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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77155 ***
+
+                      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_).
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77155 ***
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77155 ***</div>
+
+<div  class='figcenter id001'>
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_on'>on</span>
+<img src='images/cover.jpg' alt='' class='ig001'>
+</div>
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c000'>
+</div>
+<div>
+  <h1 class='c001'>SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH</h1>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c1'>
+<div class='nf-center c002'>
+    <div><span class='pageno' id='Page_ii'>ii</span><i>BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.</i></div>
+    <div class='c003'>SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND AND LATER</div>
+    <div>SOLILOQUIES.</div>
+    <div class='c000'>CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE</div>
+    <div>UNITED STATES. With Reminiscences</div>
+    <div>of William James and Josiah Royce and</div>
+    <div>Academic Life in America.</div>
+    <div class='c000'>LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM THE</div>
+    <div>WRITINGS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA.</div>
+    <div>Edited by <span class='sc'>Logan Pearsall Smith</span>.</div>
+    <div class='c000'>INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND</div>
+    <div>RELIGION.</div>
+    <div class='c000'>THE LIFE OF REASON. Five Volumes.</div>
+    <div class='c000'>THE SENSE OF BEAUTY.</div>
+    <div class='c000'>POEMS.</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c1'>
+<div class='nf-center c002'>
+    <div><span class='pageno' id='Page_iii'>iii</span><span class='xxlarge'><b>SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH</b></span></div>
+    <div class='c003'><span class='xlarge'><b>INTRODUCTION TO A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY</b></span></div>
+    <div class='c000'><span class='large'><b>BY</b></span></div>
+    <div class='c000'><span class='xxlarge'><b>GEORGE SANTAYANA</b></span></div>
+    <div class='c003'>NEW YORK</div>
+    <div>CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c004'><span class='pageno' id='Page_iv'>iv</span><i>First published 1923</i></p>
+
+<p class='c005'><i>Second Impression 1924</i></p>
+
+<p class='c005'><i>Third Impression 1929</i></p>
+
+<p class='c005'><i>Printed in Great Britain by</i> <span class='sc'>R. &#38; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_v'>v</span>
+  <h2 id='preface' class='c006'>PREFACE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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, <i>my system is not mine, nor new</i>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_vi'>vi</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>My system, accordingly, is <i>no system of the universe</i>.
+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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_vii'>vii</span>of his soul, that the variety and beauty of the prospect
+may spread more brightly before him.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Moreover, my system, save in the mocking literary
+sense of the word, is <i>not metaphysical</i>. 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 <span lang="fr"><i>esprits forts</i></span> who, leading a life of vice, thought
+the universe must be composed of nothing but dice
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_viii'>viii</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>My system, finally, though, of course, formed under
+the fire of contemporary discussions, is <i>no phase of
+any current movement</i>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_ix'>ix</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_x'>x</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_xi'>xi</span>
+  <h2 class='c006'>CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c007'><a href='#preface'><span class='sc'>Preface</span></a> ...        v</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap01'><abbr title='one'>I.</abbr> <span class='sc'>There is no First Principle of Criticism</span></a> ...      1</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap02'><abbr title='two'>II.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Dogma and Doubt</span></a> ...       6</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap03'><abbr title='three'>III.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Wayward Scepticism</span></a> ...       11</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap04'><abbr title='four'>IV.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Doubts about Self-Consciousness</span></a> ...       21</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap05'><abbr title='five'>V.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Doubts about Change</span></a> ...       27</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap06'><abbr title='six'>VI.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Ultimate Scepticism</span></a> ...       33</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap07'><abbr title='seven'>VII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Nothing Given Exists</span></a> ...       42</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap08'><abbr title='eight'>VIII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Some Authorities for this Conclusion</span></a> ...       49</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap09'><abbr title='nine'>IX.</abbr> <span class='sc'>The Discovery of Essence</span></a> ...      67</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap10'><abbr title='ten'>X.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Some Uses of this Discovery</span></a> ...       77</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap11'><abbr title='eleven'>XI.</abbr> <span class='sc'>The Watershed of Criticism</span></a> ...      99</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap12'><abbr title='twelve'>XII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Identity and Duration attributed to Essences</span></a> ...      109</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap13'><abbr title='thirteen'>XIII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Belief in Demonstration</span></a> ...      116</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap14'><abbr title='fourteen'>XIV.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Essence and Intuition</span></a> ...      125</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap15'><abbr title='fifteen'>XV.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Belief in Experience</span></a> ...       134</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap16'><abbr title='sixteen'>XVI.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Belief in the Self</span></a> ...      145</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap17'><abbr title='seventeen'>XVII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>The Cognitive Claims of Memory</span></a> ...         150</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap18'><abbr title='eighteen'>XVIII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Knowledge is Faith mediated by Symbols</span></a> ...       164</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap19'><abbr title='nineteen'>XIX.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Belief in Substance</span></a> ...       182</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap20'><abbr title='twenty'>XX.</abbr> <span class='sc'>On some Objections to Belief in Substance</span></a> ...        192</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_xii'>xii</span><a href='#chap21'><abbr title='twenty-one'>XXI.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Sublimations of Animal Faith</span></a> ...      214</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap22'><abbr title='twenty-two'>XXII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Belief in Nature</span></a> ...      233</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap23'><abbr title='twenty-three'>XXIII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Evidences of Animation in Nature</span></a> ...       240</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap24'><abbr title='twenty-four'>XXIV.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Literary Psychology</span></a> ...      252</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap25'><abbr title='twenty-five'>XXV.</abbr> <span class='sc'>The Implied Being of Truth</span></a> ...      262</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap26'><abbr title='twenty-six'>XXVI.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Discernment of Spirit</span></a> ...      272</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#chap27'><abbr title='twenty-seven'>XXVII.</abbr> <span class='sc'>Comparison with other Criticisms of Knowledge</span></a> ...      289</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><a href='#index'><span class='sc'>Index</span></a></p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_1'>1</span>
