oncoming things had rushed like a forerunner into
the audience chamber, announcing their arrival. It is only messengers
that reach the spirit, even in the thick of the fray; but by lending
credence to their hot reports, it can live through the battle, lost in
its mists and passions, and thinking itself to give and to receive the
blows.
For a man, and especially for a philosopher, to suggest that spirit does
not exist may accordingly pass for a delicious absurdity, and the best
of unconscious comedy. If it had been some angel that denied it, because
in his serenity and selflessness he could not discover that he was
alive, we might regard the denial of spirit as the highest proof of
spirituality: but in a material creature struggling to see and to think,
and tossed from one illusion and passion to another, such a denial seems
not only stupid, but ungracious; for a man ought to be very proud of
this dubious spark in his embers, and nurse it more tenderly than the
life of a frail child. Nevertheless I think that those who deny the
existence of spirit, although their language is rash and barbarous, are
honestly facing the facts, and are on the trail of a truth. Spirit is
too near them for them to stop at it in their eagerness to count their
visible possessions; and when they hear the word used, it irritates
them, because they suppose it means some sort of magical power or
metaphysical caloric, alleged to keep bodies alive, and to impose
purposes on nature; purposes which such a prior spirit, being
supernatural and immortal, could have had no reason for choosing. Such a
dynamic spirit would indeed be nothing but an immaterial matter, a
second physical substance distinguished from its grosser partner only in
that we know nothing of it, but assign to its operation all those
results which seem to us inexplicable. Belief in such a spirit is simply
belief in magic; innocent enough at first when it is merely verbal and
childish, but becoming perverse when defended after it has ceased to be
spontaneous. I am not concerned with spirit of that sort, nor with any
kind of nether influences. The investigation of substance and of the
laws of events is the province of physics, and I call everything that
science may discover in that direction physical and not spiritual. Even
if the substance of things should be sentiency, or a bevy of souls, or a
single intense Absolute, it would be nothing but matter to what I call
spirit. It would exercise only material functions in kindling the flame
of actual intuition, and bearing my light thoughts like bubbles upon its
infinite flood. I do not know what matter is in itself: but what
metaphysical idealists call spirit, if it is understood to be
responsible for what goes on in the world and in myself, and to be the
“reality” of these appearances, is, in respect to my spiritual
existence, precisely what I call matter; and I find the description of
this matter which the natural sciences supply much more interesting than
that given by the idealists, much more beautiful, and much more likely
to be true. That there is no spirit in the interstices of matter, where
the magicians look for it, nor at the heart of matter, where many
metaphysicians would place it, needs no proof to one who understands
what spirit is; because spirit is in another realm of being altogether,
and needs the being and movement of matter, by its large sweeping
harmonies, to generate it, and give it wings. It would be a pity to
abandon this consecrated word to those who are grubbing for the atoms of
substance, or speculating about a logic in history, or tabulating the
capers of ghosts; especially as there is the light of intuition, the
principle of actuality in vision and feeling, to call by that name. The
popular uses of the word spiritual support this definition of it;
because intuition, when it thoroughly dominates animal experience,
transmutes it into pure flame, and renders it religious or poetical,
which is what is commonly meant by spiritual.
CHAPTER XXVII
COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE
Descartes was the first to begin a system of philosophy with universal
doubt, intended to be only provisional and methodical; but his mind was
not plastic nor mystical enough to be profoundly sceptical, even
histrionically. He could doubt any particular fact easily, with the
shrewdness of a man of science who was also a man of the world; but this
doubt was only a more penetrating use of intelligence, a sense that the
alleged fact might be explained away. Descartes could not lend himself
to the disintegration of reason, and never doubted his principles of
explanation. For instance, in order to raise a doubt about the
applicability of mathematics to existence (for their place in the realm
of essence would remain the same in any case) he suggested that a malign
demon might have been the adequate cause of our inability to doubt that
science. He thus assumed the principle of sufficient reason, a principle
for which there is no reason at all. If any idea or axiom were really _a
priori_ or spontaneous in the human mind, it would be infinitely
improbable that it should apply to the facts of nature. Every genius, in
this respect, is his own malign demon. Nor was this the worst; for
Descartes was not content to assume that reason governs the world—a
notion scandalously contrary to fact, and at bottom contrary to reason
itself, which is but the grammar of human discourse and aspiration
linking mere essences. He set accidental limits to his scepticism even
about facts. “I think, therefore I am,” if taken as an inference is
sound because analytical, only repeating in the conclusion, for the sake
of emphasis, something assumed in the premise. If taken as an
attestation of fact, as I suppose it was meant, it is honest and richly
indicative, all its terms being heavy with empirical connotations. What
is “thinking,” what is “I,” what is “therefore,” and what is
“existence”? If there were no existence there would certainly be no
persons and no thinking, and it may be doubted (as I have indicated
above) that anything exists at all. That any being exists that may be
called “I,” so that I am not a mere essence, is a thousand times more
doubtful, and is often denied by the keenest wits. The persuasion that
in saying “I am” I have reached an indubitable fact, can only excite a
smile in the genuine sceptic. No _fact_ is self-evident; and what sort
of fact is this “I,” and in what sense do I “exist”? Existence does not
belong to a mere datum, nor am I a datum to myself; I am a somewhat
remote and extremely obscure object of belief. Doubtless what I _mean_
by myself is an existence and even a substance; but the rudimentary
phantoms that suggest that object, or that suggest the existence of
anything, need to be trusted and followed out by a laborious empirical
exploration, before I can make out at all what they signify. Variation
alleged, strain endured, persistence assumed—notions which when taken on
faith lead to the assertion of existence and of substance, if they
remained merely notions would prove nothing, disclose nothing, and
assert nothing. Yet such, I suppose, are the notions actually before me
when I say “I am.” As to myself, when I proceed to distinguish that
object in the midst of the moving world, I am roughly my body, or more
accurately, its living centre, master of its organs and seat of its
passions; and this inner life of the body, I suspect, was the rock of
vulgar belief which Descartes found at hand, easy to mount on, after his
not very serious shipwreck. And the rock was well chosen; not because
the existence of my inner man is a simpler or a surer fact than any
other; to a true sceptic this alleged being so busily thinking and
willing and fuming within my body is but a strange feature in the
fantastic world that appears for the moment. Yet the choice of the inner
man as the one certain existence was a happy one, because this sense of
life within me is more constant than other perceptions, and not wholly
to be shaken off except in profound contemplation or in some strange
forms of madness. It was a suitable first postulate for the romantic
psychologist. On this stepping-stone to idealism the father of modern
philosophy, like another Columbus, set his foot with elegance. His new
world, however, would be but an unexplored islet in the world of the
ancients if all he discovered was himself thinking.
