Understanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome,

since the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, will

not suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something which

each half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential to

feeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to science

because they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know what

to do and what to say in the sign’s presence; and this practical

knowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at the

same time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the most

superficial part of its effect. Because I understand what “horse” means,

the word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured.

This understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase may

be pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely,

that contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; and

the sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashes

and makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body’s

education. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative,

vibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Some

generative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mind

and lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are not

processes in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are æsthetic or

dialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in an

existence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien to

association: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not a

genesis.

[Sidenote: Suggestion a fancy name for automatism,]

For these and other reasons association has fallen into some disrepute;

but it is not easy to say what, in absolute psychology, has come to take

its place. If we speak of suggestion, a certain dynamic turn seems to be

given to the matter; yet in what sense a perception suggests its future

development remains a mystery. That a certain ripening and expansion of

consciousness goes on in man, not guided by former collocations of

ideas, is very true; for we do not fall in love for the first time

because this person loved and these ardent emotions have been habitually

associated in past experience. And any impassioned discourse, opening at

every turn into new vistas, shows the same sort of vegetation. Yet to

observe that consciousness is automatic is not to disclose the mechanism

by which it evolves. The theory of spontaneous growth offers less

explanation of events, if that be possible, than the theory of

association. It is perhaps a better description of the facts, since at

least it makes no attempt to deduce them from one another.

[Sidenote: and will another.]

If, on the contrary, a relation implied in the burden or will of the

moment be invoked, the connection established, so far as it goes, is

dialectical. Where a dialectical correspondence is not found, a material

cause would have to be appealed to, Such a half-dialectical psychology

would be like Schopenhauer’s, quite metaphysical. It might be a great

improvement on an absolute psychology, because it would restore, even if

in mythical terms, a background and meaning to life. The unconscious

Absolute Will, the avid Genius of the Species, the all-attracting

Platonic Ideas are fabulous; but beneath them it is not hard to divine

the forces of nature. This volitional school supplies a good

stepping-stone from metaphysics back to scientific psychology. It

remains merely to substitute instinct for will, and to explain that

instinct—or even will, if the term be thought more consoling—is merely

a word covering that operative organisation in the body which controls

action, determines affinities, dictates preferences, and sustains

ideation.

[Sidenote: Double attachment of mind to nature.]

What scientific psychology has to attempt—for little has been

accomplished—may be reduced to this: To develop physiology and

anthropology until the mechanism of life becomes clear, at least in its

general method, and then to determine, by experiment and by well-sifted

testimony, what conscious sublimation each of those material situations

attains, if indeed it attains any. There will always remain, no doubt,

many a region where the machinery of nature is too fine for us to trace

or eludes us by involving agencies that we lack senses to perceive. In

these regions where science is denied we shall have to be satisfied with

landscape-painting. The more obvious results and superficial harmonies

perceived in those regions will receive names and physics will be

arrested at natural history. Where these unexplained facts are mental it

will not be hard to do more systematically what common sense has done

already, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to the

natural crises that subtend them.

This placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental facts

themselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and even

when the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study its

meaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for a

roundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It is

superfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger:

hunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and its

extreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that want

of nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwise

with higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us in

doubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say,

square the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, or

steal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and it

also says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out of

the land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence,

clearly enough declares what it springs from—a social tradition; and

what it represents—the interests, real or imaginary, of the community

in which you were reared.

Where psychology depends on literature, where both its units and its

method are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly,

or as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of a

man’s character or a river’s god. Particulars in illustration may have

good historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Such

metaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted to

continue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods;

and since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we may

continue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse.

[Sidenote: Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?]

When psychology is a science, then, it describes the flying

consciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feeling

or absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a

psychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of

reality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to

be answered in the negative, yet not without some previous

discriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is a

sort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first

Cartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that

feeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science that

describes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet this

self-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it renders

it in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps the

sorriest illusion.

[Sidenote: Sentience is representable only in fancy]

“Reality” is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, then

sentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we mean

by sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we contain

it, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can be

conceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were an

extension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledge

of reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts that

might be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so much

feeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time,

while our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discover

nor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different;

and the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brute

sentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that science

reaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; these

states of mind are approached from without and are defined by their

surrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known by

being enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware.

Apart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which is

endured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage,

it cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined and

re-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledge

unless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributed

to some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would always

attach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to another

mind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it,

so that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredient

of present sentience.

It is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that the

re-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes an object of

knowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel—precious or

false—must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is the

only instrument for knowing this sort of “reality.” A flying moment, if

at all _understood_ or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would be

not known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be known

scientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, striving

to pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeat

what dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the very

notion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior or

substance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on the

contrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be looked

for beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body as

music about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the print

and paper. To look for it _within_ is not to understand what we are

looking for.

Knowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in its

method, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact,

it is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate,

while absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitely

ignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worst

sense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true about

it, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind

“reality” or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, we

must rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancy

in us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at least

misleading to give the name of “reality” to this appearance, which is

entirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its own

status, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, as

a dream might call to another dream.

[Sidenote: The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not

sentience, are also real.]

It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let

“reality” designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true

about those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic

sort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand

scientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have

reality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true about

sentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly

into their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and

describe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and

show us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling.

This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience

would be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a

conscious moment might represent the environing world either

scientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by

instinctive readiness to meet it.

[Sidenote: Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other

things.]

What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic

poet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon’s life-long

soliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific

psychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their

relation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon’s thoughts had

had no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or

if by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should

attribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that

they had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even

where it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its

projection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which

his thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent

to it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him.

Napoleon’s consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with

the truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he

seems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of

the forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and

function, and knew that he had _arisen_, like all the rest of history,

and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater

things. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too,

possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be

said of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material

being, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding

of itself.

The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are

thus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and

distinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities

would be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing

that Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we

know appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality.

And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon’s long soliloquy, were

separated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to

Napoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics,

with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of

what is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence,

the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the

constituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known

than through their means.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a

body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is

possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its

first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second.

Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its

body.]

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

[Sidenote: Dialectic better than physics.]

Common knowledge passes from memory to history and from history to

mechanism; and having reached that point it may stop to look back, not

without misgivings, over the course it has traversed, and thus become

psychology. These investigations, taken together, constitute physics, or

the science of existence. But this is only half of science and on the

whole the less interesting and less fundamental half. No existence is of

moment to a man, not even his own, unless it touches his will and

fulfils or thwarts his intent. Unless he is concerned that existences

should be of specific kinds, unless he is interested in form, he can

hardly be interested in being. At the very least in terms of pleasure

versus pain, light versus darkness, comfort versus terror, the flying

moment must be loaded with obloquy or excellence if its passage is not

to remain a dead fact, and to sink from the sphere of actuality

altogether into that droning limbo of potentialities which we call

matter. Being which is indifferent to form is only the material of

being. To exist is nothing if you have nothing to do, if there is

nothing to choose or to distinguish, or if those things which belong to

a chosen form are not gathered into it before your eyes, to express what

we call a truth or an excellence.

Existence naturally precedes any idealisation of it which men can

contrive (since they, at least, must exist first), yet in the order of

values knowledge of existence is subsidiary to knowledge of ideals. If

it be true that a good physics is as yet the predominant need in

science, and that man is still most troubled by his ignorance of matters

of fact, this circumstance marks his illiberal condition. Without

knowledge of existence nothing can be done; but nothing is really done

until something else is known also, the use or excellence that existence

may have. It is a great pity that those finer temperaments that are

naturally addressed to the ideal should have turned their energies to

producing bad physics, or to preventing others from establishing natural

truths; for if physics were established on a firm basis the idealists

would for the first time have a free field. They might then recover

their proper function of expressing the mind honestly, and disdain the

sorry attempt to prolong confusion and to fish in troubled waters.

[Sidenote: Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous and

unpleasant.]

Perhaps if physical truth had not been so hugely misrepresented in men’s

faith and conduct, it would not need to be minutely revealed or

particularly emphasised. When the conditions surrounding life are not

rightly faced by instinct they are inevitably forced upon reflection

through painful shocks; and for a long time the new habit thus forced

upon men brings to consciousness not so much the movement of

consciousness itself as the points at which its movement impinges on the

external world and feels checks and frictions. Physics thus becomes

inordinately conspicuous (as when philology submerges the love of

letters) for lack of a good disposition that should allow us to take

physics for granted. Much in nature is delightful to know and to keep in

mind, but much also (the whole infinite remainder) is obscure and

uninteresting; and were we practically well adjusted to its issue we

might gladly absolve ourselves from studying its processes. In a world

that in extent and complexity so far outruns human energies, physical

knowledge ought to be largely virtual; that is, nature ought to be

represented by a suitable attitude toward it, by the attitude which

reason would dictate were knowledge complete, and not by explicit ideas.

[Sidenote: Physics should be largely virtual.]

The ancients were happily inspired when they imagined that beyond the

gods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyrean

beyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one’s self about.