+  <h2 id='chap01' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='one'>I</abbr> <br> THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of
+epic poets and to plunge <span lang="la"><i>in medias res</i></span>. 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 <i>episodes of evolution</i> in the world: parents
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_2'>2</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span lang="la"><i>ad libitum</i></span>; 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_3'>3</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_4'>4</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_5'>5</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_6'>6</span>
+  <h2 id='chap02' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='two'>II</abbr> <br> DOGMA AND DOUBT</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_7'>7</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_8'>8</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_9'>9</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>right</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The brute necessity of believing something so long
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_10'>10</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_11'>11</span>
+  <h2 id='chap03' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='three'>III</abbr> <br> WAYWARD SCEPTICISM</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_12'>12</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_13'>13</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_14'>14</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_15'>15</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_16'>16</span>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 <i>not</i> asserting
+and <i>not</i> 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, <i>is</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_17'>17</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_18'>18</span>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 <span lang="la"><i>ipse</i></span>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_19'>19</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_20'>20</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_21'>21</span>
+  <h2 id='chap04' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='four'>IV</abbr> <br> DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<i>you</i>?” 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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_22'>22</span>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.”</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_23'>23</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_24'>24</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>movement</i> of my existence, and
+that it can actually have lapsed from one state into
+another, as I conceive it to have lapsed.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_25'>25</span>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 <i>feeling</i> that
+something is happening, an intuition which finds
+what it finds and cannot be made to find anything else.
+Another thing is the <i>belief</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Doubtless, as a matter of fact, this intuition of
+change is itself lapsing, and yielding its place in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_26'>26</span>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 <i>taken as a report</i>. 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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_27'>27</span>
+  <h2 id='chap05' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='five'>V</abbr><br> DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <i>Hamlet</i>,
+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 <i>belief</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_28'>28</span>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, <i>only</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_29'>29</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>pure</i> 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 <i>what</i>
+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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_30'>30</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_31'>31</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_32'>32</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_33'>33</span>
+  <h2 id='chap06' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='six'>VI</abbr> <br> ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_34'>34</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_35'>35</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Assurance of existence expresses animal watchfulness:
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_36'>36</span>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
+<span lang="la"><i>in vacuo</i></span>? 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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>It will not do for the sceptic to take refuge in the
+confused notion that expectation <i>possesses</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_37'>37</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>me</i>; 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 <i>Rausch</i>, 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_38'>38</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_39'>39</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Existence, then, not being included in any
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_40'>40</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_41'>41</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_42'>42</span>
+  <h2 id='chap07' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='seven'>VII</abbr> <br> NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<i>existence</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_43'>43</span>exploration of that realm, which is open only to
+animal faith, would not concern the sceptic.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_44'>44</span>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_45'>45</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_46'>46</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>If for the sake of argument I accept the notion
+that presence to intuition is existence, I may easily
+disprove it by a <span lang="la"><i>reductio ad absurdum</i></span>. 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 <i>believe</i> that there
+are or have been or will be other moments; but
+evidently they would not be <i>other</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_47'>47</span>denying) would be impossible, and there would be
+no such thing as fancy, hallucination, illusion, or
+error.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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, <i>first</i>, intuitions themselves, or
+instances of consciousness, like pains and pleasures
+and all remembered experiences and mental discourse;
+and <i>second</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Existences, then, from the point of view of knowledge,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_48'>48</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_49'>49</span>
+  <h2 id='chap08' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='eight'>VIII</abbr> <br> SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_50'>50</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_51'>51</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>better</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_52'>52</span>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 <i>evil</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_53'>53</span>recollection. He <i>lived</i>: 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_54'>54</span>intolerance, their imaginative poverty, their political
+zeal, and their subservience to intellectual fashion!</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_55'>55</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_56'>56</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_57'>57</span>on through the flux and has changing and external
+relations—is a <i>life</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_58'>58</span>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.