Thinking is another name for discourse; and perhaps Descartes, in noting
his own existence, was really less interested in the substance of
himself, or in the fact that he was alive, than in the play of terms in
discourse, which seemed to him obvious. Discourse truly involves spirit,
with its intuition and intent, surveying those terms. And the definition
of the soul, that its essence is to think, being a definition of spirit
and not of a man’s self, supports this interpretation. But discourse, no
less than the existence of a self, needs to be posited, and the
readiness with which a philosopher may do so yields only a candid
confession of personal credulity, not the proof of anything. The
assumption that spirit discoursing exists, and is more evident than any
other existence, leads by a slightly different path to the same
conclusion as the assumption of the self as the fundamental fact. In the
one case discourse will soon swallow up all existence, and in the other
this chosen existence, myself, will evaporate into discourse: but it
will remain an insoluble problem whether I am a transcendental spirit,
not a substance, holding the whole imaginary universe in the frame of my
thought, or whether I am an instance of thinking, a phase of that flux
of sentience which will then be the substance of the world. It is only
if we interpret and develop the Cartesian axiom in the former
transcendental sense that it supplies an instrument for criticism.
Understood in an empirical way, as the confident indication of a
particular fact, it is merely a chance dogma, betraying the
psychological bias of reflection in modern man, and suggesting a
fantastic theory of the universe, conveniently called psychologism; a
theory which fuses the two disparate substances posited by Descartes,
and maintains that while the inner essence of substance everywhere is to
think, or at least to feel, its distribution, movement, and aspect, seen
from without, are those of matter.
In adopting the method of Descartes, I have sought to carry it further,
suspending all conventional categories as well as all conventional
beliefs; so that not only the material world but all facts and all
existences have lost their status, and become simply the themes or
topics which intrinsically they are. Neither myself nor pure spirit is
at all more real in that realm of essence than any other mentionable
thing. When it comes to assertion (which is belief) I follow Descartes
in choosing discourse and (as an implication of discourse) my
substantial existence as the objects of faith least open to reasonable
doubt; not because they are the first objects asserted, nor because
intrinsically they lend themselves to existence better than anything
else, but simply because in taking note of anything whatever I find that
I am assuming the validity of primary memory; in other words, that the
method and the fact of observation are adventitious to the theme. But
the fact that observation is involved in observing anything does not
imply that observation is the only observed fact: yet in this gross
sophism and insincerity the rest of psychologism is entangled.
Hume and Kant seemed sceptics in their day and were certainly great
enemies of common sense, not through any perversity of temper (for both
were men of wise judgement) but through sophistical scruples and
criticism halting at unfortunate places. They disintegrated belief on
particular points of scholastic philosophy, which was but common sense
applied to revelation; and they made no attempt to build on the
foundations so laid bare, but rather to comfort themselves with the
assurance that what survived was practically sufficient, and far
simpler, sounder, and purer than what they had demolished. After the
manner of the eighteenth century, they felt that convention was a burden
and an imposture, not because here and there it misinterpreted nature,
but because it interpreted or defined nature at all; and in their
criticism they ran for a fall. They had nothing to offer in the place of
what they criticised, except the same cheque dishonoured. All their
philosophy, where it was not simply a collapse into living without
philosophy, was retrenchment; and they retrenched in that hand-to-mouth
fashion which Protestantism had introduced and which liberalism was to
follow. They never touched bottom, and nothing could be more gratuitous
or more helpless than their residual dogmas. These consisted in making
metaphysics out of literary psychology; not seeing that the discourse or
experience to which they appealed was a social convention, roughly
dramatising those very facts of the material world, and of animal life
in it, which their criticism had denied.