Many existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have so

infinitesimal an influence on his experience that they may be

sufficiently represented there by an atom of star-dust; and it is

probable that if, out of pure curiosity, we wished to consider very

remote beings and had the means of doing so, we should find the detail

of existence in them wholly incommensurable with anything we can

conceive. Such beings could be known virtually only, in that we might

speak of them in the right key, representing them in appropriate

symbols, and might move in their company with the right degree of

respectful indifference.

[Sidenote: and dialectic explicit.]

The present situation of science, however, reverses the ideal one.

Physics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with our

acquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by the

shock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions and

assumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give us

still greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things,

remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in

revulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous

situation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left,

after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a

fine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are

seeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or rather not

initiated.

A further bad consequence of this illiberal state is that, among many

who have, in spite of the times, adoration in their souls, to adore

physics, to worship Being, seems a philosophical religion, whereas, of

course, it is the essence of idolatry. The true God is an object of

intent, an ideal of excellence and knowledge, not a term belonging to

sense or to probable hypothesis or to the prudent management of affairs.

After we have squared our accounts with nature and taken sufficient

thought for our bodily necessities, the eyes can be lifted for the first

time to the eternal. The rest was superstition and the quaking use of a

false physics. That appeal to the supernatural which while the danger

threatens is but forlorn medicine, after the blow has fallen may turn to

sublime wisdom. This wisdom has cast out the fear of material evils, and

dreads only that the divine should not come down and be worthily

entertained among us. In art, in politics, in that form of religion

which is superior, and not inferior, to politics and art, we define and

embody intent; and the intent embodied dignifies the work and lends

interest to its conditions. So, in science, it is dialectic that makes

physics speculative and worthy of a free mind. The baser utilities of

material knowledge would leave life itself perfectly vain, if they did

not help it to take on an ideal shape. Ideal life, in so far as it

constitutes science, is dialectical. It consists in seeing how things

hang together perspicuously and how the later phases of any process fill

out—as in good music—the tendency and promise of what went before.

This derivation may be mathematical or it may be moral; but in either

case the data and problem define the result, dialectic being insight

into their inherent correspondence.

[Sidenote: Intent is vital and indescribable.]

Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect’s essence is

practical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to

transition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology is

obliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a

feeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other,

intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object

which not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable

of being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under the

Eleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. The

parts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them a

whole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories,

because while you may give place and date for every feeling that

something is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what these

feelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. The

importance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is this

pronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makes

the intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moral

world; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgment

to bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by noting

its existence, but by estimating its value, by collating it with your

own intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are no

counter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he said

so. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some risk

yourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four.

[Sidenote: It is analogous to flux in existence]

Feelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do not

retain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in their

native medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality or

transcendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in which

every initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would be

unthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instance

has, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely and

amiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiar

mysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constitute

or contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, that

bodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence is

suspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals is

mysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is an

expedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumvents

mortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst of

change, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what exists

no longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished by

thought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments,

together with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere image

of what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is not

knowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply another

more fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent that

projects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only in

use, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong,

because it takes something ulterior for its standard.

[Sidenote: It expresses natural life.]

We may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember that

thought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the world

and to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is to

experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative

structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an

expression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure.

What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that

inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character,

namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other

words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translate

into consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but to

translate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and to

express its response to those environing presences, intent and conscious

signification are required. Intellect transcends the given and means

the absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment or

entelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As life

depends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyond

the individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition of

outlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by which

they are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we use

the word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, as

Aristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life.[F] The flux is so

pervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles which

suspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm,

but only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, the

political or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, is

condemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal.

Its scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extend

its sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothing

in common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what is

not themselves.

[Sidenote: It has a material basis.]

This moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of

course not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not

consist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful.

When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take up

room and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attention

upon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occur

without a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate and

supernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams and

madness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended

altogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing

kindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the disposition

and habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the world

have not yet begun to think about it.

There is, of course, an inner dialectical relevance among all

propositions that have the same ideal theme, no matter how remote or

unknown to one another those who utter the propositions may be; but the

medium in which this infinite dialectical network is woven is

motionless, and indifferent to the direction in which thought might

traverse it; in other words, it is not discourse or intelligence but

eternal truth. From the point of view of experience this prior

dialectical relation of form to form is merely potential; for the

thoughts between which it would obtain need never exist or be enacted.

There is society only among incarnate ideas; and it is only by

expressing some material situation that an idea is selected out of the

infinity of not impossible ideas and promoted to the temporal dignity of

actual thought.

[Sidenote: It is necessarily relevant to earth.]

Moreover, even if the faculty of intelligence were disembodied and could

exist in a vacuum, it would still be a vain possession if no data were

given for it to operate upon and if no particular natural structure,

animal, social, or artistic, were at hand for intelligence to ally

itself to and defend. Reason would in that case die of inanition; it

would have no subject-matter and no sanction, as well as no seat.

Intelligence is not a substance; it is a principle of order and of art;

it requires a given situation and some particular natural interest to

bring it into play. In fact, it is nothing but a name for the empire

which conscious, but at bottom irrational, interests attain over the

field in which they operate; it is the fruition of life, the token of

successful operation.

Every theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinct

rooted in the body and incidental to natural organisation. The intent by

which memory refers to past or absent experience, or the intent by which

perception becomes recognition, is a transcript of relations in which

events actually stand to one another. Such intent represents

modifications of structure and action important to life, modifications

that have responded to forces on which life is dependent. Both desire

and meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent,

mechanical relations subsisting in nature. These mechanical relations

give practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the

thought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserve

it. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing material

potentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in

the other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things and

manifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire

to disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material

world which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even

more, for a theme.

In private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed in

reverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten.

Desire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely ideal

realm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the whole

process. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodied

life which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and native

form of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought

they deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to

reach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical

logicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite

suicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are

annihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon

consumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without

an organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is that

organ’s visible emanation; and none would be significant without a

subject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part.

[Sidenote: The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.]

The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and

its existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the

analogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This

hypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which

imply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile

or a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been

at work in the body while thought occupied the mind—even if, as more

often happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the

feeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said

to cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that such

involuntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of

feeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which

determines their material character, so that laughter, for instance,

becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as

well have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is

concerned.

In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and

superficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point

of view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying

impulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the

budding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the

perfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably

continues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have

known physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden

complexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they

become recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by

the ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature;

through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is

extended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for

its expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and

becomes an omen of that thought’s continuance, repetition, and

improvement. Thought’s rational function consists, as we then perceive,

in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by

expressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate

state of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions.

Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought

drew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and

self-assured.

A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a

wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a

disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of

will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute

moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a

fellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the

desire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in

the mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of

its cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy,

which even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes in

language an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objects

and processes.

Language is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. It

is an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the same

sense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Words

underlie the thought they are said to express—in truth it is the

thought that is the flower and expression of the language—much as the

body underlies the mind.

[Sidenote: Intent starts from a datum.]

Language contains, side by side two distinct elements. One is the

meaning or sense of the words—a logical projection given to sensuous

terms. The other is the sensuous vehicle of that meaning—the sound,

sign, or gesture. This sensuous term is a fulcrum for the lever of

signification, a _point d’appui_ which may be indefinitely attenuated in

rapid discourse, but not altogether discarded. Intent though it vaults

high must have something to spring from, or it would lend meaning to

nothing. The minimal sensuous term that subsists serves as a clue to a

whole system of possible assertions radiating from it. It becomes the

sign for an essence or idea, a logical hypostasis corresponding in

discourse to that material hypostasis of perceptions which is called an

external thing.

The hypostasised total of rational and just discourse is the truth. Like

the physical world, the truth is external and in the main potential. Its

ideal consistency and permanence serve to make it a standard and

background for fleeting assertions, just as the material hypostasis

called nature is the standard and background for all momentary

perceptions. What exists of truth in direct experience is at any moment

infinitesimal, as what exists of nature is, but all that either contains

might be represented in experience at one time or another.[G]

[Sidenote: and is carried by a feeling.]

The tensions and relations of words which make grammar or make poetry

are immediate in essence, the force of language being just as empirical

as the reality of things. To ask a thinker what he means by meaning is

as futile as to ask a carpenter what he means by wood; to discover it

you must emulate them and repeat their experience—which indeed you will

hardly be able to do if some sophist has so entangled your reason that

you can neither understand what you see nor assert what you mean. But as

the carpenter’s acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined if

he became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casual

speaker’s sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialectic

and more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital act

called intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical,

would remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spiritual

life as radical and specific as the sense of heat.

[Sidenote: It demands conventional expression.]

Significant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, contained

in the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses in

propositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man’s mind at any moment

is a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance,

a transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanent

expression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the more

urgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of what

was once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in a

vacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, it

would be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve no

immortality in the world of representation; for the experience and its

expression would remain identical and perish together, just as a

perception and its object would remain identical and perish together if

there were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which the

perplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneous

expression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effect

expressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to an

ideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which its

spontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption into

a common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment may

then reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial.

