You ask me to explain, in detail, what I mean by asserting that the
Imagination is the basis of knowledge. “Apparently,” you say, “our
knowledge of the world external to ourselves seems to you to spring, not
from the sensations as interpreted by the Reason, but (at all events to
a large extent) from the sensations as interpreted by the Imagination.
If you mean this, I wish you would show how the Imagination thus builds
up our knowledge of the world. But I think I must have misunderstood
you.”
You have not misunderstood me. I would go even further than the limits
of your statement: for I believe that we are largely indebted to the
Imagination for our knowledge, not only of the external world, but also
of ourselves. However, suppose we first take a simple instance of the
knowledge of external things: “This inkstand is hard. How did I come to
know that it was hard? How do I know that it is hard now?”
Let us begin from the beginning. I am an infant scrambling on the floor
where the said inkstand is casually lying. Having a congenital impulse
(commonly called “instinct”) to touch and suck anything that comes in my
way, and especially anything bright, I greedily and rapidly approximate
my lips to the corner of this polished object. I recoil with a sharp
shock of pain. The pain abates. The instinctive recoil from the inkstand
has left in me an instinctive aversion to the pain-causing object: but
my touching and sucking instinct again revives, and as soon as it
prevails over the recoiling instinct, I am impelled again
towards the inkstand, not so rapidly as before, but still
too rapidly. I recoil again, with pain lessened but still
acute. I am acquiring “knowledge”: I “know,” though I cannot
put it into words, that I have twice found the inkstand
not-to-be-rapidly-approached-under-penalty-of-a-certain-kind-of-pain, in
other words, “hard.” But I try again; I try four, five, six times: I
find that when I approach with less velocity my pain is less, and when
with sufficiently diminished velocity, there is no pain at all; I touch
and suck in peace: but when I forget my experience and suppose that the
inkstand—even though I dash wildly at it after my old fashion—will
“behave differently this time,” I find that I am mistaken: the inkstand
will not “behave differently”; it always behaves in the same way. By
this time then I know something very important indeed.
But pause now, my friend, and ask yourself how much this infant has a
right to say he “knows,” so far as the evidence of the senses guides
him. All that the senses have told him is that on five, six, seven,
say even seventy, occasions, he found the inkstand hard. But is this
all that he “knows”? You know perfectly well that he knows infinitely
more: he has made a leap from the past into the future and knows that
the inkstand _will_ be found hard whenever he touches it. When he
grows up and attains the power of speech he will generally express his
knowledge in the Present Tense: “I must not strike the inkstand with
my mouth for it _is_ hard”: but in reality this “is” implies “will
be”; “I must not strike the inkstand with my mouth for I _shall find_
it hard.” Now what is it that has produced in him this conviction
which no philosopher can justify by mere logic, but which every baby
acts on? It seems to have arisen thus. The baby has received in rapid
succession two sensations, first, that of a violent approximation to
the inkstand, secondly, a sudden shock of pain. Having received this
pair of sensations very frequently, he cannot help associating them
together in his thoughts; so that now the thought of a violent
approximation to the inkstand necessarily suggests to him the thought
that it is not-to-be-approached-violently, or “hard.” He began by
learning to expect that perhaps, or probably, the first sensation
would be followed by the second; but having found, after constant
experiments, that the second sensation, so far as his experience goes,
always follows the first, he gradually passes from belief into
certainty, or knowledge, that the second always will, or must, follow
the first.
A similar transition is going on at the same time in the infant’s mind—I
mean the transition from belief to certainty—in regard to thousands of
other propositions besides the one we have selected, “this inkstand is
hard.” Every single case of such transition facilitates the transition
in other cases, by making the child feel that, if he is to get on in the
world and make his way through it without incurring the constant pains
and penalties of Nature, he must not disregard these juxtapositions, or
pairs of sensations, (which, when he grows older, he will, if ever he
becomes an educated man, call “cause” and “effect”), but must take them
to heart and remember them; when the first of a familiar pair comes, he
must be prepared to find the second immediately following. Not
unfrequently the child’s limited experience associates together in his
mind sensations that Nature has not associated; as, for example, when he
infers that a clock must tick because he has never yet in his life seen
a clock that has stopped. In this and other cases the child has
afterwards to dissociate what he had too hastily joined together, and to
correct his conclusions by wider experience. But, on the whole, the
transition from belief to certainty, in any one case, is facilitated by
the great majority of similar cases in which the same transition is
going on with results that are confirmed by his own experience and by
that of his elders. What helps the transition, in each case, is its
general success; it _works_: it helps the child to move more and more
confidently in the world without subjecting himself to the punishments
which Nature has attached to ignorance.