Hume seems to have assumed that every perception perceived itself. He
assumed further that these perceptions lay in time and formed certain
sequences. Why a given perception belonged to one sequence rather than
to another, and why all simultaneous perceptions were not in the same
mind, he never considered; the questions were unanswerable, so long as
he ignored or denied the existence of bodies. He asserted also that
these perceptions were repeated, and that the repetitions were always
fainter than the originals—two groundless assertions, unless the
transitive force of memory is admitted, and impressions are
distinguished from ideas externally, by calling an intuition an
impression when caused by a present object, visible to a third person,
and calling it an idea when not so caused. Furthermore, he invoked an
alleged habit of perceptions always to follow one another in the same
order—something flatly contrary to fact; but the notion was made
plausible by confusion with the habits of the physical world, where
similar events recur when the conditions are similar. Intuitions no
doubt follow the same routine; but the conditions for an intuition are
not the previous intuitions, but the whole present state of the psyche
and of the environment, something of which the previous intuitions were
at best prophetic symptoms, symptoms often falsified by the event.
All these haltings and incoherences arose in the attempt to conceive
experience divorced from its physical ground and from its natural
objects, as a dream going on _in vacuo_. So artificial an abstraction,
however, is hard to maintain consistently, and Hume, by a happy exercise
of worldly wit, often described the workings of the mind as our social
imagination leads us all vaguely to conceive them. In these inspired
moments he made those acute analyses of our notions of material things,
of the soul, and of cause, which have given him his name as a sceptic.
These analyses are bits of plausible literary psychology, essays on the
origin of common sense. They are not accounts of what the notions
analysed mean, much less scientific judgements of their truth. They are
supposed, however, by Hume and by the whole modern school of idealists,
to destroy both the meaning of these notions and the existence of their
intended objects. Having explained how, perhaps, early man, or a
hypothetical infant, might have reached his first glimmerings of
knowledge that material things exist, or souls, or causes, we are
supposed to have proved that no causes, no souls, and no material things
can exist at all. We are not allowed to ask how, in that case, we have
any evidence for the existence of early man, or of the hypothetical
infant, or of any general characteristics of the human mind, and its
tendencies to feign. The world of literature is sacred to these bookish
minds; only the world of nature and science arouses their suspicion and
their dislike. They think that “experience,” with the habits of thought
and language prevalent in all nations, from Adam down, needs only to be
imagined in order to be known truly. All but this imagined experience
seems to them the work of imagination. While their method of criticism
ought evidently to establish not merely solipsism, but a sort of
solipsism of the present datum, yet they never stop to doubt the whole
comedy of human intercourse, just as the most uncritical instinct and
the most fanciful history represent it to be. How can such a mass of
ill-attested and boldly dogmatic assumptions fail to make the critics of
science uncomfortable in their own house? Is it because the criticism of
dogma in physics, without this dogma in psychology, could never so much
as begin? Is not their criticism at bottom a work of edification or of
malice, not of philosophic sincerity, so that they reject the claim to
knowledge only in respect to certain physical, metaphysical, or
religious objects which the modern mind has become suspicious of, and
hopes to feel freer without? Meantime, they keep their conventional
social assumptions without a qualm, because they need them to justify
their moral precepts and to lend a false air of adequacy to their view
of the world. Thus we are invited to believe that our notions of
material things do not mean what they assert, but being illusions in
their deliverance, really signify only the series of perceptions that
have preceded them, or that, for some unfathomable reason, may be
expected to ensue.
All this is sheer sophistry, and limping scepticism. Certainly the
vulgar notions of nature, and even the scientific ones, are most
questionable; and they may have grown up in the way these critics
suggest; in any case they have grown up humanly. But they are not mere
images; they are beliefs; and the truth of beliefs hangs on what they
assert, not on their origin. The question is whether such an object as
they describe lies in fact in the quarter where they assert it to lie;
the genealogy of these assertions in the mind of the believer, though
interesting, is irrelevant. _It is for science and further investigation
of the object to pronounce on the truth of any belief._ It will remain a
mere belief to the end, no matter how much corroborated and corrected;
but the fact that it is a belief, far from proving that it must be
false, renders it possibly true, as it could not be if it asserted
nothing and had no object beyond itself which it pointed to and
professed to describe. This whole school criticises knowledge, not by
extending knowledge and testing it further, but by reviewing it
maliciously, on the tacit assumption that knowledge is impossible. But
in that case this review of knowledge and all this shrewd psychology are
themselves worthless; and we are reduced, as Hume was in his deeper
moments of insight, to a speechless wonder. So that whilst all the
animals trust their senses and live, philosophy would persuade man alone
not to trust them and, if he was consistent, to stop living.
