That this gulf is apparent only, being due to inadequacy and confusion

in human perception rather than to incoherence in things, is a

speculative conviction altogether trustworthy. Any one who can at all

catch the drift of experience—moral no less than physical—must feel

that mechanism rules the whole world. There are doubleness and diversity

enough in things to satiate the greatest lover of chaos; but that a

cosmos nevertheless underlies the superficial play of sense and opinion

is what all practical reason must assume and what all comprehended

experience bears witness to. A cosmos does not mean a disorder with

which somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a necessity from

which every one must draw his happiness. If a principle is efficacious

it is to that extent mechanical. For to be efficacious a principle must

apply necessarily and proportionately; it must assure us that where the

factors are the same as on a previous occasion the quotient will be the

same also.

Now, in order that the flux of things should contain a repetition,

elements must be identified within it; these identical elements may then

find themselves in an identical situation, on which the same result may

ensue which ensued before. If the elements were not constant and

recognisable, or if their relations did not suffice to determine the

succeeding event, no observation could be transferred with safety from

the past to the future. Thus art and comprehension would be defeated

together. Novelties in the world are not lacking, because the elements

entering at any moment into a given combination have never before

entered into a combination exactly similar. Mechanism applies to the

matter and minute texture of things; but its applying there will create,

at each moment, fresh ideal wholes, formal unities which mind emanates

from and represents. The result will accordingly always be unprecedented

in the total impression it produces, in exact proportion to the

singularity of the situation in hand. Mechanical processes are not like

mathematical relations, because they _happen_. What they express the

form of is a flux, not a truth or an ideal necessity. The situation may

therefore always be new, though produced from the preceding situation by

rules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itself

novel.

Mechanism might be called the dialectic of the irrational. It is such a

measure of intelligibility as is compatible with flux and with

existence. Existence itself being irrational and change unintelligible,

the only necessity they are susceptible of is a natural or empirical

necessity, impinging at both ends upon brute matters of fact. The

existential elements, their situation, number, affinities, and mutual

influence all have to be begged before calculation can begin. When these

surds have been accepted at their face value, inference may set to work

among them; yet the inference that mechanism will continue to reign will

not amount to certain knowledge until the event inferred has come to

give it proof. Calculation in physics differs from pure dialectic in

that the ultimate object it looks to is not ideal. Theory here must

revert to the immediate flux for its sanction, whereas dialectic is a

centrifugal emanation from existence and never returns to its point of

origin. It remains suspended in the ether of those eternal relations

which forms have, even when found embedded in matter.

[Sidenote: Inadequacy of consciousness.]

If the total flux is continuous and naturally intelligible, why is the

part felt by man so disjointed and opaque? An answer to this question

may perhaps be drawn from the fact that consciousness apparently arises

to express the functions only of extremely complicated organisms. The

basis of thought is vastly more elaborate than its deliverance. It takes

a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

The mind starts, therefore, with a tremendous handicap. In order to

attain adequate practical knowledge it would have to represent clearly

its own conditions; for the purpose of mind is its own furtherance and

perfection, and before that purpose could be fulfilled the mind’s

interests would have to become parallel to the body’s fortunes. This

means that the body’s actual relations in nature would have to become

the mind’s favourite themes in discourse. Had this harmony been

attained, the more accurately and intensely thought was exercised the

more stable its status would become and the more prosperous its

undertakings, since lively thought would then be a symptom of health in

the body and of mechanical equilibrium with the environment.

The body’s actual relations, however, on which health depends, are

infinitely complex and immensely extended. They sweep the whole material

universe and are intertwined most closely with all social and passionate

forces, with their incalculable mechanical springs. Meantime the mind

begins by being a feeble and inconsequent ghost. Its existence is

intermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own

interests or the situations that might support or defeat those

interests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantastic

image which in no way represents its own complex basis. Thus the

parasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughably

insufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge

altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one

hand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to

practice, express the mind’s vegetative instincts; hence art and

mythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation

with which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, the

mind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the

turning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematic

and disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, as

we say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things not

understood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, while

practical, are meagre and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, if

not invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense,

like irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind’s

representative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions.

[Sidenote: Its articulation inferior to that of its objects.]

In other words, sense ought to correspond in articulation with the

object to be represented—otherwise the object’s structure, with the

fate it imports; cannot be transferred into analogous ideas. Now the

human senses are not at all fitted to represent an organism on the scale

of the human body. They catch its idle gestures but not the inner

processes which control its action. The senses are immeasurably too

gross. What to them is a _minimum visibile_, a just perceptible atom, is

in the body’s structure, very likely, a system of worlds, the inner

cataclysms of which count in producing that so-called atom’s behaviour

and endowing it with affinities apparently miraculous. What must the

seed of animals contain, for instance, to be the ground, as it

notoriously is, for every physical and moral property of the offspring?

Or what must the system of signals and the reproductive habit in a brain

be, for it to co-ordinate instinctive movements, learn tricks, and

remember? Our senses can represent at all adequately only such objects

as the solar system or a work of human architecture, where the unit’s

inner structure and fermentation may be provisionally neglected in

mastering the total. The architect may reckon in bricks and the

astronomer in planets and yet foresee accurately enough the practical

result. In a word, only what is extraordinarily simple is intelligible

to man, while only what is extraordinarily complex can support

intelligence. Consciousness is essentially incompetent to understand

what most concerns it, its own vicissitudes, and sense is altogether out

of scale with the objects of practical interest in life.

[Sidenote: Science consequently retarded.]

One consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hard

to attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required is

violent and frustrates all the mind’s rhetorical habits. There is a

constant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue of

myth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and is

tried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm for

knowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannot

but reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic features

in various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upon

a different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse,

he is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in,

accordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a different

one on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems to

demand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, and

the more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneous

prejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourage

radical investigation.

Thus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit of

things altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as

things then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except

that divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible

faith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be

true. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary

to change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one region

and microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured would

have lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse.

Without such a startling change of focus nature can never seem

everywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad human

interests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can

penetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the

miscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral

values must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, so

long as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived.

Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while

the influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically

against enlightenment.

[Sidenote: and speculation rendered necessary.]

The maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: that

speculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. For

direct perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality,

the subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be a

shell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but the

surface. Since the function of perception is properly to give

understanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as it

were, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about so

unintelligible and dense an apparition. Æsthetic enthusiasm cares

nothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficacious

movement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies of

perception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the object

through want of consideration. These æsthetic objects, which have no

intrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy and

inexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes,

that life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds have

fed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds.

Imaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on these

apparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long,

perhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we begin

to pine for another, where just those images which here played so

deceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed and

efficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with prophecies

about what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, in

the wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best in

dialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden world

divined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than the

objects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reach

the permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience,

something to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity.

Science, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond

the dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, as

science aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hidden

reality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on a

different scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet of

hypothesis, to carry the observer to the ends of the universe or,

changing his dimensions, to introduce him into those infinitesimal

abysses where nature has her workshop. In this region, were it

sufficiently explored, we might find just those solid supports and

faithful warnings which we were looking for with such ill success in our

rhetorical speculations. The machinery disclosed would not be human; it

would be machinery. But it would for that very reason serve the purpose

which made us look for it instead of remaining, like the lower animals,

placidly gazing on the pageants of sense, till some unaccountable pang

forced us to spasmodic movement. It is doubtless better to find material

engines—not necessarily inanimate, either—which may really serve to

bring order, security, and progress into our lives, than to find

impassioned or ideal spirits, that can do nothing for us except, at

best, assure us that they are perfectly happy.

[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural.]

The reigning aversion to mechanism is partly natural and partly

artificial. The natural aversion cannot be wholly overcome. Like the

aversion to death, to old age, to labour, it is called forth by man’s

natural situation in a world which was not made for him, but in which he

grew. That the efficacious structure of things should not be

intentionally spectacular nor poetical, that its units should not be

terms in common discourse, nor its laws quite like the logic of passion,

is of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however—not to speak

of its incidental delights—is so extraordinarily good for people that

only with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings can

clearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds. And of course, if the

material basis of human strength could be discovered and better

exploited, the free activity of the mind would be not arrested but

enlarged. Geology adds something to the interest of landscape, and

botany much to the charm of flowers; natural history increases the

pleasure with which we view society and the justice with which we judge

it. An instinctive sympathy, a solicitude for the perfect working of any

delicate thing, as it makes the ruffian tender to a young child, is a

sentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we better

perceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of every

specific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward all

forms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real

inspiration.

[Sidenote: and partly artificial.]

The artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit.

When a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits and

institutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conception

incompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values the

myth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may be

transferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is too

great to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not into

false and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into those

which are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those which

are dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates “viewing with

alarm” the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is

indeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wished

to rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental

religion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should

learn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more

manlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican

star-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine.

Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of

excellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that the

stars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thought

they were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not in

that sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease to

manifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from these

regions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come to

make their covenant with us, as with all generations.

[Sidenote: Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.]

The emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied to

materialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly a

primary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appears

as a destructive force and in the incongruous rôle of a critic. One

dogmatism is not fit to criticise another; their conflict can end only

in insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift and

irrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion.

But a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The next

turn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buried

may rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of a

later day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuine

sceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediate

and observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate,

the reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is not

necessarily destructive; some construction and some belief being

absolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all,

criticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying our

dogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice.

Materialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and the

dogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with no

scruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thorough

examination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possible

expression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. So

approached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification with

it, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. The

emotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains.

Causes having been found for what is given, these causes will be proved

to have just that beneficent potency and just that distressing

inadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the reality

has, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothing

except the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all what

it is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledge

of physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, is

itself an achievement and a new resource.

[Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.]

A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion,

merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror

may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into

everything that we know. Materialism has its distinct æsthetic and

emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even

reversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling it

accidentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habit

of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your

romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes

most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have

nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the

faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold

water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His

delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and

beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be

of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a

museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in

their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas.

Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon

over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely

interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable

those absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the

sentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active,

joyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not without a

touch of scorn.

To the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics that

accompanies materialism has never been insensible; on the contrary, like

other merciful systems, it has trembled too much at pain and tended to

withdraw the will ascetically, lest the will should be defeated.

Contempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with

hosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evils

born of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by which

man persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe,

laughter is the proper defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage,

that it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and brotherly

understanding; as the laughter that greets Don Quixote’s absurdities and

misadventures does not mock the hero’s intent. His ardour was admirable,

but the world must be known before it can be reformed pertinently, and

happiness, to be attained, must be placed in reason.

[Sidenote: The material world not dead nor ugly,]

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have

generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter.

If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance

and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds

which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in

could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving

rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature’s

meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled

they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their

judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A man

is not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, nor

every muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is nature

dead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is not

obviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and

hot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like the

sophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusions

of self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Take

off the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsome

bleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough

in their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them;

and a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer the

features of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world is

not therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer

aspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beauty

being an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful and

living which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities.

[Sidenote: nor especially cruel.]

It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for man

and all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in the

natural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror,

is it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present in

experience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong to

the eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces can

touch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds at

the thought of a merely natural existence is something truly

hysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so

intolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious

satisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetual

torture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his

infinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that

might avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them.

A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if we

understood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies that

pursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythical

expression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a

mechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in another

man seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we take

for granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afresh

when we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science that

introduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death.

[Sidenote: Mechanism to be judged by its fruits.]

The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does not

prevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge in

arbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may as

reasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might be

more. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universe

is not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must view

everything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when life

is so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of little

importance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humane

demand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not

be unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality

that may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made by

conscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described by

mechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it are

tentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vital

equilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and no

theory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptive

euphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what we

find: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearance

in some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the

physical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and a

natural prosperity.

CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD

[Sidenote: Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.]