Intent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul of

grammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logical

reasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts which

we call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom of

Socrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass over

from existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature of

life which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge which was

not itself in some way transitive and ambitious. Intent, though it looks

away from existence and the actual, is the most natural and pervasive of

things. Physics and dialectic meet in this: that the second brings to

fruition what the first describes, namely, existence, and that both have

their transcendental root in the flux of being. Matter cannot exist

without some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it may

proclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness or

infinitude. Nor can form, without the treacherous aid of matter, pass

from its ideal potentiality into selected and instant being.

[Sidenote: A fable about matter and form.]

In order to live—if such a myth may be allowed—the Titan Matter was

eager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to be

something. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company of

Forms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though their

number was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed them

hypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered their

names in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence and

toil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance—at least such of

them as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They were

presently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in that

moment’s union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to which

they returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It was

crossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some of

its lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that they

had awakened a passion, and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved a

strange indomitable giant to art and love.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote F: Cf. the motto on the title-page.]

[Footnote G: Not, of course, in human experience, which is incapable of

containing the heart of a flea, much less what may be endured in remoter

spheres. But if an intelligence were constructed _ad hoc_ there is

nothing real that might not fall within the scope of experience. The

difference between existence and truth on the one side and knowledge or

representation on the other may be reduced to this: that knowledge

brings what exists or what is true under apperception, while being

diffuses what is understood into an impartial subsistence. As truth is

indistinguishable from an absolute motionless intellect, which should no

longer be a function of life but merely a static order, so existence is

indistinguishable from an absolute motionless experience, which should

no longer be a foreshortening or representation of anything. This

existence would be motionless in the sense that it would “mark time,”

for of course every fact in it might be a fact of transition. The whole

system, however, would have a static ideal constitution, since the fact

that things change in a certain way or stand in a certain order is as

much a fact as any other; and it is not a logical necessity, either, but

a brute matter of fact that might well have been otherwise.]

CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

[Sidenote: Dialectic elaborates given forms.]

The advantage which the mechanical sciences have over history is drawn

from their mathematical form. Mathematics has somewhat the same place in

physics that conscience has in action; it seems to be a directive

principle in natural operations where it is only a formal harmony. The

formalistic school, which treats grammar in all departments as if it

were the ground of import rather than a means of expressing it, takes

mathematics also for an oracular deliverance, springing full-armed out

of the brain, and setting up a canon which all concrete things must

conform to. Thus mathematical science has become a mystery which a myth

must be constructed to solve. For how can it happen, people ask, that

pure intuition, retreating into its cell, can evolve there a prodigious

system of relations which it carries like a measuring-rod into the world

and lo! everything in experience submits to be measured by it? What

pre-established harmony is this between the spinning cerebral silkworm

and nature’s satins and brocades?

If we but knew, so the myth runs, that experience can show no patterns

but those which the prolific Mind has woven, we should not wonder at

this necessary correspondence. The Mind having decreed of its own

motion, while it sat alone before the creation of the world, that it

would take to dreaming mathematically, it evoked out of nothing all

formal necessities; and later, when it felt some solicitation to play

with things, it imposed those forms upon all its toys, admitting none of

any other sort into the nursery. In other words, perception perfected

its grammar before perceiving any of its objects, and having imputed

that grammar to the materials of sense, it was able to perceive objects

for the first time and to legislate further about their relations.

The most obvious artifices of language are often the most deceptive and

bring on epidemic prejudices. What is this Mind, this machine existing

prior to existence? The mind that exists is only a particular department

or focus of existence; its principles cannot be its own source, much

less the source of anything in other beings. Mathematical principles in

particular are not imposed on existence or on nature _ab extra_, but are

found in and abstracted from the subject-matter and march of experience.

To exist things have to wear some form, and the form they happen to wear

is largely mathematical. This being the case, the mind in shaping its

barbarous prosody somewhat more closely to the nature of things, learns

to note and to abstract the form that so strikingly defines them. Once

abstracted and focussed in the mind, these forms, like all forms, reveal

their dialectic; but that things conform to that dialectic (when they

do) is not wonderful, seeing that it is the obvious form of things that

the mind has singled out, not without practical shrewdness, for more

intensive study.

[Sidenote: Forms are abstracted from existence by intent.]

The difference between ideal and material knowledge does not lie in the

ungenerated oracular character of one of them in opposition to the

other; in both the data are inexplicable and irrational, and in both

investigation is tentative, observant, and subject to control by the

subject-matter. The difference lies, rather, in the direction of

speculation. In physics, which is at bottom historical, we study what

happens; we make inventories and records of events, of phenomena, of

juxtapositions. In dialectic, which is wholly intensive, we study what

is; we strive to clarify and develop the essence of what we find,

bringing into focus the inner harmonies and implications of forms—forms

which our attention or purpose has defined initially. The intuitions

from which mathematical deduction starts are highly generic notions

drawn from observation. The lines and angles of geometers are ideals,

and their ideal context is entirely independent of what may be their

context in the world; but they are found in the world, and their ideals

are suggested by very common sensations. Had they been invented, by

some inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have been

a marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions of

this inapplicable sort—usually, however, not very recondite in their

origin—to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, must

have taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in the

realm of logic, too, nothing submits to be governed without

representation.

[Sidenote: Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous

intent.]

When dialectic is employed, as in ethics and metaphysics, upon highly

complex ideas—concretions in discourse which cover large blocks of

existence—the dialectician in defining and in deducing often reaches

notions which cease to apply in some important respect to the object

originally intended. Thus Socrates, taking “courage” for his theme,

treats it dialectically and expresses the intent of the word by saying

that courage must be good, and then develops the meaning of good,

showing that it means the choice 01 the greater benefit; and finally

turns about and ends by saying that courage is consequently the choice

of the greater benefit and identical with wisdom. Here we have a process

of thought ending in a paradox which, frankly, misrepresents the

original meaning. For “courage” meant not merely something desirable but

something having a certain animal and psychological aspect. The emotion

and gesture of it had not been excluded from the idea. So that while

the argument proves to perfection that unwise courage is a bad thing, it

does not end with an affirmation really true of the original concept.

The instinct which we call courage, with an eye to its psychic and

bodily quality, is not always virtuous or wise. Dialectic, when it

starts with confused and deep-dyed feelings, like those which ethical

and metaphysical terms generally stand for, is thus in great danger of

proving unsatisfactory and being or seeming sophistical.

The mathematical dialectician has no such serious dangers to face. When,

having observed the sun and sundry other objects, he frames the idea of

a circle and tracing out its intent shows that the circle meant cannot

be squared, there is no difficulty in reverting to nature and saying

that the sun’s circle cannot be squared. For there is no difference in

intent between the circularity noted in the sun and that which is the

subject of the demonstration. The geometer has made in his first

reflection so clear and violent an abstraction from the sun’s actual

bulk and qualities that he will never imagine himself to be speaking of

anything but a concretion in discourse. The concretion in nature is

never legislated about nor so much as thought of except possibly when,

under warrant of sense, it is chosen to illustrate the concept

investigated dialectically. It does not even occur to a man to ask if

the sun’s circle can be squared, for every one understands that the sun

is circular only in so far as it conforms to the circle’s ideal nature;

which is as if Socrates and his interlocutors had clearly understood

that the _virtue_ of courage in an intemperate villain meant only

whatever in his mood or action was rational and truly desirable, and had

then said that courage, so understood, was identical with wisdom or with

the truly rational and desirable rule of life.

[Sidenote: The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical.]

The applicability of mathematics is not vouched for by mathematics but

by sense, and its application in some distant part of nature is not

vouched for by mathematics but by inductive arguments about nature’s

uniformity, or by the character which the notion, “a distant part of

nature,” already possesses. Inapplicable mathematics, we are told, is

perfectly thinkable, and systematic deductions, in themselves valid, may

be made from concepts which contravene the facts of perception. We may

suspect, perhaps, that even these concepts are framed by analogy out of

suggestions found in sense, so that some symbolic relevance or

proportion is kept, even in these dislocated speculations, to the matter

of experience. It is like a new mythology; the purely fictitious idea

has a certain parallelism and affinity to nature and moves in a human

and familiar way. Both data and method are drawn from applicable

science, elements of which even myth, whether poetic or mathematical,

may illustrate by a sort of variant or fantastic reduplication.

The great glory of mathematics, like that of virtue, is to be useful

while remaining free. Number and measure furnish an inexhaustible

subject-matter which the mind can dominate and develop dialectically as

it is the mind’s inherent office to develop ideas. At the same time

number and measure are the grammar of sense; and the more this inner

logic is cultivated and refined the greater subtlety and sweep can be

given to human perception. Astronomy on the one hand and mechanical arts

on the other are fruits of mathematics by which its worth is made known

even to the layman, although the born mathematician would not need the

sanction of such an extraneous utility to attach him to a subject that

has an inherent cogency and charm. Ideas, like other things, have

pleasure in propagation, and even when allowance is made for birth-pangs

and an occasional miscarriage, their native fertility will always

continue to assert itself. The more ideal and frictionless the movement

of thought is, the more perfect must be the physiological engine that

sustains it. The momentum of that silent and secluded growth carries the

mind, with a sense of pure disembodied vision, through the logical

labyrinth; but the momentum is vital, for the truth itself does not

move.