This tragic conclusion might not have daunted a true philosopher, if
like the Indians he had reached it by a massive moral experience rather
than by incidental sophistries with no hold on the spirit. In that case
the impossibility of knowledge would have seemed but one illustration of
the vanity of life in general. That all is vanity was a theme sometimes
developed by Christian preachers, and even in some late books of the
Bible, with special reservations; but it is an insight contrary to
Hebraic religion, which invokes supernatural or moral agencies only in
the hope of securing earthly life and prosperity for ever. The wisdom
demanded could, therefore, not be negative or merely liberating; and
scepticism in Christian climes has always seemed demoralising. When it
forced itself on the reluctant mind, people either dismissed it as a
game not worth playing and sank back, like Hume, into common sense,
though now with a bad conscience; or else they sought some subterfuge or
equivocation by which knowledge, acknowledged to be worthless, was
nevertheless officially countersigned and passed as legal tender, so
that the earnest practice of orthodoxy, religious or worldly, or both at
once, might go on without a qualm. Evidently, to secure this result, it
was necessary to set up some oracle, independent of natural knowledge,
that should represent some deeper reality than natural knowledge could
profess to reach; and it was necessary that this oracle itself, by a
pious or a wilful oversight, should escape criticism; for otherwise all
was lost. It escaped criticism by virtue of the dramatic illusion which
always fills the sails of argument, and renders the passing conviction
the indignant voice of omniscience and justice. The principle invoked in
criticism, whatever it might be, could not be criticised. It did not
need to be defended: its credentials were the havoc it wrought among
more explicit conventions. And yet, by a mocking fatality, those
discredited conventions had to be maintained in practice, since they are
inevitable for mankind, and the basis, even by their weaknesses, of the
appeal to that higher principle which, in theory, was to revise and
reject them. This higher principle was no alternative view of the world,
no revelation of further facts or destinies; it was the thinking or
dreaming spirit that posited those necessary conventions, and would
itself die if it ceased to posit them. In discrediting the fictions of
spirit we must, therefore, beware of suspending them. We are not asked
to abolish our conception of the natural world, nor even, in our daily
life, to cease to believe in it; we are to be idealists only
north-north-west, or transcendentally; when the wind is southerly, we
are to remain realists. The pronouncements of animal faith have no doubt
been reversed in a higher court, but with this singular proviso, that
the police and the executioner, while reverently acknowledging the
authority of the higher tribunal, must unflinchingly carry out the
original sentence passed by the lower. This escape from scepticism by
ambiguity, and by introducing only cancelled dogmas, was chosen by
German philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and by
modernism and pragmatism at the end of it.
Kant was thought a sceptic in his day, and called his philosophy
criticism; but his scepticism was very impure and his criticism, though
laborious, was very uncritical. That he was regarded as a great
philosopher in the nineteenth century is due to the same causes that
made Locke seem a great philosopher in the eighteenth, not to any
intrinsic greatness. He announced some revolutionary principles, which
alarmed and excited the public, but he did not carry them out, so that
the public was reassured. In his criticism of knowledge he assumed
without question the Humian sequences of perceptions, although contrary
to his doctrine of time; and, more wisely than Hume, he never abandoned
the general sense that these perceptions had organs and objects beneath
and beyond them; but having cut off, by his malicious criticism of
knowledge, the organs and objects which perceptions notoriously have, he
was forced to forge others, artificial and metaphysical. Instead of the
body, he posited a transcendental ego, the categories of thought, and a
disembodied law of duty; instead of natural substances he posited the
unknowable. I shall revert to these subjects in discussing the realm of
matter, which is where they belong. Here I am concerned only with the
analysis of knowledge, which in Kant was most conscientious, and
valuable in spite of its rationalistic bias and its mythical solutions.
Any intelligent mind comes upon data and takes them for signs of things.
Empirical criticism consists in reverting from these objects of intent,
the things of common sense and science, to the immediate data by which
they are revealed. But since data are not vacantly stared at by an
intelligent being, but are interpreted and combined, there is evidently
a subtler element in knowledge of things than the data which empirical
criticism reverts to: namely, the principles of interpretation, since
the data are read and taken to be significant of existing objects, far
richer and more persistent and more powerful than themselves. These
principles I have summarily called animal faith, not being concerned to
propose any analysis of them that should apply to all minds or to all
objects; for I conceive, for instance, that the future, in other
animals, may be a more frequent and vivid object of animal faith than
the past or the material environment posited by human beings. But Kant,
assuming that mind everywhere must have a single grammar, investigated
very ingeniously what he conceived to be its recondite categories, and
schemata, and forms of intuition: all pompous titles for what Hume had
satirically called tendencies to feign. But Kant, in dishonouring the
intellect, at least studied it devotedly, like an alienist discovering
the logic of madness; and he gave it so elaborate an articulation, and
imposed it so rigorously on all men for ever, that people supposed he
was establishing the sciences on a solid foundation rather than
prescribing for all men a gratuitous uniformity in error. Yet this was
his true meaning: and in spite of its psychological prefaces and
metaphysical epilogues, and in spite of this pedantry about the
necessary forms of all the sciences, the heart of the Kantian system was
the most terrible negation. Among transcendental principles he placed
space, time, and causality; so that, if he had been consistent, he would
have had to regard all multiple and successive existence as imagined
only. Everything conceivable would have collapsed into the act of
conceiving it, and this act itself would have lost its terms and its
purpose, and evaporated into nothing. But not at all; as if aware that
all his conclusions were but curiosities in speculation and academic
humours, he continued to think of experience as progressing in time,
trifled most earnestly with astronomy and geography, and even comforted
the pious with a postulate of immortality, as if time existed otherwise
than in imagination. In fact, these backslidings were his amiable side:
he always retained a certain humanity and wisdom, being much more
thoroughly saturated with his conventional presuppositions than with his
extravagant conclusions.
A philosopher, however, must be taken at his best, or at his worst; in
any case, his pure doctrine must be freed as far as possible from its
personal alloy: and the pure doctrine of Kant was that knowledge is
impossible. Anything I could perceive or think was _ipso facto_ a
creature of my sense or thought. Nature, history, God and the other
world, even a man’s outspread experience, could be things imagined only.
Thought—for it was still assumed that there was thought—was a bubble,
self-inflated at every moment, in an infinite void. All else was
imaginary; no world could be anything but the iridescence of that empty
sphere. And this transcendental thought, so rich in false perspectives,
could it be said to exist anywhere, or at any time, or for any reason?