When Democritus proclaimed the sovereignty of mechanism, he did so in

the oracular fashion proper to an ancient sage. He found it no harder to

apply his atomic theory to the mind and to the gods than to solids and

fluids. It sufficed to conceive that such an explanation might be

possible, and to illustrate the theory by a few scattered facts and

trenchant hypotheses. When Descartes, after twenty centuries of verbal

physics, reintroduced mechanism into philosophy, he made a striking

modification in its claims. He divided existence into two independent

regions, and it was only in one, in the realm of extended things, that

mechanism was expected to prevail. Mental facts, which he approached

from the side of abstracted reflection and Platonic ideas, seemed to him

obviously non-extended, even when they represented extension; and with

them mechanism could have nothing to do. Descartes had recovered in the

science of mechanics a firm nucleus for physical theory, a stronghold

from which it had become impossible to dislodge scientific methods.

There, at any rate, form, mass, distance, and other mathematical

relations governed the transformation of things. Yet the very clearness

and exhaustiveness of this mechanical method, as applied to gross masses

in motion, made it seem essentially inapplicable to anything else.

Descartes was far too radical and incisive a thinker, however, not to

feel that it must apply throughout nature. Imaginative difficulties due

to the complexity of animal bodies could not cloud his rational insight.

Animal bodies, then, were mere machines, cleancut and cold engines like

so many anatomical manikins. They explained themselves and all their

operations, talking and building temples being just as truly a matter of

physics as the revolution of the sky. But the soul had dropped out, and

Descartes was the last man to ignore the soul. There had dropped out

also the secondary qualities of matter, all those qualities, namely,

which are negligible in mechanical calculations. Mechanism was in truth

far from universal; all mental facts and half the properties of matter,

as matter is revealed to man, came into being without asking leave; they

were interlopers in the intelligible universe. Indeed, Descartes was

willing to admit that these inexplicable bystanders might sometimes put

their finger in the pie, and stir the material world judiciously so as

to give it a new direction, although without adding to its substance or

to its force.

The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent

chance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born

mechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one

quarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to

treat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is

true, the only existences that remained remained entirely without

calculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of

ideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be

unwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues,

that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic

of modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background

and chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas

could be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted a

sufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little

moment in comparison.

[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative.]

Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded

in its patient course without caring particularly what status the

metaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an

advantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt

his methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without

insisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of

his discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his

speculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton

to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing

that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural

history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate

processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations.

Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the

ultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent

immense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather

than in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater

_naturalness_ have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies in

things, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the

inner texture of the process has not been laid bare.

This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the

scientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another

proof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is

willing to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it

cannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it

will describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; and

where types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In

this way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their

results, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in

anthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology

and archæology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is

enough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund

of information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to his

mind: and if his apprehension follows that movement—not breaking in

upon it with extraneous matter—it will be scientific apprehension.

[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects.]

What confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is the

difficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding

what the element native to the object is. In political economy, for

instance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and

therefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is

descriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are

you formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both

simultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in

a given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you

taking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in

order to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first

case you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are

defining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything

except of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take

such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you

are excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any

such absolute plan.

For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a

naturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well

not to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural

philosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral

terms in his calculation. If you use such terms—and to forbid their use

altogether would be pedantic—you should take them for conventional

literary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and

intentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their

existence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where

processes hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him.

If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent

the material processes that have brought them into being. The

existential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as

Descartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus

that matter is what makes them up (as it well might if “matter” were

taken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in

mechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral

unities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral

unities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for

that reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they

enclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in

unison with the rest of nature.

People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study

physics, and _vice versa_, since it is only by feeling how the two

spheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on

both feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic

subtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for

the other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science

is sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince

us of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and

of cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the

method double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible

for the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing

forward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your

achievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the

place of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals,

metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political

economy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.

[Sidenote: “Physic of metaphysic begs defence.”]

The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry

their principles over into speculation, has left the greater part of

physics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they have

made of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly not

been a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that there

should be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is more

than a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, which

does not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythical

physics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in terms

quite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affected

this scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, in

mechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even of

natural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the general

aspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine of

evolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that half

of the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusion

could hold undisputed sway.

[Sidenote: Evolution by mechanism.]

There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any

mechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in

strangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have

been produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum

at rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; so

much so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable charge

that he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was a

supposition contrary to fact, and that though the world _might_ have

been so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, in

antiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradual

crystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles,

had anticipated Darwin’s philosophy without Darwin’s knowledge. It is

clear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical,

and therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, those

forces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can have

produced it. Darwin’s discoveries, like every other advance in physical

insight, are nothing but filling for that abstract assurance. They show

us how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, in

one stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us how

mechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and the

poetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might

secure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so

conceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.

[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction.]

At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about

it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of

a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined

and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a

full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise,

the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution

suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent

manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed

consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet

evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact

denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a

return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it

was the essence of Aristotle’s physics—of which his theology was an

integral part and a logical capping—that the forms which beings

approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been

inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly

shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to

their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of

seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they

might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved

into a chicken not by mechanical necessity—for an egg had a

comparatively simple structure—but by virtue of an ideal harmony in

things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen

should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent,

hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the

parent’s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the

perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why

Aristotle’s God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at

the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known

which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal,

already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and

direction into the world’s structureless substance.

The underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since the

natures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. An

individual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but the

specific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far as

he was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance in

the matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax by

defect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remain

unchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material.

[Sidenote: If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution.]

The contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalism

like that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it,

is that new species may arise. The very title of Darwin’s book “The

Origin of Species” is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnant

sense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by each

generation may differ from that approached by the previous one; that

not merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, may

vary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentiality

derived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal,

but on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may gradually

change and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneous

variations—of course mechanically caused[C]—may occur and may modify

the hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon one

another, may in time constitute a nature wholly unlike its first

original. This accidental, cumulative evolution accordingly justifies a

declaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the nature

my father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In me

nature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a new

spiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, and

the ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, is

unprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and without

authority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine.

[Sidenote: Intrusion of optimism.]

All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is

accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at

the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development,

however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a

breath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by

Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and

hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with

progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent

in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century,

when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world

that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has

nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be

those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities.

The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to

tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that

circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive

under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render

it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances

have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the

popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby

introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking

indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be,

and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the

guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their

political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us

when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes

said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and

the Stoics that one should fill one’s appointed place in nature, because

such was the practice of clouds and rivers.

[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel.]

Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men’s attitudes and

opinions; he had no need of Darwin’s facts to convince him that in moral

life, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture

of thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His

early contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that

opinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed

everything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be

identified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and

they would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel

was no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seeking

formulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning the

heart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same time

he was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physical

principle in things, and though the traditional myths suffered cruel

operations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythical

principle itself remained untouched and was the very breath of his

nostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growth

of experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose could

the world have than to express the formula according to which it was

being generated?

In this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste for

correct physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists.

If physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcerting

to find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard to

understand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution of

this perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should be

more worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office.

A myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation of

its character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obvious

that accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its own

standard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals

might be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of

transition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and

unawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling

in the flux.

[Sidenote: The conservative interpretation.]

This philosophy might not be much relished if it were more frankly

expressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most minds

when they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: in

this sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfolding

itself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamic

physics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predetermined

ideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but one

overarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described by

saying that this is Aristotle’s view adapted to a world in which there

is only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of life

are an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phases

express more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the

assumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went

before. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his

single desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would

embody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after.

So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and

destined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by

apotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event,

something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution

might really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably

better sort of existence—existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this

fashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it

with a refreshed patristic theology.

[Sidenote: The radical one.]

There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more

in sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental

philosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal

can be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only

open our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be

retroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is

mystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of

ulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other

ideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many

a beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is

incapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is

really to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything

but their totality—the infinite history of experience viewed under the

form of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of

Heaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time,

is “taken up into a higher unity.” There could be no real pre-eminence

in one man’s works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into

the equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege

reserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since

those who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as

useful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for

knowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and

finite ideal—something to be outgrown.

[Sidenote: Megalomania.]

What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and

naturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a

standard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and the

justifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity

in the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being

equal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of

the world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it

any one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would

not come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular

ideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till the

original soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable.

This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be “striving

onward.” Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre

and omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised the

supreme vocation of vortices, to have “their centre everywhere and their

circumference nowhere.” This somewhat troubled situation might seem

sublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach

the most remarkable and doubtless the “highest” form of

optimism—optimism in hell.

[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind.]

Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field

where mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material

operations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods

over the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The

difficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged

here, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems

to know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and

ideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and

intelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or

finally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is

characteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless

often designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to

recognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying

to build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter,

when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with

the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the

seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or

perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter

itself.[D]

[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness.]

To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch

some glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it,

we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the

mind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their

primitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and

traceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no

self-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have

been as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one

budding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them.

These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the

same time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing

originally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may

seem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might

as easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it

to have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not

having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor

their passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence

of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction;

indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that

we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned

them to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.

The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not

all artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where

prejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and

ingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total

confusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was

impossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly

scene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passions

stalking through space. Material and mental elements, connections

natural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet

inseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across

the sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is

that dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out.

The flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discrimination

and enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Its

inconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could be

fixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flock

together. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things about

them, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal in

particular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower than

any dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but often

spontaneously exerted—a phenomenon which appeared in no other part of

the world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object was

thus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all the

others, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed.

[Sidenote: The notion of spirit.]

The external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind,

seemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just as

one’s own body was moved by passions and thoughts which no one else

could see—and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder and

self-congratulation—so evidently other things had a spirit within or

above them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much to

contain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could very

well feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden force

into the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching,

this spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to have

unaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Things

past, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was not

credited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more or

less resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimes

could pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. The

future, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the same

fashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant and

preternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubt

that all those objects existed; the only question was where they might

lie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation and

a dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as it

could dart in every direction over both space and time, so it could

come thence into a man’s presence or even into his body, to take

possession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been

distinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination,

so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.

The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth,

the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by

men, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some

quick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to

phenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of

nature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to

that fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things

which were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive were

conceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More

stirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material

constituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We

still say, for instance, that war _comes on_. That phrase would once

have been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must

exist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that

rage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god.

Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed

their divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of

antiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how

absolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those

figures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.

[Sidenote: The notion of sense.]

Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material

objects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively

fixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one’s body

all other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a

permanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found

again unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we

receded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and

measuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects

or views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things

themselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above

anybody’s sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects

were due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended on

its presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one’s

head or, if they were emotional, in one’s heart; but anatomy would have

had some difficulty in finding them there. They constituted what is

properly called the mind—the region of sentience, emotion, and

soliloquy.

The mind was the region where those aspects which real things present

to the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly

and from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely

on the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine

and ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far

from depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late

school of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, with

its ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Its

prophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than material

appearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous and

inspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable in

every sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal,

since absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by nature

present wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; the

dreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities with

things to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to be

divinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses’ voice heard in a

profound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind of

clairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit might

naturally be expected to pass into another world, since it already dwelt

there at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Its

incursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent a

thrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh.

[Sidenote: Competition between the two.]

The ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first as

something sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or private

product, and though its destiny might be to pass half the time, like

Persephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The human

mind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was a

familiar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bred

contempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation of

individuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or

edifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge.

As each man’s whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the

most trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental

ground or _ratio cognoscendi_ of every other sphere. It suffices,

therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical

and dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the

discoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in

which they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed

inconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and

no faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses,

now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very

easy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.

Passions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when

removed from their objects will naturally fall into the body’s mind, and

be allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to

attribute almost all the body’s acts to some preparatory intention or

motive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human

nature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions,

as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this

upper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it

has a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals

of science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is

too tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and

accordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the

sphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational

worlds, the material and the ideal.

[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism.]

Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things,

will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal

realm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no

place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with

decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will

be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic

has packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of

sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that

it changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists

will declare that all body is a part of some body’s mind. Thus, by a

curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless

contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction

and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be

quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the

things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The

intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its

ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into

the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once

extricated a world.

The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow

the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we

shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous

monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly

transcendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of

place, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or

discovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So

administered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will

not inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief

will subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a

belief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not

entertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance.

But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology

itself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for

physics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in

bewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish

in its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the

effect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A

calculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior,

would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive

sciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary

objects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think

about. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to

addressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the

beginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might

well have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or a

practical universe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote B: The term “matter” (which ought before long to reappear in

philosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology it

commonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritus

or the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Its

particles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a given

hypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong only

because this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise that

the hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent its

constitution.