[Sidenote: Its moral value is therefore contingent.]

Whether the airy phantoms thus brought into being are valued and

preserved by the world is an ulterior point of policy which the pregnant

mathematician does not need to consider in bringing to light the

legitimate burden of his thoughts. But were mathematics incapable of

application, did nature and experience, for instance, illustrate nothing

but Parmenides’ Being or Hegel’s Logic, the dialectical cogency which

mathematics would of course retain would not give this science a very

high place in the Life of Reason. Mathematics would be an amusement, and

though apparently innocent, like a game of patience, it might even turn

out to be a wasteful and foolish exercise for the mind; because to

deepen habits and cultivate pleasures irrelevant to other interests is a

way of alienating ourselves from our general happiness. Distinction and

a curious charm there may well be in such a pursuit, but this quality is

perhaps traceable to affinities and associations with other more

substantial interests, or is due to the ingenious temper it denotes,

which touches that of the wit or magician. Mathematics, if it were

nothing more than a pleasure, might conceivably become a vice. Those

addicted to it might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense of

their humanity. It would then be in the position now occupied by

mythology and mysticism. Even as it is, mathematicians share with

musicians a certain partiality in their characters and mental

development. Masters in one abstract subject, they may remain children

in the world; exquisite manipulators of the ideal, they may be erratic

and clumsy in their earthly ways. Immense as are the uses and wide the

applications of mathematics, its texture is too thin and inhuman to

employ the whole mind or render it harmonious. It is a science which

Socrates rejected for its supposed want of utility; but perhaps he had

another ground in reserve to justify his humorous prejudice. He may have

felt that such a science, if admitted, would endanger his thesis about

the identity of virtue and knowledge.

[Sidenote: Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment.]

Mathematical method has been the envy of philosophers, perplexed and

encumbered as they are with the whole mystery of existence, and they

have attempted at times to emulate mathematical cogency. Now the

lucidity and certainty found in mathematics are not inherent in its

specific character as the science of number or dimension; they belong to

dialectic as a whole which is essentially elucidation. The effort to

explain meanings is in most cases abortive because these meanings melt

in our hands—a defeat which Hegel would fain have consecrated, together

with all other evils, into necessity and law. But the merit of

mathematics is that it is so much less Hegelian than life; that it holds

its own while it advances, and never allows itself to misrepresent its

original intent. In all it finds to say about the triangle it never

comes to maintain that the triangle is really a square. The privilege of

mathematics is simply to have offered the mind, for dialectical

treatment, a material to which dialectical treatment could be honestly

applied. This material consists in certain general aspects of

sensation—its extensity, its pulsation, its distribution into related

parts. The wakefulness that originally makes these abstractions is able

to keep them clear, and to elaborate them infinitely without

contradicting their essence.

For this reason it is always a false step in mathematical science, a

step over its brink into the abyss beyond, when we try to reduce its

elements to anything not essentially sensible. Intuition must continue

to furnish the subject of discourse, the axioms, and the ultimate

criteria and sanctions. Calculation and transmutation can never make

their own counters or the medium in which they move. So that space,

number, continuity, and every other elementary intuition remains at

bottom opaque—opaque, that is, to mathematical science; for it is no

paradox, but an obvious necessity, that the data of a logical operation

should not be producible by its workings. Reason would have nothing to

do if it had no irrational materials. Saint Augustine’s rhetoric

accordingly covered—as so often with him—a profound truth when he said

of time that he knew what it was when no one asked him, but if any one

asked him he did not know; which may be restated by saying that time is

an intuition, an aspect of crude experience, which science may work with

but which it can never arrive at.

[Sidenote: Constancy and progress in intent.]

When a concretion is formed in discourse and an intent is attained in

consciousness, predicates accrue to the subject in a way which is

perfectly empirical. Dialectic is not retrospective; it does not consist

in recovering ground previously surveyed. The accretion of new

predicates comes in answer to chance questions, questions raised, to be

sure, about a given theme. The subject is fixed by the mind’s intent and

it suffices to compare any tentative assertion made about it with that

intent itself to see whether the expression suggested for it is truly

dialectical and thoroughly honest. Dialectic verifies by

reconsideration, by equation of tentative results with fixed intentions.

It does not verify, like the sciences of existence, by comparing a

hypothesis with a new perception. In dialectic no new _perception_ is

wanted; the goal is to understand the old fact, to give it an aureole

and not a progeny. It is a transubstantiation of matter, a passage from

existence to eternity. In this sense dialectic is “synthetic _a

priori_”; it analyses an intent which demanded further elucidation and

had fixed the direction and principle of its expansion. If this intent

is abandoned and a new subject is introduced surreptitiously, a fallacy

is committed; yet the correct elucidation of ideas is a true progress,

nor could there be any progress unless the original idea were better

expressed and elicited as we proceeded; so that constancy in intent and

advance in explication are the two requisites of a cogent deduction.

The question in dialectic is always what is true, what can be said,

about _this_; and the demonstrative pronoun, indicating an act of

selective attention, raises the object it selects to a concretion in

discourse, the relations of which in the universe of discourse it then

proceeds to formulate. At the same time this dialectical investigation

may be full of surprises. Knowledge may be so truly enriched by it that

_knowledge_, in an ideal sense, only begins when dialectic has given

some articulation to being. Without dialectic an animal might follow

instinct, he might have vivid emotions, expectations, and dreams, but he

could hardly be said to know anything or to guide his life with

conscious intent. The accretions that might come empirically into any

field of vision would not be new predicates to be added to a known

thing, unless the logical and functional mantle of that thing fell upon

them and covered them. While the right of particulars to existence is

their own, granted them by the free grace of heaven, their ability to

enlarge our knowledge on any particular subject—their relevance or

incidence in discourse—hangs on their fulfilling the requirements which

that subject’s dialectical nature imposes on all its expressions.

[Sidenote: Intent determines the functional essence of objects.]

It is on this ground, for instance, that the image of a loaf of bread is

so far from being the loaf of bread itself. External resemblance is

nothing; even psychological derivation or superposition is nothing; the

intent, rather, which picks out what that object’s function and meaning

shall be, alone defines its idea; and this function involves a locus and

a status which the image does not possess. Such admirable iridescence as

the image might occasionally put on—in the fine arts, for

instance—would not constitute any iridescence or transformation in the

thing; nor would identity of aspect preserve the thing if its soul, if

its utility, had disappeared. Herein lies the ground for the essential

or functional distinction between primary and secondary qualities in

things, a distinction which a psychological scepticism has so hastily

declared to be untenable. If it was discovered, said these logicians,

that space was perceived through reading muscular sensations, space, and

the muscles too, were thereby proved to be unreal. This remarkable

sophism passed muster in the philosophical world for want of attention

to dialectic, which might so easily have shown that what a thing _means_

is spatial distinction and mechanical efficacy, and that the origin of

our perceptions, which are all equally bodily and dependent on material

stimulation, has nothing to do with their respective claims to

hypostasis. It is intent that makes objects objects; and the same

intent, defining the function of things, defines the scope of those

qualities which are essential to them. In the flux substances and

shadows drift down together; it is reason that discerns the difference.

[Sidenote: Also the scope of ideals.]

Purposes need dialectical articulation as much as essences do, and

without an articulate and fixed purpose, without an ideal, action would

collapse into mere motion or conscious change. It is notably in this

region that elucidation constitutes progress; for to understand the

properties of number may be less important than empirically to count;

but to see and feel the values of things in all their distinction and

fulness is the ultimate fruit of efficiency; it is mastery in that art

of life for which all the rest is apprenticeship. Dialectic of this sort

is practised intuitively by spiritual minds; and even when it has to be

carried on argumentatively it may prove very enlightening. That the

excellence of courage is identical with that of wisdom still needs to be

driven home; and that the excellence of poetry is identical with that of

all other things probably sounds like a blind paradox. Yet did not all

excellences conspire to one end and meet in one Life of Reason, how

could their relative value be estimated, or any reflective sanction be

found for them at all? The miscellaneous, captious fancies of the will,

the menagerie of moral prejudices, still call for many a Socrates to

tame them. So long as courage means a grimace of mind or body, the love

of it is another grimace. But if it meant the value, recognisable by

reason and diffused through all life, which that casual attitude or

feeling might have, then we should be launched upon the quest for

wisdom.

The want of integration in moral views is like what want of integration

would be in arithmetic if we declared that it was the part of a man and

a Christian to maintain that _my_ two equals four or that a _green_

fifteen is a hundred. These propositions might have incidental lights

and shades in people’s lives to make them plausible and precious; but

they could not be maintained by one who had clarified his intent in

naming and adding. For then the arithmetical relations would be

abstracted, and their incidental associates would drop out of the

account. So a man who is in pursuit of things for the good that is in

them must recognise and (if reason avails) must pursue what is good in

them all. Strange customs and unheard-of thoughts may then find their

appropriate warrant; just as in higher mathematical calculations very

wonderful and unforeseen results may be arrived at, which a man will not

accept without careful reconsideration of the terms and problem before

him; but if he finds the unexpected conclusion flowing from those

premises, he will have enlarged his knowledge of his art and discovered

a congenial good. He will have made progress in the Socratic science of

knowing his own intent.