Here we touch one of those ambiguities and mystifications in which
German philosophy takes refuge when pressed; strong in the attack, it
dissolves if driven to the defensive. Transcendentalism, in so far as it
is critical, is a method only; the principles by which data are
interpreted come into play whenever intelligence is at work. The
occasions for this exercise, as a matter of fact, are found in animal
life; and while every mind, at every moment, is the seat and measure of
its own understanding, and creates its own knowledge (though, of course,
not the objects on which animal life is directed and which it professes
to know) yet the quality and degree of this intelligence may vary
indefinitely from age to age and from animal to animal. Transcendental
principles are accordingly only principles of local perspective, the
grammar of fancy in this or that natural being quickened to imagination,
and striving to understand what it endures and to utter what it deeply
wills. The study of transcendental logic ought, therefore, to be one of
the most humane, tender, tentative of studies: nothing but sympathetic
poetry and insight into the hang and rhythm of various thoughts. It
should be the finer part of literary psychology. But such is not the
transcendentalism of the absolute transcendentalists. For them the
grammar of thought is single and compulsory. It is the method of the
creative fiat by which not this or that idea of the universe, but the
universe itself, comes into being. The universe has only a specious
existence; and the method by which specious existence is evoked in
thought is divine and identical in all thinking.
But why divine, and why always identical? And why any thinking at all,
or any process or variation in discourse, other than the given
perspectives of the present vision? At this point vertigo seizes the
transcendentalist, and he no longer knows what he means. On the one
hand, phenomena cannot be produced by an agency prior to them, for his
first principle is that all existence is phenomenal and exists only in
being posited or discovered. Will, Life, Duty, or whatever he calls this
transcendental agency, by which the illusions of nature and history are
summoned from the vasty deep, cannot be a fact, since all facts are
created by its incantations. On the other hand phenomena cannot be
substantial on their own account, for then they would not be phenomena
but things, and no transcendental magician, himself non-existent and
non-phenomenal, would be needed to produce them.
Absolute transcendentalism—the only radical form of a psychological
criticism of knowledge—is accordingly not a thinkable nor a stable
doctrine. It is merely a habit of speaking ambiguously, with a just
sense for the living movement of thought and a romantic contempt for its
deliverance. Self-consciousness cannot be, as this school strove to make
it, a first principle of criticism: it is far too complex and derivative
for that. But transcendentalism is a legitimate attitude for a poet in
his dramatic reflections and romantic soliloquies; it is the principle
of perspective in thought, the scenic art of the mental theatre. The
fully awakened soul, looking about it in this strange world, may well
believe that it is dreaming. It may review its shifting memories, with a
doubt whether they were ever anything in themselves. It may marshal all
things in ideal perspectives about the present moment, and esteem them
important and even real only in so far as they diversify the mental
landscape. And to compensate it for the visionary character which the
world takes on, it may cultivate the sense (by no means illusory) of
some deep fountain of feeling and fancy within the self. Such wistful
transcendentalism is akin to principles which in India long ago inspired
very deep judgements upon life. It may be practised at will by any
reflective person who is minded to treat the universe, for the time
being, as so much furniture for his dreams.
Yet this attitude, seeing that man is not a solitary god but an animal
in a material and social world, must be continually abandoned. It must
be abandoned precisely when a man does or thinks anything important. Its
own profundity is dreamful, and, so to speak, digestive: action, virtue,
and wisdom sound another note. It is therefore no worthy philosophy; and
in fact the Germans, whose philosophy it is, while so dutiful in their
external discipline, are sentimental and immoral in their spiritual
economy. If a learned and placid professor tells me he is creating the
universe by positing it in his own mind according to eternal principles
of logic and duty, I may smile and admire such an inimitable mixture of
enthusiasm and pedantry, profundity and innocence. Yet there is
something sinister in this transcendentalism, apparently so pure and
blameless; it really expresses and sanctions the absoluteness of a
barbarous soul, stubborn in its illusions, vulgar in its passions, and
cruel in its zeal—cruel especially to itself, as barbarism always is,
because it feeds and dilates its will as if its will were an absolute
power, whereas it is nothing but a mass of foolish impulses and boasts
ending in ignominy. Moreover, transcendentalism cannot even supply a
thorough criticism of knowledge, which would demand that the ideas of
self, of activity, and of consciousness should be disintegrated and
reduced to the immediate. In the immediate, however, there is no
transcendental force nor transcendental machinery, not even a set of
perceptions nor an experience, but only some random essence, staring and
groundless.
I hope I have taken to heart what the schools of Hume and Kant have to
offer by way of disintegrating criticism of knowledge, and that in
positing afresh the notions of substance, soul, nature, and discourse, I
have done so with my eyes open. These notions are all subject to doubt;
but so, also, are the notions proposed instead by psychological
philosophers. None of these have reached the limit of possible doubt;
yet the dogmas they have retained, being romantic prejudices, are
incoherent and incapable of serving as the basis for any reasonable
system: and in a moral sense they are the very opposite of philosophy.
When pressed, their negations end in solipsism and their affirmations in
rhapsody. Far from purging the mind and strengthening it, that it might
gain a clearer and more stable vision of the world, these critics have
bewildered it with a multitude of methods and vistas, the expression of
the confusion reigning in their day between natural science and
religious faith, and between psychology and scepticism.