On the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter means

something good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion in

discourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent of

every existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, like

everything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actual

love, for instance, differs _materially_ from the mere idea or

possibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body of

it were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it a

grander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysical

will. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existence

or presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strain

and dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in the

premises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of brute

existence. The surd in experience—its non-ideal element—is not an

indifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by calling

it pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting or

rejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, the

surd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possible

quantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree of

perfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These important

factors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it a

serious and indispensable rôle in describing and feeling the world.

Aristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency to

the dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him for

substance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excuse

for this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is a

piece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere

material for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is

matter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and

non-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything

could glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of

things.]

[Footnote C: It has been suggested—what will not party spirit

contrive?—that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because

not predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical

sense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free,

these acts might deflect evolution—like Descartes’ soul acting on the

pineal gland—into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and

gradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary

implication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It

may not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely

free, _i.e._, intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way

quite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were

kept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not

be free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic

destiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to

Aristotelian physics again.]

[Footnote D: The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because

they had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable

was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a

multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the

latter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be

contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we

are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to

apparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative

aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically

governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the

substance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of

thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any

material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our

idealists, in their eagerness to show that _Gefuehl ist Alles_, have

thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression

and wishing to make it a stuff.

There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful

name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any

actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to

rely on the _system_ into which that material has fallen; the

substantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its

intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form

depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations

which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.]

CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

[Sidenote: Mind reading not science.]

If psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology contain

should be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besides

having a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities,

makes a certain inner music in the beholder’s mind, inciting him to

enter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he

might lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not

passed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that

luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the

passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things

inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the

movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best

poetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men’s minds is

made of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which

presumably might be a fair sample of what men’s minds are; but

unfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed

and idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious

reasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and

blameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an

insipid and impractical view of mankind.

In fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men is

suggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gesture

and expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their novelty

and alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkward

ways, create a notion of our friends’ natures which is extremely vivid

and seldom extremely flattering.

Such romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it is

persuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has always

been about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the potential

in one’s self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughts

of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring

natures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite

classifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions,

religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of

them is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one

another than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men credit

for originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of it

to show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that all

memories are not furnished with the like material images, but often

have no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged that

the disparity in men’s soliloquies is enormous, and that some races,

perhaps, live content without soliloquising at all.

[Sidenote: Experience a reconstruction.]

Nevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given view

of things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybody

was agreed about what universal experience is and had personally

gathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only his

own, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis of

this his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, with

whatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others.

Universal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly ideal

construction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which of

course is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmitting

materially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also to

their mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, and

institutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to a

rational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment is

material, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred by

us anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Past

experience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortal

reach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectual

truth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves,

starting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. This

reconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, better

evidence of what we are than of what other men have been.

[Sidenote: The honest art of education.]

When we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to deal

with is our interlocutor’s power of imagining that experience; for the

real experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neither

answer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do not

touch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All our

proofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purpose

and best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate an

ideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In these

matters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. We

may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for

the moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their

natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat

sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be

more profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walking

together along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material

facts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual

ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus,

with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond

of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to

understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in

antiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; and

while the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science of

people’s states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity in

ourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Arbitrary readings of the mind.]

In what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is often

pursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any generic

experience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must be

reconstructed _ad hoc_; it is not the experience that necessitates the

description, but the description that recalls the experience, defining

it in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that there

is something about our friend’s troubles that secretly pleases us, many

circumstances in our own lives, or in other people’s, may suddenly recur

to us to illustrate that _aperçu_; and we may be tempted to say, There

is a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit of

satire, a ray from a literary flashlight, giving a partial clearness for

a moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volume

of Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot

but enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that

another man’s imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a

distress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we

shall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a

profounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientific

discovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happen

or help us to decompose a single event, accurately and without

ambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thing

impossible, but the Scotch philosopher’s amiable generalities, perhaps

largely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenth

century, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and every

new shade of brute born into the world will ground a new “theory of the

moral sentiments.”

The whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease with

which the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in his

own past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regard

facts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show no

continuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them,

consequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is no

method in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it.

The views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be more

natural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the

essential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward

continually out of the past what can have a value for the present. The

spiritual life in which this value lies is practical in its

associations, because it understands and dominates what touches action;

yet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists in

knowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can find

yourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal to

imagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trains

imagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science is

instrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes of

knowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. But

when it is science and accurate knowledge that we pursue, we should not

be satisfied with literature.

[Sidenote: Human nature appealed to rather than described.]

When discourse on any subject would be persuasive, it appeals to the

interlocutor to think in a certain dynamic fashion, inciting him, not

without leading questions, to give shape to his own sentiments.

Knowledge of the soul, insight into human nature and experience, are no

doubt requisite in such an exercise; yet this insight is in these cases

a vehicle only, an instinctive method, while the result aimed at is

agreement on some further matter, conviction and enthusiasm, rather than

psychological information. Thus if I declare that the storms of winter

are not so unkind as benefits forgot, I say something which if true has

a certain psychological value, for it could be inferred from that

assertion that resentment is generally not proportionate to the injury

received but rather to the surprise caused, so that it springs from our

own foolishness more than from other people’s bad conduct. Yet my

observation was not made in the interest of any such inferences: it was

made to express an emotion of my own, in hopes of kindling in others a

similar emotion. It was a judgment which others were invited to share.

There was as little exact science about it as if I had turned it into

frank poetry and exclaimed, “Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind!” Knowledge

of human nature might be drawn even from that apostrophe, and a very

fine shade of human feeling is surely expressed in it, as Shakespeare

utters it; but to pray or to converse is not for that reason the same

thing as to pursue science.