[Sidenote: Double status of mathematics.]

Mathematics, for all its applications in nature, is a part of ideal

philosophy. It is logic applied to certain simple intuitions. These

intuitions and many of their developments happen to appear in that

efficacious and self-sustaining moiety of being which we call material;

so that mathematics is _per accidens_ the dialectical study of nature’s

efficacious form. Its use and application in the world rather hide its

dialectical principle. Mathematics owes its public success to the happy

choice of a simple and widely diffused subject-matter; it owes its inner

cogency, however, to its ideality and the merely adventitious

application it has to existence. Mathematics has come to seem the type

of good logic because it is an illustration of logic in a sphere so

highly abstract in idea and so pervasive in sense as to be at once

manageable and useful.

The delights and triumphs of mathematics ought, therefore, to be a great

encouragement to ideal philosophy. If in a comparatively uninteresting

field attention can find so many treasures of harmony and order, what

beauties might it not discover in interpreting faithfully ideas nobler

than extension and number, concretions closer to man’s spiritual life?

But unfortunately the logic of values is subject to voluntary and

involuntary confusions of so discouraging a nature that the flight of

dialectic in that direction has never been long and, even when short,

often disastrous. What is needed, as the example of mathematics shows,

is a steadfast intent and an adventurous inquiry. It would not occur to

a geometer to ask with trepidation what difference it would make to the

Pythagorean proposition if the hypothenuse were said to be wise and

good. Yet metaphysicians, confounding dialectic with physics and

thereby corrupting both, will discuss for ever the difference it makes

to substance whether you call it matter or God. Nevertheless, no

decorative epithets can give substance any other attributes than those

which it has; that is, other than the actual appearances that substance

is needed to support. Similarly, neither mathematicians nor astronomers

are exercised by the question whether [Greek: pi] created the ring of

Saturn; yet naturalists and logicians have not rejected the analogous

problem whether the good did or did not create the animals.

[Sidenote: Practical rôle of dialectic.]

So long as in using terms there is no fixed intent, no concretion in

discourse with discernible predicates, controversy will rage as

conceptions waver and will reach no valid result. But when the force of

intellect, once having arrested an idea amid the flux of perceptions,

avails to hold and examine that idea with perseverance, not only does a

flash of light immediately cross the mind, but deeper and deeper vistas

are opened there into ideal truth. The principle of dialectic is

intelligence itself; and as no part of man’s economy is more vital than

intelligence (since intelligence is what makes life aware of its

destiny), so no part has a more delightful or exhilarating movement. To

understand is pre-eminently to live, moving not by stimulation and

external compulsion, but by inner direction and control. Dialectic is

related to observation as art is to industry; it uses what the other

furnishes; it is the fruition of experience. It is not an alternative to

empirical pursuits but their perfection; for dialectic, like art, has no

special or private subject-matter, nor any obligation to be useless. Its

subject-matter is all things, and its function is to compare them in

form and worth, giving the mind speculative dominion over them. It

profits by the flux to fix its signification. This is precisely what

mathematics does for the abstract form and multitude of sensible things;

it is what dialectic might do everywhere, with the same incidental

utility, if it could settle its own attitude and learn to make the

passions steadfast and calm in the consciousness of their ultimate

objects.

[Sidenote: Hegel’s satire on dialectic.]

The nature of dialectic might be curiously illustrated by reference to

Hegel’s Logic; and though to approach the subject from Hegel’s satirical

angle is not, perhaps, quite honest or fair, the method has a certain

spice. Hegel, who despised mathematics, saw that in other departments

the instability of men’s meanings defeated their desire to understand

themselves. This insecurity in intent he found to be closely connected

with change of situation, with the natural mutability of events and

opinions in the world. Instead of showing, however, what inroads

passion, oblivion, sophistry, and frivolity may make into dialectic, he

bethought himself to represent all these incoherences, which are indeed

significant of natural changes, as the march of dialectic itself, thus

identified with the process of evolution and with natural law. The

romance of an unstable and groping theology, full of warm intentions and

impossible ideas, he took to be typical of all experience and of all

science.

In that impressionable age any effect of _chiaro-oscuro_ caught in the

moonlight of history could find a philosopher to exalt it into the

darkly luminous secret of the world. Hegel accordingly decreed that

men’s habit of self-contradiction constituted their providential

function, both in thought and in morals; and he devoted his Logic to

showing how every idea they embraced (for he never treated an idea

otherwise than as a creed), when pressed a little, turned into its

opposite. This opposite after a while would fall back into something

like the original illusion; whereupon a new change of insight would

occur and a new thought would be accepted until, the landscape changing,

attention would be attracted to a fresh aspect of the matter and

conviction would wander into a new labyrinth of false steps and

half-meanings. The sum total of these wanderings, when viewed from

above, formed an interesting picture. A half-mystical, half-cynical

reflection might take a certain pleasure in contemplating it; especially

if, in memory of Calvin and the Stoics, this situation were called the

expression of Absolute Reason and Divine Will.

We may think for a moment that we have grasped the elusive secret of

this philosophy and that it is simply a Calvinism without Christianity,

in which God’s glory consists in the damnation of quite all his

creatures. Presently, however, the scene changes again, and we recognise

that Creator and creation, ideal and process, are identical, so that the

glory belongs to the very multitude that suffers. But finally, as we rub

our eyes, the whole revelation collapses into a platitude, and we

discover that this glory and this damnation were nothing but unctuous

phrases for the vulgar flux of existence.

That nothing is what we mean by it is perfectly true when we in no case

know what we mean. Thus a man who is a mystic by nature may very well

become one by reflection also. Not knowing what he wants nor what he is,

he may believe that every shift carries him nearer to perfection. A

temperamental and quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and room

to move on lent a certain triumphant note to Hegel’s satire; he was sure

it all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate in

himself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotistical

reader, is a long demonstration of man’s ineptitude and of nature’s

contemptuous march over a path paved with good intentions. It is an

idealism without respect for ideals; a system of dialectic in which a

psychological flux (not, of course, psychological science, which would

involve terms dialectically fixed and determinate) is made

systematically to obliterate intended meanings.

[Sidenote: Dialectic expresses a given intent.]

This spirited travesty of logic has enough historical truth in it to

show that dialectic must always stand, so to speak, on its apex; for

life is changeful, and the vision and interest of one moment are not

understood in the next. Theological dialectic rings hollow when once

faith is dead; grammar looks artificial when a language is foreign;

mathematics itself seems shallow when, like Hegel, we have no love for

nature’s intelligible mechanism nor for the clear structure and

constancy of eternal things. Ideal philosophy is a flower of the spirit

and varies with the soil. If mathematics suffers so little

contradiction, it is only because the primary aspects of sensation which

it elaborates could not lapse from the world without an utter break in

its continuity. Otherwise though mathematics might not be refuted it

might well be despised, like an obsolete ontology. Its boasted necessity

and universality would not help it at all if experience should change so

much as to present no further mathematical aspect. Those who expect to

pass at death into a non-spatial and super-temporal world, where there

will be no detestable extended and unthinking substances, and nothing

that need be counted, will find their hard-learned mathematics sadly

superfluous there. The memory of earthly geometry and arithmetic will

grow pale amid that floating incense and music, where dialectic, if it

survives at all, will have to busy itself on new intuitions.

So, too, when the landscape changes in the moral world, when new

passions or arts make their appearance, moral philosophy must start

afresh on a new foundation and try to express the ideals involved in the

new pursuits. To this extent experience lends colour to Hegel’s

dialectical physics; but he betrayed, like the sincere pantheist he was,

the finite interests that give actual values to the world, and he wished

to bestow instead a groundless adoration on the law that connected and

defeated every ideal. Such a genius, in spite of incisive wit and a

certain histrionic sympathy with all experience, could not be truly

free; it could not throw off its professional priestcraft, its habit of

ceremonious fraud on the surface, nor, at heart, its inhuman religion.

[Sidenote: Its empire is ideal and autonomous.]

The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human,

Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its

basis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has

the gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the

throne of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous

heart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own

interest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it;

so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world

he may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his

mind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties

had entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve.

Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new

method of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces

stealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that

would frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and

free; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody

them at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured

life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.

CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

[Sidenote: Empirical alloy in dialectic.]

When a polyglot person is speaking, foreign words sometimes occur to

him, which he at once translates into the language he happens to be

using. Somewhat in the same way, when dialectic develops an idea,

suggestions for this development may come from the empirical field; yet

these suggestions soon shed their externality and their place is taken

by some genuine development of the original notion. In constructing, for

instance, the essence of a circle, I may have started from a hoop. I may

have observed that as the hoop meanders down the path the roundness of

it disappears to the eye, being gradually flattened into a straight

line, such as the hoop presents when it is rolling directly away from

me. I may now frame the idea of a mathematical circle, in which all

diameters are precisely equal, in express contrast to the series of

ellipses, with very unequal diameters, which the floundering hoop has

illustrated in its career. When once, however, the definition of the

circle is attained, no watching of hoops is any longer requisite. The

ellipse can be generated ideally out of the definition, and would have

been generated, like asymptotes and hyperbolas, even if never

illustrated in nature at all. Lemmas from a foreign tongue have only

served to disclose a great fecundity in the native one, and the

legitimate word that the context required has supplanted the casual

stranger that may first have ushered it into the mind.