My endeavour has been to restore these things to their natural places,
without forgetting the assumptions on which they rest. But the chief
difference between my criticism of knowledge and theirs lies in the
conception of knowledge itself. The Germans call knowledge
_Wissenschaft_, as if it were something to be found in books, a
catalogue of information, and an encyclopædia of the sciences. But the
question is whether all this _Wissenschaft_ is knowledge or only
learning. My criticism is criticism of myself: I am talking of what I
believe in my active moments, as a living animal, when I am really
believing something: for when I am reading books belief in me is at its
lowest ebb; and I lend myself to the suasion of eloquence with the same
pleasure (when the book is well written) whether it be the _Arabian
Nights_ or the latest philosophy. My criticism is not essentially a
learned pursuit, though habit may sometimes make my language scholastic;
it is not a choice between artificial theories; it is the discipline of
my daily thoughts and the account I actually give to myself from moment
to moment of my own being and of the world around me. I should be
ashamed to countenance opinions which, when not arguing, I did not
believe. It would seem to me dishonest and cowardly to militate under
other colours than those under which I live. Merely learned views are
not philosophy; and therefore no modern writer is altogether a
philosopher in my eyes, except Spinoza; and the critics of knowledge in
particular seem to me as feeble morally as they are technically.
I should like, therefore, to turn to the ancients and breathe again a
clear atmosphere of frankness and honour; but in the present business
they are not very helpful. The Indians were poets and mystics; and while
they could easily throw off the conventions of vulgar reason, it was
often only to surrender themselves to other conventions, far more
misleading to a free spirit, such as the doctrine of transmigration of
souls; and when, as in Buddhism, they almost vanquished that illusion,
together with every other, their emasculated intellect had nothing to
put in its place. The Greeks on the contrary were rhetoricians; they
seldom or never reverted to the immediate for a foothold in thought,
because the immediate lies below the level of language and of political
convention. But they were disputatious, and in that sense no opinion
escaped their criticism. In this criticism they simply pitted one
plausible opinion against another, supporting each in turn by all
conceivable arguments, based on no matter what prejudices or
presumptions. The result of this forensic method was naturally a
suspense of rational judgement, favourable now to frivolity and now to
superstition. The frivolity appeared in the Sophists who, seeing that
nothing was certain, impudently assumed as true whatever it was socially
convenient to advocate. Protagoras seems to have reduced this bad habit
to an honest system, when he taught that each occasion is, for itself,
the ultimate judge of truth. This, taken psychologically, is evidently
the case: a mind cannot judge on other subjects nor on other evidences
than are open to it when judging. But the judging moment need not judge
truly; and to maintain (as Protagoras does in Plato’s _Dialogue_ and as
some pragmatists have done in our day) that all momentary opinions are
equal in truth, though not equal in value, is to fail in radical
scepticism: for it is to assume many moments, and knowledge (utterly
inexplicable on these principles) of their several sequences and import;
and to assume something even more wanton, a single standard of value by
which to judge them all. Such incoherence is not surprising in sophists
whose avowed purpose in philosophising is to survive and succeed in this
world, or perhaps in the next. Worldly people will readily admit that
some ideas are better than others, even if both sets are equally false.
The interest in truth for its own sake is not a worldly interest, but
the human soul is capable of it; and there might be spirits directed on
the knowledge of truth as upon their only ultimate good, as there might
be spirits addressed exclusively to music. Which arts and sciences are
worth pursuing, and how far, is a question for the moralist, to be
answered in each case in view of the faculties and genius of the persons
concerned, and their opportunities. Socrates may humorously eschew all
science that is useless to cobblers; he thereby expresses his plebeian
hard sense, and his Hellenic joy in discourse and in moral apologues;
but if he allows this pleasant prejudice to blind him to the possibility
of physical discoveries, or of cogent mathematics, he becomes a simple
sophist. The moralist needs true knowledge of nature—even a little
astronomy—in order to practise the art of life in a becoming spirit; and
an agnosticism which was not merely personal, provisional, and humble
would be the worst of dogmas.
A sinking society, with its chaos of miscellaneous opinions, touches the
bottom of scepticism in this sense, that it leaves no opinion
unchallenged. But as a complete suspense of judgement is physically
impossible in a living animal, every sceptic of the decadence has to
accept some opinion or other. Which opinions he accepts, will depend on
his personal character or his casual associations. His philosophy
therefore deserts him at the threshold of life, just when it might cease
to be a verbal accomplishment; in other words, he is at intervals a
sophist, but at no time a philosopher. Nevertheless, among the Greek
sceptics there were noble minds. They turned their scepticism into an
expression of personal dignity and an argument for detachment. In such
scepticism every one who practises philosophy must imitate them; for why
should I pledge myself absolutely to what in fact is not certain?
Physics and theology, to which most philosophies are confined, are
dubious in their first principles: which is not to say that nothing in
them is credible. If we assert that one thing is more probable than
another, as did the sceptics of the Academy, we have adopted a definite
belief, we profess to have some hold on the nature of things at large, a
law seems to us to rule events, and the lust of scepticism in us is
chastened. This belief in nature, with a little experience and good
sense to fill in the picture, is almost enough by way of belief. Nor can
a man honestly believe less. An active mind never really loses the
conviction that it is scenting the way of the world.