Now therefore, reviewing the stages of the progress upwards, we see that
the knowledge of which we are speaking is based upon an inherent and
fundamental belief of which we can give no logical justification
whatever. Why should an inkstand always be hard? The child can allege no
reason for this except that, having found the inkstand to be hard in a
great number of past instances, he is compelled to believe that it will
be always hard, with such a force of conviction that he cannot but feel
and say he “knows” it. But of course there is no logical justification
for this assertion. He might argue for some months or even years, in
precisely the same way about a clock, and say that “a clock always
ticks,” because he has seen the clock tick times innumerable and never
known it not to tick. Why should not a larger experience confute his
so-called knowledge in the case of the inkstand as in the case of the
clock? As the clock collapses, why should not the nature of the inkstand
collapse—be, come unwound, so to speak, or altogether transmuted? There
is no possible answer to this question for the child, at present, except
the following:—“It never has done so, and therefore I believe that it
never will. I believe in the uniformity of Nature. The sequences of
observed cause and effect are Nature’s promises, and if she does not
keep them, life will break down. I am compelled to believe, and to act
on the belief, that life will not break down. I believe that this
inkstand is hard, because this belief _works_.”
I conclude therefore that all knowledge of the kind we are now
describing is based on belief (viz. the belief that what has been will
be) tested by experience. I think it must also be admitted that
Imagination contributed to the result: for the child not only remembers
his two past consecutive sensations but gradually _images_ in his mind a
kind of bond between them, which memory pure and simple could not have
contributed. Memory reproduces “Inkstand and _then_ hardness;”
Imagination paints, or begins to paint, a new idea, “Inkstand and
_therefore_ hardness.” Again, Memory reproduces vaguely numerous
instances, “The inkstand was hard ten, eleven, twenty, many times;” then
comes Imagination and at a leap sets before the mind an entirely new
notion, and invents for it the word “always.”
Concerning other and more complex kinds of knowledge what need is there
to say a word? For if such simple propositions as “a stone is hard,” are
shown to depend upon Imagination for suggesting, and Faith for
retaining, a conviction of the uniformity of Nature, much more must
these influences be presupposed if the child is to attain knowledge
about matters avowedly future, _e.g._ “the sun will rise to-morrow.” In
reality all knowledge of any practical value has to do with a future,
immediate or remote; and therefore I do not think I shall be
exaggerating in saying that for all knowledge about things outside us we
depend largely upon Imagination and Faith.
But I pass now to consider a child’s knowledge about himself. Take for
example such a proposition as this, “I like sugar.” Is Faith or
Imagination required to enable a child to arrive at the knowledge of
this proposition about himself? I think so. The very use of the word
“I,” if used intelligently, appears to need some imaginative effort. Of
course I do not deny that this subtle metaphysical idea may have been
suggested to us originally by our faculty of touch, and especially the
faculty of self-pinching or self-touching. I dare say you have read how
men have sometimes caught hold of their own benumbed hand by night, and
awakened a household by shouting that they had caught a robber: has it
ever occurred to you that, if you never had the power of distinguishing
your own hand from anybody else’s hand by the sense of touch, you might
have gone through life with no sense, or with a very tardily acquired
sense, of your own identity? If the monkey who boiled his own tail in
the caldron had felt no pain, might he not have been excused for
doubting sometimes whether the tail belonged to him? And if his head
were equally painless or joyless when he thumped it or scratched it,
ought he to be condemned for disowning his own head? And if a monkey, or
even a child, could not lay claim to its own head, it seems to me
doubtful whether he could ever claim such a separation from the outside
world as would necessitate his using the word “I.” But, as it is, having
this self-pinching faculty, the child soon finds that to pinch a ball,
or a bladder, or a sister, is an entirely different thing from pinching
himself: and this self-touching faculty confirms the evidence suggested
by the bumps and thumps of the external world; all of which lead him to
the belief that he has a bodily frame of his own, liable to pain and to
pleasure, and largely dependent for pain and pleasure on his own
motions, which motions he dimly perceives dependent upon something that
appears to be inside himself.