When the idea which dialectic is to elaborate is a moral idea, a purpose

touching something in the concrete world, lemmas from experience often

play a very large part in the process. Their multitude, with the small

shifts in aspiration and esteem which they may suggest to the mind,

often obscures the dialectical process altogether. In this case the

foreign term is never translated into the native medium; we never make

out what ideal connection our conclusion has with our premises, nor in

what way the conduct we finally decide upon is to fulfil the purpose

with which we began. Reflection merely beats about the bush, and when a

sufficient number of prejudices and impulses have been driven from

cover, we go home satisfied with our day’s ranging, and feeling that we

have left no duty unconsidered; and our last bird is our final

resolution.

[Sidenote: Arrested rationality in morals.]

When morality is in this way non-dialectical, casual, impulsive,

polyglot, it is what we may call prerational morality. There is indeed

reason in it, since every deliberate precept expresses some reflection

by which impulses have been compared and modified. But such chance

reflection amounts to moral perception, not to moral science. Reason has

not begun to educate her children. This morality is like knowing chairs

from tables and things near from distant things, which is hardly what we

mean by natural science. On this stage, in the moral world, are the

judgments of Mrs. Grundy, the aims of political parties and their

maxims, the principles of war, the appreciation of art, the commandments

of religious authorities, special revelations of duty to individuals,

and all systems of intuitive ethics.

[Sidenote: Its emotional and practical power.]

Prerational morality is vigorous because it is sincere. Actual

interests, rooted habits, appreciations the opposite of which is

inconceivable and contrary to the current use of language, are embodied

in special precepts; or they flare up of themselves in impassioned

judgments. It is hardly too much to say, indeed, that prerational

morality is morality proper. Rational ethics, in comparison, seems a

kind of politics or wisdom, while post-rational systems are essentially

religions. If we thus identify morality with prerational standards, we

may agree also that morality is no science in itself, though it may

become, with other matters, a subject for the science of anthropology;

and Hume, who had never come to close quarters with any rational or

post-rational ideal, could say with perfect truth that morality was not

founded on reason. Instinct is of course not founded on reason, but

_vice versa_; and the maxims enforced by tradition or conscience are

unmistakably founded on instinct. They might, it is true, become

materials for reason, if they were intelligently accepted, compared, and

controlled; but such a possibility reverses the partisan and spasmodic

methods which Hume and most other professed moralists associate with

ethics. Hume’s own treatises on morals, it need hardly be said, are pure

psychology. It would have seemed to him conceited, perhaps, to inquire

what ought really to be done. He limited himself to asking what men

tended to think about their doings.

The chief expression of rational ethics which a man in Hume’s world

would have come upon lay in the Platonic and Aristotelian writings; but

these were not then particularly studied nor vitally understood. The

chief illustration of post-rational morality that could have fallen

under his eyes, the Catholic religion, he would never have thought of as

a philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition and

policy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean

peoples. Under such circumstances ethics could not be thought of as a

science; and whatever gradual definition of the ideal, whatever

prescription of what ought to be and to be done, found a place in the

thoughts of such philosophers formed a part of their politics or

religion and not of their reasoned knowledge.

[Sidenote: Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of

anthropology.]

There is, however, a dialectic of the will; and that is the science

which, for want of a better name, we must call ethics or moral

philosophy. The interweaving of this logic of practice with various

natural sciences that have man or society for their theme, leads to much

confusion in terminology and in point of view. Is the good, we may ask,

what anybody calls good at any moment, or what anybody calls good on

reflection, or what all men agree to call good, or what God calls good,

no matter what all mankind may think about it? Or is true good something

that perhaps nobody calls good nor knows of, something with no other

characteristic or relation except that it is simply good?

Various questions are involved in such perplexing alternatives; some are

physical questions and others dialectical. Why any one values anything

at all, or anything in particular, is a question of physics; it asks for

the causes of interest, judgment, and desire. To esteem a thing good is

to express certain affinities between that thing and the speaker; and if

this is done with self-knowledge and with knowledge of the thing, so

that the felt affinity is a real one, the judgment is invulnerable and

cannot be asked to rescind itself. Thus if a man said hemlock was good

to drink, we might say he was mistaken; but if he explained that he

meant good to drink in committing suicide, there would be nothing

pertinent left to say: for to adduce that to commit suicide is not good

would be impertinent. To establish that, we should have to go back and

ask him if he valued anything—life, parents, country, knowledge,

reputation; and if he said no, and was sincere, our mouths would be

effectually stopped—that is, unless we took to declamation. But we

might very well turn to the bystanders and explain what sort of blood

and training this man possessed, and what had happened among the cells

and fibres of his brain to make him reason after that fashion. The

causes of morality, good or bad, are physical, seeing that they are

causes.

The science of ethics, however, has nothing to do with causes, not in

that it need deny or ignore them but in that it is their fruit and

begins where they end. Incense rises from burning coals, but it is

itself no conflagration, and will produce none. What ethics asks is not

why a thing is called good, but whether it is good or not, whether it is

right or not so to esteem it. Goodness, in this ideal sense, is not a

matter of opinion, but of nature. For intent is at work, life is in

active operation, and the question is whether the thing or the situation

responds to that intent. So if I ask, Is four really twice two? the

answer is not that most people say so, but that, in saying so, I am not

misunderstanding myself. To judge whether things are _really_ good,

intent must be made to speak; and if this intent may itself be judged

later, that happens by virtue of other intents comparing the first with

their own direction.

Hence good, when once the moral or dialectical attitude has been

assumed, means not what is called good but what is so; that is, what

_ought_ to be called good. For intent, beneath which there is no moral

judgment, sets up its own standard, and ideal science begins on that

basis, and cannot go back of it to ask why the obvious good is good at

all. Naturally, there is a reason, but not a moral one; for it lies in

the physical habit and necessity of things. The reason is simply the

propulsive essence of animals and of the universal flux, which renders

forms possible but unstable, and either helpful or hurtful to one

another. That nature should have this constitution, or intent this

direction, is not a good in itself. It is esteemed good or bad as the

intent that speaks finds in that situation a support or an obstacle to

its ideal. As a matter of fact, nature and the very existence of life

cannot be thought wholly evil, since no intent is wholly at war with

these its conditions; nor can nature and life be sincerely regarded as

wholly good, since no moral intent stops at the facts; nor does the

universal flux, which infinitely overflows any actual synthesis,

altogether support any intent it may generate.

[Sidenote: Estimation the soul of philosophy.]

Philosophers would do a great discourtesy to estimation if they sought

to justify it. It is all other acts that need justification by this one.

The good greets us initially in every experience and in every object.

Remove from anything its share of excellence and you have made it

utterly insignificant, irrelevant to human discourse, and unworthy of

even theoretic consideration. Value is the principle of perspective in

science, no less than of rightness in life. The hierarchy of goods, the

architecture of values, is the subject that concerns man most. Wisdom is

the first philosophy, both in time and in authority; and to collect

facts or to chop logic would be idle and would add no dignity to the

mind, unless that mind possessed a clear humanity and could discern what

facts and logic are good for and what not. The facts would remain facts

and the truths truths; for of course values, accruing on account of

animal souls and their affections, cannot possibly create the universe

those animals inhabit. But both facts and truths would remain trivial,

fit to awaken no pang, no interest, and no rapture. The first

philosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets who

knew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the better

to understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. Before their

day, too, wisdom had spoken in proverbs. _It is better_ every adage

began: _Better this than that_. Images or symbols, mythical or homely

events, of course furnished subjects and provocations for these

judgments; but the residuum of all observation was a settled estimation

of things, a direction chosen in thought and life because it was better.

Such was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still.

[Sidenote: Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.]

To one brought up in a sophisticated society, or in particular under an

ethical religion morality seems at first an external command, a chilling

and arbitrary set of requirements and prohibitions which the young

heart, if it trusted itself, would not reckon at a penny’s worth. Yet

while this rebellion is brewing in the secret conclave of the passions,

the passions themselves are prescribing a code. They are inventing

gallantry and kindness and honour; they are discovering friendship and

paternity. With maturity comes the recognition that the authorised

precepts of morality were essentially not arbitrary; that they expressed

the genuine aims and interests of a practised will; that their alleged

alien and supernatural basis (which if real would have deprived them of

all moral authority) was but a mythical cover for their forgotten

natural springs. Virtue is then seen to be admirable essentially, and

not merely by conventional imputation. If traditional morality has much

in it that is out of proportion, much that is unintelligent and inert,

nevertheless it represents on the whole the verdict of reason. It speaks

for a typical human will chastened by a typical human experience.

[Sidenote: A choice of proverbs.]