Living when human faith is again in a state of dissolution, I have
imitated the Greek sceptics in calling doubtful everything that, in
spite of common sense, any one can possibly doubt. But since life and
even discussion forces me to break away from a complete scepticism, I
have determined not to do so surreptitiously nor at random,
ignominiously taking cover now behind one prejudice and now behind
another. Instead, I have frankly taken nature by the hand, accepting as
a rule in my farthest speculations the animal faith I live by from day
to day. There are many opinions which, though questionable, are
inevitable to a thought attentive to appearance, and honestly expressive
of action. These natural opinions are not miscellaneous, such as those
which the Sophists embraced in disputation. They are superposed in a
biological order, the stratification of the life of reason. In rising
out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional necessity,
to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in truth, and in
spirit. All these objects may conceivably be illusory. Belief in them,
however, is not grounded on a prior probability, but all judgements of
probability are grounded on them. They express a rational instinct or
instinctive reason, the waxing faith of an animal living in a world
which he can observe and sometimes remodel.
This natural faith opens to me various Realms of Being, having very
different kinds of reality in themselves and a different status in
respect to my knowledge of them. I hope soon to invite the friendly
reader to accompany me in a further excursion through those tempting
fields.
INDEX
Analysis and synthesis, 117-119
Animation, not behaviour, 244-246;
an expression of mechanism, not a substitute, 246, 247;
conceived dramatically, 248, 249
Anthropomorphism excusable, 147, 148
Appearance, two senses of the word, 39, 43
Apperception, timeless, 24, 25, 28-30;
its physical ground, 282
_Arabian Nights_, 67, 160, 305
Aristotle, his metaphysics, vii;
identifies essence with intuition, 126-129;
on God, 130, 131;
on substance, 190;
on entelechies, 217
Arts, creative like the senses, 87, 102
Astronomy, good for moralists, 307
Behaviour, theme of scientific psychology, 243-246
Belief, not implied in intuition, 16;
enacted before it is asserted, 264
Berkeley, alluded to, 58;
his direct intuition, 68;
his nominalism, 97
Brahma, 18, 19, 51
British and German philosophy criticises perception, not memory, 13;
only literature, 254
Buddhism, 306
Causation, 210
Change, feeling of it not a change, 25;
known by faith only, 26;
may be illusion, 30;
fallacious disproofs of it, 31, 32
Common sense, roughly sound, v
Contingency of all existence, 134, 135
Contradiction an essence of discourse, 121, 137
Criticism, empirical and transcendental, 3, 4;
arises by conflict of dogmas, 8;
depends on literary psychology, 187;
should appeal to living beliefs, 305
Data, non-existentials, 45;
universals, 54;
their basis cerebral, 56
Dateless, defined, 270
Democritus, ix, 55
Demonstration, assumes discourse, 115-119
Descartes, 17;
doubts facts only, 289;
_cogito ergo sum_, 290-293
Dialectic, not true unless descriptive, 28;
involves belief in memory, 119, 120
Discourse, an event, 119;
involved in positing anything, 124;
distinguished late, 193
Dogma, how precipitated, 6
Empiricism admits substance, 199-201
Entelechy, 130, 217
Error distinguishes discourse from its objects, 123
_Esse est percipi_, 58
Essences adumbrated, 35, 38, 39, 48;
simile of the costumer’s shop, 70-72;
introduced, 73, 74;
defined further, 75-78;
necessary terms in knowledge, 80-82;
of any complexity, 116, 262;
infinitely comminuted, 129;
without inherent values, 130;
not limited to Platonic ideas, 225
Eternal, defined, 271
Eternity, 112
Euclid, 86, 121;
his space, 116, 117
Events involve substance, 230-232
Everlasting, defined, 271
Evidence, two meanings, 43, 44, 99
Existence, the sense of it, 24, 25, 187, 188;
not a datum, 34-38;
presence to intuition neither sufficient for it nor necessary, 45-47;
its physical definition, 48;
odious to logic, 48, 206;
name for an object of faith, 42;
felt as pure Being posited, 273
Expectation, irrational as hunger, 36
Experience, use of the word, 138;
naturally conditioned, transcendentally primary, 23, 24;
conceived as a life, 57;
is discourse interrupted by shocks, 143;
belief in it imposed by instinct, not by experience itself, 144;
its primitive texture, 188, 189;
imagined experience hypostatised, 255, 256;
reduced to blank feeling or extended to dreams, 260
Explanation, 208
Fact, 228, 229;
never a datum, 91;
denied if regarded as a concept, 60
Faith prior to intuition, 107
Fichte, 62, 63, 184, 185
Future, an assumption, 36;
rash notion of it, 235
God assimilated to nature, 237;
to truth, 268;
to the spirit of a cosmos, 130, 131
Hamlet, 27, 58, 95
Heraclitus, ix, 29
History, dependent for its validity on physics, 13;
interfused with fiction, 160;
partly literary psychology, 253
Hume, his sharp intuition, 67, 68;
criticism by retrenchment, 293;
residual assumptions, 294;
analysis of conventions, 295;
sophistical result, 296, 297
Ideas not beliefs unless action is suggested, 16;
Platonic ideas, 222-224
Identification an act of faith, 117, 119
Identity felt under diverse appearances, 153
Illusion, three ways out of it, 72
Immortal, defined, 271
Indian philosophy, viii, 51-55, 67, 305, 306
Instantaneous, defined, 270
Intelligence expresses animal adjustments, 281