+<span lang="la"><i>Esse est percipi</i></span> was a maxim recalled by an intelligible
+literary impulse, as Faust said, <span lang="de"><i>Gefühl ist Alles!</i></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_59'>59</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_60'>60</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_61'>61</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_62'>62</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_63'>63</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Confirmation of this thesis may also be found in
+an entirely different quarter, in natural history. The
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_64'>64</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_65'>65</span>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_66'>66</span>and pain, when it reaches distraction, may be said to
+be that moral monster, intuition devouring itself, or
+wasted in agony upon nothing.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_67'>67</span>
+  <h2 id='chap09' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='nine'>IX</abbr> <br> THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <i>Arabian
+Nights</i>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_68'>68</span>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 <i>see</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_69'>69</span>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 <i>is</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_70'>70</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_71'>71</span>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 <i>is</i> 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 <i>is</i>,
+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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_72'>72</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_73'>73</span>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 <i>me</i>; 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 <i>it</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_74'>74</span>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 <span class='sc'>Essence</span>.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_75'>75</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_76'>76</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_77'>77</span>
+  <h2 id='chap10' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='ten'>X</abbr> <br> SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_78'>78</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_79'>79</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_80'>80</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>This is one hygienic effect of the discovery of
+essence: it is a shower-bath for the dreamy moralist,
+and clears Platonism of superstition.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_81'>81</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_82'>82</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_83'>83</span>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:
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_84'>84</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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)
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_85'>85</span>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_86'>86</span>and reason, as his intuition renders them, must
+permeate the universe.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_87'>87</span>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 <i>true</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_88'>88</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The absurdity of wishing to have <i>intuitions of
+things</i> 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, <i>resembles</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_89'>89</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_90'>90</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_91'>91</span>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 <i>given fact</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_92'>92</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_93'>93</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_94'>94</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_95'>95</span>other determinations: as the cloud in <i>Hamlet</i> is but
+a vague camel or a vague weasel, but for the landscape-painter
+a perfectly definite cloud. The vague is
+merely the <i>too</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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?
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_96'>96</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_97'>97</span>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, <i>et cetera</i>, 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 <i>any</i> house, nor
+the exact measure of <i>any</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Thus the discrimination of essence has a happy
+tendency to liberalise philosophy, freeing it at once
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_98'>98</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_99'>99</span>
+  <h2 id='chap11' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='eleven'>XI</abbr> <br> THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <i>there</i>; 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_100'>100</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_101'>101</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The doctrine of essence thus renders my scepticism
+invincible and complete, while reconciling me with
+it emotionally.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_102'>102</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_103'>103</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_104'>104</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_105'>105</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>not</i> yielding to opinion and illusion,
+and by <i>not</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_106'>106</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_107'>107</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_108'>108</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_109'>109</span>
+  <h2 id='chap12' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twelve'>XII</abbr> <br> IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <i>order of genesis</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Beliefs and ideas might also be surveyed in the
+<i>order of discovery</i>, 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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_110'>110</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Finally, beliefs and ideas may be marshalled in the
+<i>order of evidence</i>; 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_111'>111</span>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>identity</i> 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, <i>the same
+pebble</i>, I may always be deceived. My own thought
+is not at all unlikely to play this trick on me; it is
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_112'>112</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>to endure</i>; and when, after
+an interval, I revert to it or to any feature of it, this
+feature seems to me <i>to be identical</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_113'>113</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>this</i>? Here, from the point of view of essence, is
+a sheer absurdity. <i>This</i> cannot change its nature,
+though what we have before us a moment later may be
+something but slightly different from <i>this</i>; and of
+course the essence now brought to view can be slightly
+different from the one formerly in evidence only
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_114'>114</span>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 <i>same essence</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>somehow</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_115'>115</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_116'>116</span>
+  <h2 id='chap13' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='thirteen'>XIII</abbr> <br> BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_117'>117</span>simplicity; it had enough character to be identified
+with the total and unitary aspect of another essence—Euclidean
+space analysed—which may appear later.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_118'>118</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_119'>119</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_120'>120</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_121'>121</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_122'>122</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_123'>123</span>interests, and of any life except the life of discourse
+itself.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_124'>124</span>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 <i>true</i>; 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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_125'>125</span>
+  <h2 id='chap14' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='fourteen'>XIV</abbr> <br> ESSENCE AND INTUITION</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_126'>126</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_127'>127</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_128'>128</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_129'>129</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>substance</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence
+by virtue of the interest which somebody takes in it,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_130'>130</span>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 <i>any</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_131'>131</span>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
+<i>might</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_132'>132</span>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_133'>133</span>and that my intuition in particular exercises an adventitious
+choice, and has a private method, in its survey
+of essence.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_134'>134</span>
+  <h2 id='chap15' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='fifteen'>XV</abbr> <br> BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_135'>135</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_136'>136</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_137'>137</span>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 <i>are</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_138'>138</span>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 <i>experience</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_139'>139</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>That discourse is secretly an experience, and may
+be turned into knowledge, becomes particularly evident
+when it is interrupted by <i>shocks</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_140'>140</span>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 <i>happened</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_141'>141</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>believe</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Shocks <i>come</i>: if they did not <i>come</i>, 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 <i>memory</i>.
+My objects have receded, yet I continue to consider
+them. They are no longer essences, but facts, and
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_142'>142</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Nevertheless shock, like any other datum, intrinsically
+presents an essence only, and <i>might</i> 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:
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_143'>143</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_144'>144</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_145'>145</span>
+  <h2 id='chap16' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='sixteen'>XVI</abbr> <br> BELIEF IN THE SELF</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <i>all</i> the
+vicissitudes of experience, and serving as an instrument
+to produce them, or a soil out of which they
+grow.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_146'>146</span>he is asking, not whence shocks come, but to what
+beliefs they should lead. In the criticism of knowledge
+the <span lang="la"><i>argumentum baculaneum</i></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_147'>147</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_148'>148</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_149'>149</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_150'>150</span>
+  <h2 id='chap17' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='seventeen'>XVII</abbr> <br> THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_151'>151</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>mind</i>, 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_152'>152</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_153'>153</span>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 <i>seem</i> 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 <i>every</i> 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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_154'>154</span>therefore I feel that the thing appearing in the two
+ways is identical, that the one is <i>really</i> the other,
+however diverse the two sets of symbols may be.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_155'>155</span>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 <i>souvenirs</i>, 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?