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend

for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost

every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it; so

that a man rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find a

venerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be taking. In respect

to foresight, for instance, we are told, Make hay while the sun shines,

A stitch in time saves nine, Honesty is the best policy, Murder will

out, Woe unto you, ye hypocrites, Watch and pray, Seek salvation with

fear and trembling, and _Respice finem_. But on the same authorities

exactly we have opposite maxims, inspired by a feeling that mortal

prudence is fallible, that life is shorter than policy, and that only

the present is real; for we hear, A bird in the hand is worth two in the

bush, _Carpe diem, Ars longa, vita brevis_. Be not righteous overmuch,

Enough for the day is the evil thereof, Behold the lilies of the field,

Judge not, that ye be not judged, Mind your own business, and It takes

all sorts of men to make a world. So when some particularly shocking

thing happens one man says, _Cherchez la femme_, and another says, Great

is Allah.

That these maxims should be so various and partial is quite intelligible

when we consider how they spring up. Every man, in moral reflection, is

animated by his own intent; he has something in view which he prizes, he

knows not why, and which wears to him the essential and unquestionable

character of a good. With this standard before his eyes, he observes

easily—for love and hope are extraordinarily keen-sighted—what in

action or in circumstances forwards his purpose and what thwarts it;

and at once the maxim comes, very likely in the language of the

particular instance before him. Now the interests that speak in a man

are different at different times; and the outer facts or measures which

in one case promote that interest may, where other less obvious

conditions have changed, altogether defeat it. Hence all sorts of

precepts looking to all sorts of results.

[Sidenote: Their various representative value.]

Prescriptions of this nature differ enormously in value; for they differ

enormously in scope. By chance, or through the insensible operation of

experience leading up to some outburst of genius, intuitive maxims may

be so central, so expressive of ultimate aims, so representative, I

mean, of all aims in fusion, that they merely anticipate what moral

science would have come to if it had existed. This happens much as in

physics ultimate truths may be divined by poets long before they are

discovered by investigators; the _vivida vis animi_ taking the place of

much recorded experience, because much unrecorded experience has

secretly fed it. Such, for instance, is the central maxim of

Christianity, Love thy neighbour as thyself. On the other hand, what is

usual in intuitive codes is a mixture of some elementary precepts,

necessary to any society, with others representing local traditions or

ancient rites: so Thou shalt not kill, and Thou shalt keep holy the

Sabbath day, figure side by side in the Decalogue. When Antigone, in

her sublimest exaltation, defies human enactments and appeals to

laws which are not of to-day nor yesterday, no man knowing whence

they have arisen, she mixes various types of obligation in a most

instructive fashion; for a superstitious horror at leaving a body

unburied—something decidedly of yesterday—gives poignancy in her mind

to natural affection for a brother—something indeed universal, yet

having a well-known origin. The passionate assertion of right is here,

in consequence, more dramatic than spiritual; and even its dramatic

force has suffered somewhat by the change in ruling ideals.

[Sidenote: Conflict of partial moralities.]

The disarray of intuitive ethics is made painfully clear in the

conflicts which it involves when it has fostered two incompatible

growths in two centres which lie near enough to each other to come into

physical collision. Such ethics has nothing to offer in the presence of

discord except an appeal to force and to ultimate physical sanctions. It

can instigate, but cannot resolve, the battle of nations and the battle

of religions. Precisely the same zeal, the same patriotism, the same

readiness for martyrdom fires adherents to rival societies, and fires

them especially in view of the fact that the adversary is no less

uncompromising and fierce. It might seem idle, if not cruel and

malicious, to wish to substitute one historical allegiance for another,

when both are equally arbitrary, and the existing one is the more

congenial to those born under it; but to feel this aggression to be

criminal demands some degree of imagination and justice, and sectaries

would not be sectaries if they possessed it.

Truly religious minds, while eager perhaps to extirpate every religion

but their own, often rise above national jealousies; for spirituality is

universal, whatever churches may be. Similarly politicians often

understand very well the religious situation; and of late it has become

again the general practice among prudent governments to do as the Romans

did in their conquests, and to leave people free to exercise what

religion they have, without pestering them with a foreign one. On the

other hand the same politicians are the avowed agents of a quite patent

iniquity; for what is their ideal? To substitute their own language,

commerce, soldiers, and tax-gatherers for the tax-gatherers, soldiers,

commerce, and language of their neighbours; and no means is thought

illegitimate, be it fraud in policy or bloodshed in war, to secure this

absolutely nugatory end. Is not one country as much a country as

another? Is it not as dear to its inhabitants? What then is gained by

oppressing its genius or by seeking to destroy it altogether?

Here are two flagrant instances where prerational morality defeats the

ends of morality. Viewed from within, each religious or national

fanaticism stands for a good; but in its outward operation it produces

and becomes an evil. It is possible, no doubt, that its agents are

really so far apart in nature and ideals that, like men and mosquitoes,

they can stand in physical relations only, and if they meet can meet

only to poison or to crush one another. More probably, however, humanity

in them is no merely nominal essence; it is definable ideally, as

essences are defined, by a partially identical function and intent. In

that case, by studying their own nature, they could rise above their

mutual opposition, and feel that in their fanaticism they were taking

too contracted a view of their own souls and were hardly doing justice

to themselves when they did such great injustice to others.

[Sidenote: The Greek ideal.]

How prerational morality may approach the goal, and miss it, is well

illustrated in the history of Hellenism. Greek morals may be said to

have been inspired by two prerational sentiments, a naturalistic

religion and a local patriotism. Could Plato have succeeded in making

that religion moral, or Alexander in universalising that patriotism,

perhaps Greece might have been saved and we might all be now at a very

different level of civilisation. Both Plato and Alexander failed, in

spite of the immense and lasting influence of their work; for in both

cases the after-effects were spurious, and the new spirit was smothered

in the dull substances it strove to vivify.

Greek myth was an exuberant assertion of the rights of life in the

universe. Existence could not but be joyful and immortal, if it had

once found, in land, sea, or air, a form congruous with that element.

Such congruity would render a being stable, efficient, beautiful. He

would achieve a perfection grounded in skilful practice and in a

thorough rejection of whatever was irrelevant. These things the Greeks

called virtue. The gods were perfect models of this kind of excellence;

for of course the amours of Zeus and Hermes’ trickery were, in their

hearty fashion, splendid manifestations of energy. This natural divine

virtue carried no sense of responsibility with it, but it could not fail

to diffuse benefit because it radiated happiness and beauty. The

worshipper, by invoking those braver inhabitants of the cosmos, felt he

might more easily attain a corresponding beauty and happiness in his

paternal city.

[Sidenote: Imaginative exuberance and political discipline.]

The source of myth had been a genial sympathy with nature. The observer,

at ease himself, multiplied ideally the potentialities of his being; but

he went farther in imagining what life might yield abroad, freed from

every trammel and necessity, than in deepening his sense of what life

was in himself, and of what it ought to be. This moral reflection,

absent from mythology, was supplied by politics. The family and the

state had a soberer antique religion of their own; this hereditary

piety, together with the laws, prescribed education, customs, and

duties. The city drew its walls close about the heart, and while it

fostered friendship and reason within, without it looked to little but

war. A splendid physical and moral discipline was established to serve a

suicidal egoism. The city committed its crimes, and the individual

indulged his vices of conduct and estimation, hardly rebuked by

philosophy and quite unrebuked by religion. Nevertheless, religion and

philosophy existed, together with an incomparable literature and art,

and an unrivalled measure and simplicity in living. A liberal fancy and

a strict civic regimen, starting with different partial motives and

blind purposes, combined by good fortune into an almost rational life.

It was inevitable, however, when only an irrational tradition supported

the state, and kept it so weak amid a world of enemies, that this state

should succumb; not to speak of the mean animosities, the license in

life, and the spirit of mockery that inwardly infested it. The myths,

too, faded; they had expressed a fleeting moment of poetic insight, as

patriotism had expressed a fleeting moment of unanimous effort; but what

force could sustain such accidental harmonies? The patriotism soon lost

its power to inspire sacrifice, and the myth its power to inspire

wonder; so that the relics of that singular civilisation were scattered

almost at once in the general flood of the world.

[Sidenote: Sterility of Greek example.]

The Greek ideal has fascinated many men in all ages, who have sometimes

been in a position to set a fashion, so that the world in general has

pretended also to admire. But the truth is Hellas, in leaving so many

heirlooms to mankind, has left no constitutional benefit; it has taught

the conscience no lesson. We possess a great heritage from Greece, but

it is no natural endowment. An artistic renaissance in the fifteenth

century and a historical one in the nineteenth have only affected the

trappings of society. The movement has come from above. It has not found

any response in the people. While Greek morality, in its contents or in

the type of life it prescribes, comes nearer than any other prerational

experiment to what reason might propose, yet it has been less useful

than many other influences in bringing the Life of Reason about. The

Christian and the Moslem, in refining their more violent inspiration,

have brought us nearer to genuine goodness than the Greek could by his

idle example. Classic perfection is a seedless flower, imitable only by

artifice, not reproducible by generation. It is capable of influencing

character only through the intellect, the means by which character can

be influenced least. It is a detached ideal, responding to no crying and

actual demand in the world at large. It never passed, to win the right

of addressing mankind, through a sufficient novitiate of sorrow.

[Sidenote: Prerational morality among the Jews.]

