Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is
an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the
wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its
transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are
changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which
supported them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and
of political systems to life? What are the revolutions of the globe
which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is
composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns,
of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their
destiny, compared with life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not,
because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by
the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable,
from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the
functions of that which is its object.
If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived in
his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, they not
existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, the
spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated
it by the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or had
he imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas, and
the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of the forms
and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colours which attend
the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the atmosphere, turbid
or serene, these things not before existing, truly we should have been
astonished, and it would not have been a vain boast to have said of
such a man, "Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta."
But now these things are looked on with little wonder, and to be
conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the
distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person. The
multitude of men care not for them. It is thus with Life--that which
includes all.
What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will,
and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is
unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on,
and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to
think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used
they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much.
For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is birth the
commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and
death?
The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life,
which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which
the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in
us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of
things. I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my
assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that
nothing exists but as it is perceived.
It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle, and we
must be long convicted before we can be convinced that the solid
universe of external things is "such stuff as dreams are made of." The
shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, its
fatal consequences in morals, and their violent dogmatism concerning
the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. This
materialism is a seducing system to young and superficial minds. It
allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I
was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a
being of high aspirations, "looking both before and after," whose
"thoughts wander through eternity," disclaiming alliance with
transience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation;
existing but in the future and the past; being, not what he is, but
what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final
destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness
and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being. Each is
at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all
things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained.
Such contemplations as these, materialism and the popular philosophy
of mind and matter alike forbid; they are only consistent with the
intellectual system.
It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments
sufficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writer on
abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the most clear
and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be found in
Sir William Drummond's Academical Questions. After such an exposition,
it would be idle to translate into other words what could only lose
its energy and fitness by the change. Examined point by point, and
word by word, the most discriminating intellects have been able to
discern no train of thoughts in the process of reasoning, which does
not conduct inevitably to the conclusion which has been stated.
What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth, it gives
us no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither its action
nor itself. Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build, has much work
yet remaining, as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages. It makes one
step towards this object; it destroys error, and the roots of error.
It leaves, what it is too often the duty of the reformer in political
and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It reduces the mind to that
freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and
signs, the instruments of its own creation. By signs, I would be
understood in a wide sense, including what is properly meant by that
term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter sense, almost all
familiar objects are signs, standing, not for themselves, but for
others in their capacity of suggesting one thought which shall lead to
a train of thoughts. Our whole life is thus an education of error.
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and
intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves! Many of the
circumstances of social life were then important to us which are now
no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on which I mean
to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt,
from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There
are some persons who, in this respect, are always children. Those who
are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were
dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding
universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no
distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or
follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men
grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and
habitual agents. Thus feelings and then reasonings are the combined
result of a multitude of entangled thoughts, and of a series of what
are called impressions, planted by reiteration.
The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the
intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is
perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes
of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and
of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the
existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is
employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a
delusion. The words _I_, _you_, _they_, are not signs of any actual
difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus
indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different
modifications of the one mind.
Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous
presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one
mind. I am but a portion of it. The words _I_, and _you_, and _they_
are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally
devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to them. It
is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle a conception
as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has conducted us. We are
on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy
to look down the dark abyss of how little we know.
The relations of _things_ remain unchanged, by whatever system. By the
word _things_ is to be understood any object of thought, that is any
thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an apprehension
of distinction. The relations of these remain unchanged; and such is
the material of our knowledge.
What is the cause of life? that is, how was it produced, or what
agencies distinct from life have acted or act upon life? All recorded
generations of mankind have wearily busied themselves in inventing
answers to this question; and the result has been,--Religion. Yet,
that the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy
alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any
experience of its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is
argument! cannot create, it can only perceive. It is said also to be
the cause. But cause is only a word expressing a certain state of the
human mind with regard to the manner in which two thoughts are
apprehended to be related to each other. If any one desires to know
how unsatisfactorily the popular philosophy employs itself upon this
great question, they need only impartially reflect upon the manner in
which thoughts develop themselves in their minds. It is infinitely
improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar
to mind.
_Shelley._