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_156'>156</span>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 <i>sentiment</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_157'>157</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_158'>158</span>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 <i>experience</i> 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 <i>look at</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_159'>159</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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).</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_160'>160</span>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
+<i>habit</i> 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. <i>Vice versa</i>, 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 <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> 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 <i>Thousand and One Nights</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_161'>161</span>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
+<i>that</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>understands</i>, that it tells truly
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_162'>162</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_163'>163</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_164'>164</span>
+  <h2 id='chap18' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='eighteen'>XVIII</abbr> <br> KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_165'>165</span>of knowledge other than the general marvel of material
+interaction and animal life.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_166'>166</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_167'>167</span>But how, I may ask, can intent distinguish its
+hidden object, so that an image, distorted or faithful,
+may be truly or falsely projected <i>there</i>, or used to
+describe <i>it</i>? 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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>believed</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_168'>168</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>rehearsing</i> even now the exact volume, tone,
+and rumblings of that sound; yet I <i>know</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_169'>169</span>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 <i>sort</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_170'>170</span>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<i>look like</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_171'>171</span>would still not be knowledge of it, but contemplation
+of the idea only.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Knowledge is no such thing. It is not intramental
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_172'>172</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_173'>173</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>identifies the object</i>
+of his desire and knowledge <i>in the physical world</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The same bodily attitude of the child <i>identifies the
+object in the discourse of an observer</i>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_174'>174</span>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 <i>alter ego</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The attitude of the child’s body also <i>identifies the
+object for him, in his own subsequent discourse</i>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_175'>175</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_176'>176</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_177'>177</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_178'>178</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_179'>179</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_180'>180</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_181'>181</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_182'>182</span>
+  <h2 id='chap19' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='nineteen'>XIX</abbr> <br> BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_183'>183</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <span lang="la"><i>a priori</i></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In the genesis of human knowledge (which I am
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_184'>184</span>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_185'>185</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_186'>186</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_187'>187</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>might</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_188'>188</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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) <i>before</i> it brings intuition of essences; it
+is appetition <i>before</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_189'>189</span>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 <i>things</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_190'>190</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <span lang="la"><i>in vacuo</i></span>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Belief in substance, taken transcendentally, as a
+critic of knowledge must take it, is the most irrational,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_191'>191</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_192'>192</span>
+  <h2 id='chap20' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty'>XX</abbr> <br> ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_193'>193</span>of the permanent, nothing permanent could exist in
+fact, or could be reasonably believed to exist.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_194'>194</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_195'>195</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>In the third place, even if direct experience did
+not illustrate the permanent, the order of events when
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_196'>196</span>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 <i>habits</i> in substance, which
+without arresting the perpetual and pervasive flux
+of experience (nor perhaps that of substance itself)
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_197'>197</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>observations</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_198'>198</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_199'>199</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<i>plus</i> thing posited), and perception (meaning intuition
+<i>plus</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_200'>200</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>essence</i>, his total system, as it
+would appear when the <i>essences</i> present in his various
+reflective moments are collated; and, therefore, I am
+really studying and learning a system of philosophy,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_201'>201</span>not the presumable condition of a dead man’s mind
+at various historical moments.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_202'>202</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_203'>203</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>But is not the <span lang="la"><i>materia prima</i></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Of course: and I shall have occasion, when
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_204'>204</span>surveying the realm of matter, to show that these and
+other metaphysical entities are only nominal essences,
+and cannot be the substance of anything.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>invent</i> 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).</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_205'>205</span>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 <i>true</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_206'>206</span>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 <i>if</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_207'>207</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_208'>208</span>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
+<span lang="la"><i>a priori</i></span>; 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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_209'>209</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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?