Now it constantly happens in philosophic writing that what is supposed

to go on in the human mind is described and appealed to in order to

support some observation or illustrate some argument—as continually,

for instance, in the older English critics of human nature, or in these

very pages. What is offered in such cases is merely an invitation to

think after a certain fashion. A way of grasping or interpreting some

fact is suggested, with a more or less civil challenge to the reader to

resist the suasion of his own experience so evoked and represented. Such

a method of appeal may be called psychological, in the sense that it

relies for success on the total movement of the reader’s life and mind,

without forcing a detailed assent through ocular demonstration or pure

dialectic; but the psychology of it is a method and a resource rather

than a doctrine. The only doctrine aimed at in such philosophy is a

general reasonableness, a habit of thinking straight from the elements

of experience to its ultimate and stable deliverance. This is what in

his way a poet or a novelist would do. Fiction swarms with such sketches

of human nature and such renderings of the human mind as a critical

philosopher depends upon for his construction. He need not be interested

in the pathology of individuals nor even in the natural history of man;

his effort is wholly directed toward improving the mind’s economy and

infusing reason into it as one might religion, not without diligent

self-examination and a public confession of sin. The human mind is

nobody’s mind in particular, and the science of it is necessarily

imaginative. No one can pretend in philosophic discussion any more than

in poetry that the experience described is more than typical. It is

given out not for a literal fact, existing in particular moments or

persons, but for an imaginative expression of what nature and life have

impressed on the speaker. In so far as others live in the same world

they may recognise the experience so expressed by him and adopt his

interpretation; but the aptness of his descriptions and analyses will

not constitute a science of mental states, but rather—what is a far

greater thing—the art of stimulating and consolidating reflection in

general.

[Sidenote: Dialectic in psychology.]

There is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed a

science, but not a science of matters of fact—I mean the dialectic of

ideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and this

relation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, implies

further that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both.

Every idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out into

a curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of that

idea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure and

relations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, its

dialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love all

those who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatever

tends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however,

that those who resembled him most in amiability—say by flattering me no

less than he did—were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of my

affections would become somewhat involved. I might end either by

striving to reconcile the rivals or by discovering that what I loved was

not the man at all, but only an office exercised by him in my regard

which any one else might also exercise.

These inner lucubrations, however, while they lengthen the moment’s

vista and deepen present intent, give no indication whatever about the

order or distribution of actual feelings. They are out of place in a

psychology that means to be an account of what happens in the world. For

these dialectical implications do not actually work themselves out. They

have no historical or dynamic value. The man that by mistake or courtesy

I call a father may really have no son, any more than Herodotus for

being the father of history; or having had a son, he may have lost him;

or the creature sprung from his loins may be a misshapen idiot, having

nothing ideal in common with his parent. Similarly my affection for a

friend, having causes much deeper than discourse, may cling to him

through all transformations in his qualities and in his attitude toward

me; and it may never pass to others for resembling him, nor take, in all

its days, a Platonic direction. The impulse on which that dialectic was

based may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may be

nipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of things

unborn.

[Sidenote: Spinoza on the passions.]

Spinoza’s account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialectical

psychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities and

impossibilities in such a method. Spinoza began with self-preservation,

which was to be the principle of life and the root of all feelings. The

violence done to physics appears in this beginning. Self-preservation,

taken strictly, is a principle not illustrated in nature, where

everything is in flux, and where habits destructive or dangerous to the

body are as conspicuous as protective instincts. Physical mechanism

requires reproduction, which implies death, and it admits suicide.

Spinoza himself, far too noble a mind to be fixed solely on preserving

its own existence, was compelled to give self-preservation an

extravagant meaning in order to identify it with “intellectual love of

God” or the happy contemplation of that natural law which destroyed all

individuals. To find the self-preserving man you must take him after he

has ceased to grow and before he has begun to love. Self-preservation,

being thus no principle of natural history, the facts or estimations

classed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two other

principles—either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or to

dialectical consistency in judgment.

Self-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceived

events acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrested

momentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts and

tensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes and

relations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterward

itself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity or

conflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation is

dialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. It

might accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in the

self-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by that

dialectic would discover its ideal scope.

Such a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of that

attitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the ideal

relations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one of

its moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path and

made the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to trace

the sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes in

life were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life might

be at a single instant. The arrow’s flight was to be deduced from its

instantaneous position. A passion’s history was to be the history of

what would have been its expression if it had had no history at all.

[Sidenote: A principle of estimation cannot govern events.]

A man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchanged

emotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much in

Spinoza’s way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, when

somewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know their

friends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, for

instance, that I feel some titillation on reading a proposition

concerning the contrast between Paul’s idea of Peter and Peter’s idea of

himself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, its

external cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately love

its cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external cause

is, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I love

Spinoza. Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to another

demonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy—Hobbes,

for instance—my delight in Spinoza’s increased perfection, consequent

upon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, its

external cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbes

as well. Thus the periphery of my affections may expand indefinitely,

till it includes the infinite, the ultimate external cause of all my

titillations. But how these interesting discoveries are interrupted

before long by a desire for food, or by an indomitable sense that Hobbes

and the infinite are things I do _not_ love, is something that my

dialectic cannot deduce; for it was the values radiating from a given

impulse, the implications of its instant object, that were being

explicated, not at all the natural forces that carry a man through that

impulse and beyond it to the next phase of his dream, a phase which if

it continues the former episode must continue it spontaneously, by grace

of mechanical forces.

When dialectic is thus introduced into psychology, an intensive

knowledge of the heart is given out for distributive knowledge of

events. Such a study, when made by a man of genius, may furnish good

spiritual reading, for it will reveal what our passions mean and what

sentiments they would lead to if they could remain fixed and dictate all

further action. This insight may make us aware of strange

inconsistencies in our souls, and seeing how contrary some of our ideals

are to others and how horrible, in some cases, would be their ultimate

expression, we may be shocked into setting our house in order; and in

trying to understand ourselves we may actually develop a self that can

be understood. Meantime this inner discipline will not enlighten us

about the march of affairs. It will not give us a key to evolution,

either in ourselves or in others. Even while we refine our aspirations,

the ground they sprang from will be eaten away beneath our feet. Instead

of developing yesterday’s passion, to-day may breed quite another in its

place; and if, having grown old and set in our mental posture, we are

incapable of assuming another, and are condemned to carrying on the

dialectic of our early visions into a new-born world, to be a

schoolmaster’s measuring-rod for life’s infinite exuberance, we shall

find ourselves at once in a foreign country, speaking a language that

nobody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of the

dialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day a

message which every day grows less applicable and less significant.