Intent, 100, 137, 166, 167
Interpretation obscures the datum, 67, 68
Introjection, 241
Intuition yields only appearance, 24;
denied by sceptics, 58;
an expression of animal wakefulness, 133;
does not think, 150;
may exist behind observable facts, 258;
divined by sympathy, 221, 250;
most communicable when most articulate, 251
Ionian physics, vii, viii
Kant, 4, 97;
his incoherence, 298;
his analysis of knowledge, 299, 300;
destructive results, 301
Karma, 54
Knowledge, impossible with nothing to know, 60;
is symbolical, 95, 96, 98, 101;
has a removed object, 154;
bridges the flux, 161;
its animal basis, 164, 172;
may recover essences given elsewhere, 168, 169;
not intuition, 170, 171;
the object identified by bodily attitude (illustration of the moon),
172-177;
though symbolical progressive, 177-179;
may be adequate to discourse elsewhere, 207;
when pictorially adequate it is still faith, 107
Life of reason, 109, 110
Literary psychology, 174;
possibly true, 259;
turned into metaphysics, 293, 294
Logic, partly creative, partly descriptive, vi;
not coercive over fact, _ibid._, 2, 3;
studies essence, not truth, 262
Memory, presence of the absent, 141;
is direct, 151;
posits animation, 242;
in a natural setting, 150, 158;
pictorial exactitude possible but worthless, 152, 153;
stationed in the present, which frames the past, 154, 155;
may be truer than experience, 156;
should be selective, 157;
criticised only by fancy, 160
Metaphysics confuses different realms of being, vii, 203, 208, 209, 218
Natural philosophy, vii;
present ferment in it, ix;
progresses in knowledge, 218;
has a poetic side, 234
Nature, the total object of perception, 197, 198;
connotations of the word, 234;
uniformity of nature an assumption, _ibid._;
tested and embodied in art, 236, 239
Nirvana, 51
Object, use and misuse of the word, 202, 203
Order of genesis, of discovery, 109;
of evidence, 110
Pain, 65, 66, 280
Parmenides, 29, 55, 61
Past, an object of faith, 29;
may be illusory, 36, 37
Perception, not intuition but faith expressing a bodily response, 282,
283
Permanence given in experience, 193, 195
Phenomena, in Platonism, 224;
in modern philosophy, 225, 226
Plato, 69, 78, 85, 225, 226, 306
Platonic ideas, selected essences, 77;
hypostatised, 222-224
Positing, propriety of the term, 184
Primary and secondary qualities, 82-90
Protagoras, 306
Psyche, 19, 147, 156. Cf. _Self_
Psychologism, 256, 292
Psychology, scientific and literary, 252;
supports the non-existence of data, 63-66
Pythagoras, ix
Reality, meaning of the term, 33, 34;
eulogistic use of it, 51, 210
Reason, not a force, 186;
principle of sufficient reason, 289
Religious dogmas easily doubted, 11, 12
Scepticism, a conflict of dogmas, 8;
an accident in philosophy, 9;
rich in ideas, 67;
a trance state, 69;
would be the best philosophy if tenable, 100, 186;
deprecated in Christian times, 297
Sceptics in Greece, some sophists, 307;
some true philosophers, 308
Schopenhauer, 68
Self, evidence for its existence, 146;
may be denied, 148, 290;
is obscure, 149;
an almost perpetual object, 291
Sensations and ideas, ambiguous uses of the terms, 86-90, 188, 225
Shock, distinguishes experience from pure discourse, 139, 141;
prompts to belief in the self and in the object, 142
Socrates, his favourite essences, 78;
his utilitarianism in science, 307
Solipsism, untenable if personal, 13;
tenable if of the present moment, 15, 16
Sophists, 306
Soul, genesis of the notion, 216;
analysis of it, 218-221
Spinoza, right on chief issue, viii;
thinks ideas beliefs, 16;
defines the realm of essence, 129;
a philosopher in the better sense, 305
Spirit, non-existential for transcendentalists, 62;
at home in intuition, 125, 126;
implied in it, 147;
ready to be omniscient, 116;
timeless and supernatural in status, 161, 162;
distrusts substance but lives by it, 147;
is no datum, 272;
often more than intuition, 273, 274;
expresses animal life, 276-280;
is not a substance, 286-288
Spiritual substance, a contradiction, 217;
how suggested, _ibid._
Substance, posited by intent expressing animal reaction, 106;
belief in it primordial, 185, 187;
prior to intuition, 188;
revealed on its dynamic side, not pictorially, 197;
not metaphysical, 201, 202;
the material in things, 203;
not duplicated by them, 204;
explains their genesis and distribution, 209;
connects appearances, 212
Surprise, not occasioned by contingency, 136;
incompatible with omniscience, 276
Timeless, defined, 270
Transcendentalism, properly a method only, 25;
its subject and object false, _ibid._;
denies all existences, 59-63;
its ambiguity, 297, 298;
a part of literary psychology, 301;
its metaphysical form, 302;
must be abandoned in practice, 303;
its latent barbarism, 304
Truth, may be conveyed through symbols, 179-181;
mistaken for substance, 226-228;
possible in literary psychology, 259;
not proper to names or values, 263;
ignored by supposing things to change with the views of them,
264-266;
not an existence, not an opinion, not certitude, but the ultimate
description of things in all their relations, 267, 268;
the subjective seat of opinions does not jeopardise it, 306;
may be loved for its own sake, 307
Unity of apperception, 25
Universals, data of intuition, 91, 93
Universe, not known as a whole, vi;
may be a chaos, 235, 237
Vagueness, relative, 94, 95
Variation involves eternal essences, 113, 114
Vedanta, 61
THE END
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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