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_210'>210</span>In other words, substance, by hypothesis, is the source
+of appearances: but how, remaining substance, can
+it ever produce them?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_211'>211</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_212'>212</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_213'>213</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_214'>214</span>
+  <h2 id='chap21' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-one'>XXI</abbr> <br> SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>Animal faith, being an expression of hunger, pursuit,
+shock, or fear, is directed upon <i>things</i>; 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_215'>215</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_216'>216</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>what</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_217'>217</span>which, once existing, agitates and governs the body
+that bred it.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>come</i>
+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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_218'>218</span>is intimately aware to hybrid essences floating before
+it: hence superstition, myth, metaphysics, and the
+materialisation of words.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>It is a task for natural philosophy to remove these
+ghosts, by discovering the true movement of that
+living substance on which animal faith <i>means</i> 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 <i>Realms of Being</i> 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 <i>intended</i> object of its faith.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>1. <i>Souls.</i>—These are essentially moral forces, that
+is, passions or interests not necessarily self-conscious,
+conceived as magically ruling animal bodies and
+dictating their acts.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_219'>219</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_220'>220</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_221'>221</span>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 <i>possible</i> 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 <i>may</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_222'>222</span>2. <i>Master-types, or Platonic Ideas.</i>—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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_223'>223</span>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
+<i>merely</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_224'>224</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>3. <i>Phenomena.</i>—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 <i>par excellence</i>: 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_225'>225</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The other, and proper, meaning of phenomenon
+seems to be retained by the positivists, who deprecate
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_226'>226</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>4. <i>Truth.</i>—Memory presents many a scene which
+is not substantial, as is the world before me now:
+yet this <i>now</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_227'>227</span>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_228'>228</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>5. <i>Fact.</i>—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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_229'>229</span>deliberately in theory and discourse. It is as far as
+possible from being a fact. And the intuition (which
+<i>is</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_230'>230</span>that a practical mind, in love with facts, would be
+tempted to believe in.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>6. <i>Events.</i>—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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_231'>231</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_232'>232</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_233'>233</span>
+  <h2 id='chap22' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-two'>XXII</abbr> <br> BELIEF IN NATURE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>Belief in substance, I have seen, is inevitable. The
+hungry dog <i>must</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>The word nature is sometimes written with a
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_234'>234</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_235'>235</span>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 <i>nature</i>, which it cannot change.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_236'>236</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_237'>237</span>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, <span lang="la"><i>Deus sive natura</i></span>. 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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_238'>238</span>the endless vitality and changeful order of the world
+in which I live.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>how</i> he
+operates, nor, at bottom, <i>why</i> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_239'>239</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_240'>240</span>
+  <h2 id='chap23' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-three'>XXIII</abbr> <br> EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_241'>241</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_242'>242</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>By animation, then, I understand material life
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_243'>243</span>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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<i>behave</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_244'>244</span>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, <i>my</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_245'>245</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_246'>246</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_247'>247</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_248'>248</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_249'>249</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_250'>250</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_251'>251</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_252'>252</span>
+  <h2 id='chap24' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-four'>XXIV</abbr> <br> LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <i>understanding</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_253'>253</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_254'>254</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_255'>255</span>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 <i>hypostasis of an imagined experience</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>It seems</i>, but rebels saying <i>I
+find</i>, <i>I know</i>, or empiricists saying <i>Everybody finds</i>,
+<i>Everybody knows</i>. Their alleged criticism of science
+is pure literary psychology, gossip, and story-telling.
+They are miraculously informed that there are many
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_256'>256</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_257'>257</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_258'>258</span>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 <i>gran rifiuto</i> 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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_259'>259</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<i>sub rosa</i> in spite of fate. And there are many experiences
+which are only tolerable in this dream-like
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_260'>260</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>This natural setting restores literary psychology
+to its normal status; it is no longer a chimerical
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_261'>261</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_262'>262</span>
+  <h2 id='chap25' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-five'>XXV</abbr> <br> THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_263'>263</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>true</i> name for every object, a
+part of its nature. There was a <i>true</i> logic, and a <i>true</i>
+ethics, and a <i>true</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>It might seem, perhaps, that truth must be envisaged
+even by the animals in action, when things
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_264'>264</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_265'>265</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_266'>266</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>that</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_267'>267</span>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;
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_268'>268</span>nor can it be identified with the facts to which it
+relates, since they are in flux, and it is eternal.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_269'>269</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_270'>270</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>A thing that occupied but one point of physical time
+would be <i>instantaneous</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>A given essence containing no specious temporal
+progression or perspective between its parts would be
+<i>timeless</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>A being that should have no external temporal
+relations and no locus in physical time would be
+<i>dateless</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_271'>271</span>Whatsoever, having once arisen, never perishes,
+would be <i>immortal</i>. I believe there is nothing immortal.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Whatsoever exists through a time infinite in both
+directions is <i>everlasting</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>That which without existing is contemporary with
+all times is <i>eternal</i>. 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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_272'>272</span>
+  <h2 id='chap26' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-six'>XXVI</abbr> <br> DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_273'>273</span>lights I may observe, but the exercise of sight as