[Sidenote: Scientific psychology a part of biology.]

That remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a science

of matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history and

constitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originally

distinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation in

the body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was in

Aristotle’s _De Anima_—an ill-developed branch of natural science,

pieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasional

dramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic element

consists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and natural

situations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same time

that bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a man

begins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand that

they are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with such

external objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enter

into the things’ texture. The images and emotions remain, however,

attached to those things, for they are refractions of them through

bodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passions

fixed upon them as their object.

In parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitate

to refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, which

they may occasionally read in an animal’s aspect. Darwin, for instance,

constantly uses psychical language: his birds love one another’s plumage

and their æsthetic charms are factors in natural selection. Such little

fables do not detract from the scientific value of Darwin’s

observations, because we see at once what the fables mean. The

description keeps close enough to the facts observed for the reader to

stop at the latter, rather than at the language in which they are

stated. In the natural history of man such interpretation into mental

terms, such microscopic romance, is even easier and more legitimate,

because language allows people, perhaps before their feelings are long

past, to describe them in terms which are understood to refer directly

to mental experience. The sign’s familiarity, to be sure, often hides in

these cases a great vagueness and unseizableness in the facts; yet a

beginning in defining distinctly the mental phase of natural situations

has been made in those small autobiographies which introspective writers

sometimes compose, or which are taken down in hospitals and laboratories

from the lips of “subjects.” What a man under special conditions may say

he feels or thinks adds a constituent phase to his natural history; and

were these reports exact and extended enough, it would become possible

to enumerate the precise sensations and ideas which accompany every

state of body and every social situation.

[Sidenote: Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.]

This advantage, however, is the source of that confusion and sophistry

which distinguish the biology of man from the rest of physics. Attention

is there arrested at the mental term, in forgetfulness of the situation

which gave it warrant, and an invisible world, composed of these

imagined experiences, begins to stalk behind nature and may even be

thought to exist independently. This metaphysical dream may be said to

have two stages: the systematic one, which is called idealism, and an

incidental one which pervades ordinary psychology, in so far as mental

facts are uprooted from their basis and deprived of their expressive or

spiritual character, in order to be made elements in a dynamic scheme.

This battle of feelings, whether with atoms or exclusively with their

own cohorts, might be called a primitive materialism, rather than an

idealism, if idealism were to retain its Platonic sense; for forms and

realisations are taken in this system for substantial elements, and are

made to figure either as a part or as the whole of the world’s matter.

[Sidenote: Differentia of the psychic.]

Phenomena specifically mental certainly exist, since natural phenomena

and ideal truths are concentrated and telescoped in apprehension,

besides being weighted with an emotion due to their effect on the person

who perceives them. This variation, which reality suffers in being

reported to perception, turns the report into a mental fact

distinguishable from its subject-matter. When the flux is partly

understood and the natural world has become a constant presence, the

whole flux itself, as it flowed originally, comes to be called a mental

flux, because its elements and method are seen to differ from the

elements and method embodied in material objects or in ideal truth. The

primitive phenomena are now called mental because they all deviate from

the realities to be ultimately conceived. To call the immediate mental

is therefore correct and inevitable when once the ultimate is in view;

but if the immediate were all, to call it mental would be unmeaning.

The visual image of a die, for instance, has at most three faces, none

of them quite square; no hired artificer is needed to produce it; it

cannot be found anywhere nor shaken in any box; it lasts only for an

instant; thereafter it disappears without a trace—unless it flits back

unaccountably through the memory—and it leaves no ponderable dust or

ashes to attest that it had a substance. The opposite of all this is

true of the die itself. But were no material die in existence, the image

itself would be material; for, however evanescent, it would occupy

space, have geometrical shape, colour, and magic dynamic destinies. Its

transformations as it rolled on the idea of a table would be

transformations in nature, however unaccountable by any steady law. Such

material qualities a mental fact can retain only in the spiritual form

of representation. A representation of matter is immaterial, but a

material image, when no object exists, is a material fact. If the

Absolute, to take an ultimate case, perceived nothing but space and

atoms (perceiving itself, if you will, therein), space and atoms would

be its whole nature, and it would constitute a perfect materialism. The

fact that materialism was true would not of itself constitute an

idealism worth distinguishing from its opposite. For a vehicle or locus

exists only when it makes some difference to the thing it carries,

presenting it in a manner not essential to its own nature.

[Sidenote: Approach to irrelevant sentience.]

The qualification of being by the mental medium may be carried to any

length. As the subject-matter recedes the mental datum ceases to have

much similarity or inward relevance to what is its cause or its meaning.

The report may ultimately become, like pure pain or pleasure, almost

wholly blind and irrelevant to any world; yet such emotion is none the

less immersed in matter and dependent on natural changes both for its

origin and for its function, since a significant pleasure or pain makes

comments on the world and involves ideals about what ought to be

happening there.

Mental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over a

dead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure of

life is independent of that of their objects, since thought may be

prophetic or reminiscent and is intermittent even when its object enjoys

a continuous existence. Mental facts are similar to their objects, since

things and images have, intrinsically regarded, the same constitution;

but images do not move in the same plane with things and their parts are

in no proportionate dynamic relation to the parts of the latter.

Thought’s place in nature is exiguous, however broad the landscape it

represents; it touches the world tangentially only, in some ferment of

the brain. It is probably no atom that supports the soul (as Leibnitz

imagined), but rather some cloud of atoms shaping or remodelling an

organism. Mind in this case would be, in its physical relation to

matter, what it feels itself to be in its moral attitude toward the

same; a witness to matter’s interesting aspects and a realisation of its

forms.

[Sidenote: Perception represents things in their practical relation to

the body.]