The Hebrews, on the contrary, who in comparison with the Greeks had a

barbarous idea of happiness, showed far greater moral cohesion under

the pressure of adversity. They integrated their purposes into a

fanaticism, but they integrated them; and the integrity that resulted

became a mighty example. It constituted an ideal of character not the

less awe-inspiring for being merely formal. We need not marvel that

abstract commandments should have impressed the world more than concrete

ideals. To appreciate an ideal, to love and serve it in the full light

of science and reason, would require a high intelligence, and, what is

rarer still, noble affinities and renunciations which are not to be

looked for in an undisciplined people. But to feel the truth and

authority of an abstract maxim (as, for instance, Do right and shame the

devil), a maxim applicable to experience on any plane, nothing is needed

but a sound wit and common honesty. Men know better what is right and

wrong than what is ultimately good or evil; their conscience is more

vividly present to them than the fruits which obedience to conscience

might bear; so that the logical relation of means to ends, of methods to

activities, eludes them altogether. What is a necessary connection

between the given end, happiness, and the normal life naturally

possessing it, appears to them as a miraculous connection between

obedience to God’s commands and enjoyment of his favour. The evidence of

this miracle astonishes them and fills them with zeal. They are

strengthened to persevere in righteousness under any stress of

misfortune, in the assurance that they are being put to a temporary test

and that the reward promised to virtue will eventually be theirs.

[Sidenote: The development of conscience.]

Thus a habit of faithfulness, a trust in general principles, is fostered

and ingrained in generation after generation—a rare and precious

heritage for a race so imperfectly rational as the human. Reason would

of course justify the same constancy in well-doing, since a course of

conduct would not be right, but wrong, if its ultimate issue were human

misery. But as the happiness secured by virtue may be remote and may

demand more virtue to make it appreciable, the mere rationality of a

habit gives it no currency in the world and but little moral glow in the

conscience. We should not, therefore, be too much offended at the

illusions which play a part in moral integration. Imagination is often

more efficacious in reaching the gist and meaning of experience than

intelligence can be, just because imagination is less scrupulous and

more instinctive. Even physical discoveries, when they come, are the

fruit of divination, and Columbus had to believe he might sail westward

to India before he could actually hit upon America. Reason cannot create

itself, and nature, in producing reason, has to feel her way

experimentally. Habits and chance systems of education have to arise

first and exercise upon individuals an irrational suasion favourable to

rational ends. Men long live in substantial harmony with reality before

they recognise its nature. Organs long exist before they reach their

perfect function. The fortunate instincts of a race destined to long

life and rationality express themselves in significant poetry before

they express themselves in science.

The service which Hebraism has rendered to mankind has been

instrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative.

Hebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it a

matter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganism

had left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewish

system has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda and intolerance; a

tendency which would not have proved nefarious had this religion always

remained true to its moral principle; for morality is coercive and no

man, being autonomous, has a right to do wrong. Conscience, thus

reinforced by religious passion, has been able to focus a general

abhorrence on certain great scandals—slavery and sodomy could be

practically suppressed among Christians, and drunkenness among Moslems.

The Christian principle of charity also owed a part of its force to

Hebraic tradition. For the law and the prophets were full of mercy and

loving kindness toward the faithful. What Moses had taught his people

Christ and his Hellenising disciples had the beautiful courage to preach

to all mankind. Yet this virtue of charity, on its subtler and more

metaphysical side, belongs to the spirit of redemption, to that ascetic

and quasi-Buddhistic element in Christianity to which we shall presently

revert. The pure Jews can have no part in such insight, because it

contradicts the positivism of their religion and character and their

ideal of worldly happiness.

[Sidenote: Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims.]

As the human body is said to change all its substance every seven years,

and yet is the same body, so the Hebraic conscience might change all its

tenets in seven generations and be the same conscience still. Could this

abstract moral habit, this transferable earnestness, be enlisted in

rational causes, the Life of Reason would have gained a valuable

instrument. Men would possess the “single eye,” and the art, so

difficult to an ape-like creature with loose moral feelings, of acting

on principle. Could the vision of an adequate natural ideal fall into

the Hebraising mind, already aching for action and nerved to practical

enthusiasm, that ideal vision might become efficacious and be largely

realised in practice. The abstract power of self-direction, if

enlightened by a larger experience and a more fertile genius, might give

the Life of Reason a public embodiment such as it has not had since the

best days of classic antiquity. Thus the two prerational moralities out

of which European civilisation has grown, could they be happily

superposed, would make a rational polity.

[Sidenote: Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no

programme.]

The objects of human desire, then, until reason has compared and

experience has tested them, are a miscellaneous assortment of goods,

unstable in themselves and incompatible with one another. It is a happy

chance if a tolerable mixture of them recommends itself to a prophet or

finds an adventitious acceptance among a group of men. Intuitive morality

is adequate while it simply enforces those obvious and universal laws

which are indispensable to any society, and which impose themselves

everywhere on men under pain of quick extinction—a penalty which many

an individual and many a nation continually prefers to pay. But when

intuitive morality ventures upon speculative ground and tries to guide

progress, its magic fails. Ideals are tentative and have to be

critically viewed. A moralist who rests in his intuitions may be a good

preacher, but hardly deserves the name of philosopher. He cannot find

any authority for his maxims which opposite maxims may not equally

invoke. To settle the relative merits of rival authorities and of

hostile consciences it is necessary to appeal to the only real

authority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the living man. No

other test is conceivable and no other would be valid; for no good man

would ever consent to regard an authority as divine or binding which

essentially contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience which is

irreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied with itself, and

not conscientious enough: it needs cultivation by dialectic. It neglects

to extend to all human interests that principle of synthesis and justice

by which conscience itself has arisen. And so soon as the conscience

summons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and of

universal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason. So,

too, when the spirit summons its traditional faiths, to subject them to

a similar examination, that exercise is not called religion, but

philosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the purest

religion and reason the ultimate conscience; but so to name them would

be misleading. The things commonly called by those names have seldom

consented to live at peace with sincere reflection. It has been felt

vaguely that reason could not have produced them, and that they might

suffer sad changes by submitting to it; as if reason could be the

_ground_ of anything, or as if everything might not find its

consummation in becoming rational.

CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

[Sidenote: Moral passions represent private interests.]

In moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I mean that

hatred which an animal may sometimes feel for other animals on account

of their strange aspect, or because their habits put him to serious

inconvenience, or because these habits, if he himself adopted them,

might be vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rational

sentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature merely for not

resembling another, or for nourishing in a different physical or moral

environment. It has been an unfortunate consequence of mythical

philosophies that moral emotions have been stretched to objects with

which a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has been

filled with monsters more or less horrible, according as the forces they

represented were more or less formidable to human life. In the same

spirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among

those engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an

insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material

obstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion,

however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough

not to be constituted like the average of his neighbours.

Ethics, if it is to be a science and not a piece of arbitrary

legislation, cannot pronounce it sinful in a serpent to be a serpent; it

cannot even accuse a barbarian of loving a wrong life, except in so far

as the barbarian is supposed capable of accusing himself of barbarism.

If he is a perfect barbarian he will be inwardly, and therefore morally,

justified. The notion of a barbarian will then be accepted by him as

that of a true man, and will form the basis of whatever rational

judgments or policy he attains. It may still seem dreadful to him to be

a serpent, as to be a barbarian might seem dreadful to a man imbued with

liberal interests. But the degree to which moral science, or the

dialectic of will, can condemn any type of life depends on the amount of

disruptive contradiction which, at any reflective moment, that life

brings under the unity of apperception. The discordant impulses therein

confronted will challenge and condemn one another; and the court of

reason in which their quarrel is ventilated will have authority to

pronounce between them.

The physical repulsion, however, which everybody feels to habits and

interests which he is incapable of sharing is no part of rational

estimation, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices and

superstitions which prerational morality abounds in. The strongest

feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they

express merely physical antipathies.

Toward alien powers a man’s true weapon is not invective, but skill and

strength. An obstacle is an obstacle, not a devil; and even a moral

life, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, is

merely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is

moral, but only in so far as its morality represents a material

organism, physically incompatible with what the thinker has at heart.

[Sidenote: Common ideal interests may supervene.]

Material conflicts cannot be abolished by reason, because reason is

powerful only where they have been removed. Yet where opposing forces

are able mutually to comprehend and respect one another, common ideal

interests at once supervene, and though the material conflict may remain

irrepressible, it will be overlaid by an intellectual life, partly

common and unanimous. In this lies the chivalry of war, that we

acknowledge the right of others to pursue ends contrary to our own.

Competitors who are able to feel this ideal comity, and who leading

different lives in the flesh lead the same life in imagination, are

incited by their mutual understanding to rise above that material

ambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies. They may

ultimately wish to renounce that temporal good which deprives them of

spiritual goods in truth infinitely greater and more appealing to the

soul—innocence, justice, and intelligence. They may prefer an enlarged

mind to enlarged frontiers, and the comprehension of things foreign to

the destruction of them. They may even aspire to detachment from those

private interests which, as Plato said,[H] do not deserve to be taken

too seriously; the fact that we must take them seriously being the

ignoble part of our condition.