+distinguished from blindness.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>me</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_274'>274</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <span lang="la"><i>dramatis
+personæ</i></span> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_275'>275</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_276'>276</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_277'>277</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_278'>278</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_279'>279</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_280'>280</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'><span class='pageno' id='Page_281'>281</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>Pure spirit would never need to <i>apperceive</i> at all;
+this is an animal exigency that distracts it from
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_282'>282</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_283'>283</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_284'>284</span>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 <span lang="la"><i>a priori</i></span>, 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 <i>can</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <i>vice versa</i>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_285'>285</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_286'>286</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_287'>287</span>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_288'>288</span>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_289'>289</span>
+  <h2 id='chap27' class='c006'>CHAPTER <abbr title='twenty-seven'>XXVII</abbr> <br> COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE</h2>
+</div>
+<p class='c007'>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 <span lang="la"><i>a priori</i></span> 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_290'>290</span>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 <i>fact</i> 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 <i>mean</i> 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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_291'>291</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_292'>292</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_293'>293</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_294'>294</span>very facts of the material world, and of animal life
+in it, which their criticism had denied.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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 <span lang="la"><i>in vacuo</i></span>. 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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_295'>295</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_296'>296</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<i>It is for science and further investigation of
+the object to pronounce on the truth of any belief.</i> 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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_297'>297</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_298'>298</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_299'>299</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_300'>300</span>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_301'>301</span>with his conventional presuppositions than with his
+extravagant conclusions.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span lang="la"><i>ipso facto</i></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_302'>302</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_303'>303</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_304'>304</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>My endeavour has been to restore these things to
+their natural places, without forgetting the assumptions
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_305'>305</span>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 <span lang="de"><i>Wissenschaft</i></span>, 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 <span lang="de"><i>Wissenschaft</i></span> 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 <i>Arabian Nights</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_306'>306</span>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 <i>Dialogue</i> 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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_307'>307</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_308'>308</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_309'>309</span>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.</p>
+
+<p class='c005'>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.</p>
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 id='index' class='c006'>INDEX</h2>
+</div>
+<ul class='index c003'>
+  <li class='c008'>Analysis and synthesis, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>-119</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Animation, not behaviour, <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>-246;
+    <ul>
+      <li>an expression of mechanism, not a substitute, <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>, <a href='#Page_247'>247</a>;</li>
+      <li>conceived dramatically, <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>, <a href='#Page_249'>249</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Anthropomorphism excusable, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Appearance, two senses of the word, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Apperception, timeless, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>-30;
+    <ul>
+      <li>its physical ground, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'><i>Arabian Nights</i>, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>, <a href='#Page_305'>305</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Aristotle, his metaphysics, vii;
+    <ul>
+      <li>identifies essence with intuition, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>-129;</li>
+      <li>on God, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a>;</li>
+      <li>on substance, <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>;</li>
+      <li>on entelechies, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Arts, creative like the senses, <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Astronomy, good for moralists, <a href='#Page_307'>307</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Behaviour, theme of scientific psychology, <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>-246</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Belief, not implied in intuition, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>enacted before it is asserted, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Berkeley, alluded to, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>his direct intuition, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>;</li>
+      <li>his nominalism, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Brahma, <a href='#Page_18'>18</a>, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>British and German philosophy criticises perception, not memory, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>only literature, <a href='#Page_254'>254</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Buddhism, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Causation, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Change, feeling of it not a change, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>known by faith only, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a>;</li>
+      <li>may be illusion, <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>;</li>
+      <li>fallacious disproofs of it, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>, <a href='#Page_32'>32</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Common sense, roughly sound, v</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Contingency of all existence, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Contradiction an essence of discourse, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Criticism, empirical and transcendental, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>arises by conflict of dogmas, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>;</li>
+      <li>depends on literary psychology, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>;</li>
+      <li>should appeal to living beliefs, <a href='#Page_305'>305</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Data, non-existentials, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>universals, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>;</li>
+      <li>their basis cerebral, <a href='#Page_56'>56</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Dateless, defined, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Democritus, ix, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Demonstration, assumes discourse, <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>-119</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Descartes, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>doubts facts only, <a href='#Page_289'>289</a>;</li>
+      <li><span lang="la"><i>cogito ergo sum</i></span>, <a href='#Page_290'>290</a>-293</li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Dialectic, not true unless descriptive, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>involves belief in memory, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>, <a href='#Page_120'>120</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Discourse, an event, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>involved in positing anything, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>;</li>
+      <li>distinguished late, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Dogma, how precipitated, <a href='#Page_6'>6</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Empiricism admits substance, <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>-201</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Entelechy, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Error distinguishes discourse from its objects, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'><span lang="la"><i>Esse est percipi</i></span>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Essences adumbrated, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>simile of the costumer’s shop, <a href='#Page_70'>70</a>-72;</li>
+      <li>introduced, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>;</li>
+      <li>defined further, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>-78;</li>