But neither this nor any other explanation of the manner in which the
sensations prepare the way for the construction of the idea of the “I,”
ought to prevent us from recognizing that the idea itself is the work of
the Imagination, and not of the unaided sensations, nor of the unaided
reason. Self-pinching and contact with the rough external world might
convince the child that he was different from his environment at the
time when he made his last experiments and underwent his last
experiences; but they could not convince him that he _is_ different
_now_, or that he _will be_ different in the next instant; and for this
conviction he depends upon faith. Again, the imagination of the “I”
seems closely bound up with two other nearly simultaneous imaginations,
those of Force and Cause. First he feels a desire to touch the inkstand,
then he feels himself moving towards the inkstand, then he feels the
inkstand touched. These sequences of desire, action, result, he can
repeat as often as he likes. By their frequency therefore, as well as by
their vividness, they impress him more powerfully than sequences of
phenomena not dependent on himself; and it is from these probably that
he first imagines the idea of “must,” or “necessity,” or “cause and
effect.” If he feels a desire to move a limb, the motion of the limb
immediately follows; it always obeys him; it _must_ obey him. He pushes
a brick; what caused the brick to fall? He feels that it was his own
force that caused it; he no longer looks upon the push and the fall as
if the former merely preceded the latter; he imagines a connection of
necessity between the push and the fall, the cause and the effect, and
gradually comes to imagine himself as the causer of the cause. But all
these imaginations are mere imaginations, not proofs. To gather together
all the sensations of which he retains the memory, the sensations of
which he is at present conscious, and the sensations to which he looks
forward, and to put an “I” behind or below all these, as the foundation
of them all, and partial causer of them all—what an audacious assumption
is this! Not Plato and Aristotle combined could prove to a child, or to
the most consummate of philosophers, that he has a right to call himself
“I,” or that he is any other than a machine and a part of the universal
machinery. How can I prove and vindicate my independence, my right to an
“I”? By saying that I will do, or not do, and by then doing, or not
doing, any conceivable thing at any conceivable time? Such an attempt is
futile. The retort is unanswerable: “In the great machine which you call
the universe, that small part which you call ‘I’ was so constructed and
wound up that it could no more help saying and doing what it did and
said, than a clock could help pointing and striking.”
What then is the real proof that we are right in using the word “I” and
in distinguishing ourselves from other objects which we call external?
There is no proof at all except that, first, we are led to this way of
looking at things by Nature and Imagination, and secondly, this way of
looking at things _works_ best. The “I-view” is better fitted than the
“machine-view” to develop in us the faculties of judgment and
self-control, to give us a sense of responsibility and a capability of
amendment, and to make us ultimately more hopeful and more active. So
too, the belief in “cause and effect” _works_ better than a mere mental
record of past antecedents and sequences, accompanied by a blank and
strictly logical neutrality of mind as to what will happen in the
future. Faith in “cause and effect” is the foundation of all stable life
and all regular progress alike in the individual and in the state. The
unfaithful unbeliever in causality is the Esau, both in the moral and in
the intellectual world, the happy-go-lucky hunter who depends on stray
venison and refuses to resort to system in order to make a sure
provision for the needs of the future; the believer is the quiet
plodding Jacob who has his goats in the fold where he knows he can find
them when wanted. The unbeliever is the unimaginative savage who has not
faith enough to see the harvest in the seed; the believer is the man of
civilisation who can trust Nature through six long months of waiting and
can say to her, not in the language of hope, “_do ut des_,” but in the
language of conviction, “_do daturae_.” Nevertheless, convenient as
these ideas may be for our comfort, nay, though they may be even
necessary for our existence, we are bound to recollect that they are
merely ideas. Like the ideas of force, cause, effect, necessity, so the
idea of “I,”—though produced with the aid of experience and tested by
appeal to experience and reason—appears to be nothing but a child of the
Imagination, and a foster-child of Faith.
Perhaps your conclusion from all this is that I am proving that we can
know nothing? Not in the least. What I am saying does not prove that we
know less or more than we profess to know at present. I am merely
showing that our knowledge comes to us from sources other than those
which are ordinarily assumed.
IV
IDEALS