Mental facts, moreover, are highly selective; especially does this

appear in respect to the dialectical world, which is in itself infinite,

while the sum of human logic and mathematics, though too long for most

men’s patience, is decidedly brief. If we ask ourselves on what

principle this selection and foreshortening of truth takes place in the

mind, we may perhaps come upon the real bond and the deepest contrast

between mind and its environment. The infinity of formal truth is

disregarded in human thought when it is irrelevant to practice and to

happiness; the infinity of nature is represented there in violent

perspective, centring about the body and its interests. The seat and

starting-point of every mental survey is a brief animal life. A mind

seems, then, to be a consciousness of the body’s interests, expressed in

terms of what affects that body, as if in the Babel of nature a man

heard only the voices that pronounced his name. A mind is a private

view; it is gathered together in proportion as physical sensibility

extends its range and makes one stretch of being after another tributary

to the animal’s life, and in proportion also as this sensibility is

integrated, so that every organ in its reaction enlists the resources of

every other organ as well. A personal will and intelligence thus arise;

and they direct action from within with a force and freedom which are

exactly proportionate to the material forces, within and without the

body, which the soul has come to represent.

In other words, mind raises to an actual existence that _form_ in

material processes which, had the processes remained wholly material,

would have had only ideal or imputed being—as the stars would not have

been divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye of

astrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any value

coming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anything

fortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding or

withering of a flower. Some of nature’s automata, however, love

themselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; these

constellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness and

their interest in their own individuality rescues that individuality

from the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits.

[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.]

That the basis of mind lies in the body’s interests rather than in its

atoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet may

not poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, be

perhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with the

practical and prospective character of consciousness, with its total

dependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and its

formal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body like

a useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it is

intermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes,

processes irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterial

essence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body assumes an attitude

which, being an attitude, supervenes upon the body’s elements and cannot

be contained within them. This attitude belongs to the whole body in its

significant operation, and the report of this attitude, its expression,

requires survey, synthesis, appreciation—things which constitute what

we call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of that

material situation; it is the voice of that particular body in that

particular pass. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis

(being a _form_ of material existence and not matter itself) is neither

vainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in the

process.

Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those

mechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentially

and at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes

this delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual

centres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continues

to be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has created

values which, being due to imputation, could not exist without being

imputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed without

being attached to one object or event rather than to another. Material

dramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own by

being expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind is

the entelechy of an organic body.[E] It is a region where form breeds an

existence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt.

Mind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the constitution

of being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offers

something in which it is possible to ground an interest.

That Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially so

natural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness in

conceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on his

own part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theory

only an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficient

cause. Analysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident that

all dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain only

among objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful that

mental facts can have no connection except through their material basis

and no mutual relevance except through their objects.

[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics.]

There is indeed a strange half-assumption afloat, a sort of reserved

faith which every one seems to respect but nobody utters, to the effect

that the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideas

intelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, to

be sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to the

cosmos, so that the passage from idea to idea in experience need not be

due, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy in

these ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at all

by such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation to

some science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisional

life. Their own understanding is of things merely in the gross, because

they fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough,

some interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, in

making a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. The

laws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It is

only the “possibilities” of sensation that stand and change according to

law; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanent

possibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream.

Correct and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its face

backward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements of

knowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looks

forward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it would

rise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relations

which attach the moments of feeling together are material relations,

implying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceive

nothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this is

the only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybody

can think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented to

immerse flying experience in experience understood, it would become

ordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, for

no very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of an

unwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does not

believe in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in the

prevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovers

how he has formed it, and that our ancestors—at least the remoter

ones—begin to exist when we discover them.

When Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, was

asked by admiring ladies to say something about the passions, what came

into his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, he

thought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. The

soul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted from

that rational path by the waves of passion that beat against it and

sometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal entities

in dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course,

from the other half of the world; because while a material mechanism

might be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not be

conceived without a material mechanism—at least a represented

one—lying beneath and between. Spinoza made a great improvement in the

system by attaching the mind more systematically to the body, and

studying the parts which organ and object played in qualifying

knowledge; but his conception of mental unities and mental processes

remained literary, or at best, as we have seen, dialectical. No shadow

of a principle at once psychic and genetic appeared in his philosophy.

All mind was still a transcript of material facts or a deepening of

moral relations.

[Sidenote: Association not efficient]

The idea of explaining the flow of ideas without reference to bodies

appeared, however, in the principle of association. This is the nearest

approach that has yet been made to a physics of disembodied

mind—something which idealism sadly needs to develop. A terrible

incapacity, however, appears at once in the principle of association;

for even if we suppose that it could account for the flow of ideas, it

does not pretend to supply any basis for sensations. And as the more

efficient part of association—association by contiguity—is only a

repetition in ideas of the order once present in impressions, the whole

question about the march of mental experience goes back to what

association does not touch, namely, the origin of sensations. What

everybody assumed, of course, was that the order and quality of

sensations were due to the body; but their derivation was not studied.

Hume ignored it as much as possible, and Berkeley did not sacrifice a

great deal when he frankly suggested that the production of sensation

must be the direct work of God.

This tendency not to recognise the material conditions of mind showed

itself more boldly in the treatment of ideation. We are not plainly

aware (in spite of headaches, fatigue, sleep, love, intoxication, and

madness) that the course of our thoughts is as directly dependent on the

body as is their inception. It was therefore possible, without glaring

paradox, to speak as if ideas caused one another. They followed, in

recurring, the order they had first had in experience, as when we learn

something by heart. Why, a previous verse being given, we should

sometimes be unable to repeat the one that had often followed it before,

there was no attempt to explain: it sufficed that reverie often seemed

to retrace events in their temporal order. Even less dependent on

material causes seemed to be the other sort of association, association

by similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from

China to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out

between them.

[Sidenote: It describes coincidences.]

Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea of

finding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or

intelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention or

divert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of association

were gathered and classified. It was the young ladies’ botany of mind.

Under association could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, a

thousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, once

led a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once?

The wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of King

Charles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have led

any one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been a

good royalist and a good Christian—and then only by a curious accident.

It was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggested

one another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world,

opened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one cared

to observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled,

associated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor was

the matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among all

similar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor how

among a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should be

recalled for contiguity’s sake.

[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in

dialectic.]

The best instance, perhaps, of regular association might be found in

language and its meaning; for understanding implies that each word

habitually calls up its former associates. Yet in what, psychologically

considered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants does

the word “horse” involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image such

as a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one view

of one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vague

sense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which that

object lies. The word “kite” would immediately make a different region

warm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn in

idea to the sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of a

more buoyant sort of locomotion.