+      <li>necessary terms in knowledge, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>-82;</li>
+      <li>of any complexity, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>;</li>
+      <li>infinitely comminuted, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>;</li>
+      <li>without inherent values, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>;</li>
+      <li>not limited to Platonic ideas, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Eternal, defined, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Eternity, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Euclid, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>his space, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Events involve substance, <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>-232</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Everlasting, defined, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Evidence, two meanings, <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>, <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Existence, the sense of it, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>not a datum, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>-38;</li>
+      <li>presence to intuition neither sufficient for it nor necessary, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>-47;</li>
+      <li>its physical definition, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>;</li>
+      <li>odious to logic, <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>, <a href='#Page_206'>206</a>;</li>
+      <li>name for an object of faith, <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>;</li>
+      <li>felt as pure Being posited, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Expectation, irrational as hunger, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Experience, use of the word, <a href='#Page_138'>138</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>naturally conditioned, transcendentally primary, <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>;</li>
+      <li>conceived as a life, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>;</li>
+      <li>is discourse interrupted by shocks, <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>;</li>
+      <li>belief in it imposed by instinct, not by experience itself, <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>;</li>
+      <li>its primitive texture, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_189'>189</a>;</li>
+      <li>imagined experience hypostatised, <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>;</li>
+      <li>reduced to blank feeling or extended to dreams, <a href='#Page_260'>260</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Explanation, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Fact, <a href='#Page_228'>228</a>, <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>never a datum, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>;</li>
+      <li>denied if regarded as a concept, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Faith prior to intuition, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Fichte, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Future, an assumption, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>rash notion of it, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>God assimilated to nature, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>to truth, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>;</li>
+      <li>to the spirit of a cosmos, <a href='#Page_130'>130</a>, <a href='#Page_131'>131</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Hamlet, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Heraclitus, ix, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>History, dependent for its validity on physics, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>interfused with fiction, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a>;</li>
+      <li>partly literary psychology, <a href='#Page_253'>253</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Hume, his sharp intuition, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>criticism by retrenchment, <a href='#Page_293'>293</a>;</li>
+      <li>residual assumptions, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a>;</li>
+      <li>analysis of conventions, <a href='#Page_295'>295</a>;</li>
+      <li>sophistical result, <a href='#Page_296'>296</a>, <a href='#Page_297'>297</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Ideas not beliefs unless action is suggested, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>Platonic ideas, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>-224</li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Identification an act of faith, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_119'>119</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Identity felt under diverse appearances, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Illusion, three ways out of it, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Immortal, defined, <a href='#Page_271'>271</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Indian philosophy, viii, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>-55, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_305'>305</a>, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Instantaneous, defined, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Intelligence expresses animal adjustments, <a href='#Page_281'>281</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Intent, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>, <a href='#Page_167'>167</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Interpretation obscures the datum, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Introjection, <a href='#Page_241'>241</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Intuition yields only appearance, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>denied by sceptics, <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>;</li>
+      <li>an expression of animal wakefulness, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>;</li>
+      <li>does not think, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>;</li>
+      <li>may exist behind observable facts, <a href='#Page_258'>258</a>;</li>
+      <li>divined by sympathy, <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>, <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>;</li>
+      <li>most communicable when most articulate, <a href='#Page_251'>251</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Ionian physics, vii, viii</li>
+  <li class='c003'>Kant, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>his incoherence, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>;</li>
+      <li>his analysis of knowledge, <a href='#Page_299'>299</a>, <a href='#Page_300'>300</a>;</li>
+      <li>destructive results, <a href='#Page_301'>301</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Karma, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Knowledge, impossible with nothing to know, <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>is symbolical, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a>, <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>, <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>;</li>
+      <li>has a removed object, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>;</li>
+      <li>bridges the flux, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>;</li>
+      <li>its animal basis, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>;</li>
+      <li>may recover essences given elsewhere, <a href='#Page_168'>168</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a>;</li>
+      <li>not intuition, <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>;</li>
+      <li>the object identified by bodily attitude (illustration of the moon), <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>-177;</li>
+      <li>though symbolical progressive, <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>-179;</li>
+      <li>may be adequate to discourse elsewhere, <a href='#Page_207'>207</a>;</li>
+      <li>when pictorially adequate it is still faith, <a href='#Page_107'>107</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Life of reason, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Literary psychology, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>possibly true, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>;</li>
+      <li>turned into metaphysics, <a href='#Page_293'>293</a>, <a href='#Page_294'>294</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Logic, partly creative, partly descriptive, vi;
+    <ul>
+      <li>not coercive over fact, <i>ibid.</i>, <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>, <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>;</li>
+      <li>studies essence, not truth, <a href='#Page_262'>262</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Memory, presence of the absent, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>is direct, <a href='#Page_151'>151</a>;</li>
+      <li>posits animation, <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>;</li>
+      <li>in a natural setting, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>;</li>
+      <li>pictorial exactitude possible but worthless, <a href='#Page_152'>152</a>, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>;</li>
+      <li>stationed in the present, which frames the past, <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>;</li>
+      <li>may be truer than experience, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>;</li>
+      <li>should be selective, <a href='#Page_157'>157</a>;</li>
+      <li>criticised only by fancy, <a href='#Page_160'>160</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Metaphysics confuses different realms of being, vii, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Natural philosophy, vii;
+    <ul>
+      <li>present ferment in it, ix;</li>
+      <li>progresses in knowledge, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>;</li>
+      <li>has a poetic side, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Nature, the total object of perception, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>, <a href='#Page_198'>198</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>connotations of the word, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>;</li>
+      <li>uniformity of nature an assumption, <i>ibid.</i>;</li>
+      <li>tested and embodied in art, <a href='#Page_236'>236</a>, <a href='#Page_239'>239</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Nirvana, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Object, use and misuse of the word, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Order of genesis, of discovery, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>of evidence, <a href='#Page_110'>110</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Pain, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_280'>280</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Parmenides, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Past, an object of faith, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>may be illusory, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Perception, not intuition but faith expressing a bodily response, <a href='#Page_282'>282</a>, <a href='#Page_283'>283</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Permanence given in experience, <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>, <a href='#Page_195'>195</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Phenomena, in Platonism, <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>in modern philosophy, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Plato, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>, <a href='#Page_85'>85</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Platonic ideas, selected essences, <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>hypostatised, <a href='#Page_222'>222</a>-224</li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Positing, propriety of the term, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Primary and secondary qualities, <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>-90</li>
+  <li class='c008'>Protagoras, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Psyche, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a>, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_156'>156</a>. <abbr class='spell'>Cf.</abbr> <a href='#index-self'><i>Self</i></a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Psychologism, <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>, <a href='#Page_292'>292</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Psychology, scientific and literary, <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>supports the non-existence of data, <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>-66</li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Pythagoras, ix</li>
+  <li class='c003'>Reality, meaning of the term, <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>eulogistic use of it, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_210'>210</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Reason, not a force, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>principle of sufficient reason, <a href='#Page_289'>289</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Religious dogmas easily doubted, <a href='#Page_11'>11</a>, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a></li>
+  <li class='c003'>Scepticism, a conflict of dogmas, <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>an accident in philosophy, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>;</li>
+      <li>rich in ideas, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>;</li>
+      <li>a trance state, <a href='#Page_69'>69</a>;</li>
+      <li>would be the best philosophy if tenable, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>;</li>
+      <li>deprecated in Christian times, <a href='#Page_297'>297</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Sceptics in Greece, some sophists, <a href='#Page_307'>307</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>some true philosophers, <a href='#Page_308'>308</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Schopenhauer, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'><a id='index-self'></a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Self, evidence for its existence, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>may be denied, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_290'>290</a>;</li>
+      <li>is obscure, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>;</li>
+      <li>an almost perpetual object, <a href='#Page_291'>291</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Sensations and ideas, ambiguous uses of the terms, <a href='#Page_86'>86</a>-90, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>, <a href='#Page_225'>225</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Shock, distinguishes experience from pure discourse, <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>prompts to belief in the self and in the object, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Socrates, his favourite essences, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>his utilitarianism in science, <a href='#Page_307'>307</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Solipsism, untenable if personal, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>tenable if of the present moment, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Sophists, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Soul, genesis of the notion, <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>analysis of it, <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>-221</li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Spinoza, right on chief issue, viii;
+    <ul>
+      <li>thinks ideas beliefs, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>;</li>
+      <li>defines the realm of essence, <a href='#Page_129'>129</a>;</li>
+      <li>a philosopher in the better sense, <a href='#Page_305'>305</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Spirit, non-existential for transcendentalists, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>at home in intuition, <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>;</li>
+      <li>implied in it, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>;</li>
+      <li>ready to be omniscient, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>;</li>
+      <li>timeless and supernatural in status, <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>, <a href='#Page_162'>162</a>;</li>
+      <li>distrusts substance but lives by it, <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>;</li>
+      <li>is no datum, <a href='#Page_272'>272</a>;</li>
+      <li>often more than intuition, <a href='#Page_273'>273</a>, <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>;</li>
+      <li>expresses animal life, <a href='#Page_276'>276</a>-280;</li>
+      <li>is not a substance, <a href='#Page_286'>286</a>-288</li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Spiritual substance, a contradiction, <a href='#Page_217'>217</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>how suggested, <i>ibid.</i></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Substance, posited by intent expressing animal reaction, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>belief in it primordial, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>, <a href='#Page_187'>187</a>;</li>
+      <li>prior to intuition, <a href='#Page_188'>188</a>;</li>
+      <li>revealed on its dynamic side, not pictorially, <a href='#Page_197'>197</a>;</li>
+      <li>not metaphysical, <a href='#Page_201'>201</a>, <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>;</li>
+      <li>the material in things, <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>;</li>
+      <li>not duplicated by them, <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>;</li>
+      <li>explains their genesis and distribution, <a href='#Page_209'>209</a>;</li>
+      <li>connects appearances, <a href='#Page_212'>212</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Surprise, not occasioned by contingency, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>incompatible with omniscience, <a href='#Page_276'>276</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Timeless, defined, <a href='#Page_270'>270</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Transcendentalism, properly a method only, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a>;
+    <ul>
+      <li>its subject and object false, <i>ibid.</i>;</li>
+      <li>denies all existences, <a href='#Page_59'>59</a>-63;</li>
+      <li>its ambiguity, <a href='#Page_297'>297</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>;</li>
+      <li>a part of literary psychology, <a href='#Page_301'>301</a>;</li>
+      <li>its metaphysical form, <a href='#Page_302'>302</a>;</li>
+      <li>must be abandoned in practice, <a href='#Page_303'>303</a>;</li>
+      <li>its latent barbarism, <a href='#Page_304'>304</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c008'>Truth, may be conveyed through symbols, <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>-181;
+    <ul>
+      <li>mistaken for substance, <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>-228;</li>
+      <li>possible in literary psychology, <a href='#Page_259'>259</a>;</li>
+      <li>not proper to names or values, <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>;</li>
+      <li>ignored by supposing things to change with the views of them, <a href='#Page_264'>264</a>-266;</li>
+      <li>not an existence, not an opinion, not certitude, but the ultimate description of things in all their relations, <a href='#Page_267'>267</a>, <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>;</li>
+      <li>the subjective seat of opinions does not jeopardise it, <a href='#Page_306'>306</a>;</li>
+      <li>may be loved for its own sake, <a href='#Page_307'>307</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Unity of apperception, <a href='#Page_25'>25</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Universals, data of intuition, <a href='#Page_91'>91</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Universe, not known as a whole, vi;
+    <ul>
+      <li>may be a chaos, <a href='#Page_235'>235</a>, <a href='#Page_237'>237</a></li>
+    </ul>
+  </li>
+  <li class='c003'>Vagueness, relative, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_95'>95</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Variation involves eternal essences, <a href='#Page_113'>113</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a></li>
+  <li class='c008'>Vedanta, <a href='#Page_61'>61</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p class='c007'>THE END</p>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77155 ***</div>
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+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77155)