been familiar to common sense, without being understood except
dramatically. These forces are called the passions; or when the dramatic
units distinguished are longish strands rather than striking episodes,
they are called temperament, character, or will; or perhaps, weaving all
these strands and episodes together again into one moral fabric, we call
them simply human nature. But in what does this vague human nature reside,
and how does it operate on the non-human world? Certainly not within the
conscious sphere, or in the superficial miscellany of experience.
Immediate experience is the intermittent chaos which human nature, in
combination with external circumstances, is invoked to support and to
rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the body?
Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
continually aroused and modified by material agencies.
Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with
registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its
hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the
most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned,
though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not
traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches,
has to be patched by invented episodes, and largely attributed to daemonic
personages that never come on the stage.
Locke, in his psychology of morals, had at first followed the verbal
rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one
another. Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the
greater prospective pleasure, and avoidance of the greater prospective
pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no
less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no
power: they cannot even be discerned prophetically, save by the vaguest
fancy, entirely based on the present impulses and obsessions of the soul.
No future good, no future evil avails to move us, except--as Locke said
after examining the facts more closely--when a _certain uneasiness_ in the
soul (or in the body) causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils
with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream
pictures which it evokes, is a mere symptom of the direction in which
human nature in us is already moving, or already disposed to move. Without
this prior physical impulse, heaven may beckon and hell may yawn without
causing the least variation in conduct. As in religious conversion all is
due to the call of grace, so in ordinary action all is due to the ripening
of natural impulses and powers within the psyche. The _uneasiness_
observed by Locke is merely the consciousness of this ripening, before the
field of relevant action has been clearly discerned.
When all this is considered, the ostensible interaction between mind and
body puts on a new aspect. There are no _purely mental_ ideas or
intentions followed by material effects: there are no material events
followed by a _purely mental_ sensation or idea. Mental events are always
elements in total natural events containing material elements also:
material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the
object for those mental sensations or ideas. Moreover, the physical strand
alone is found to be continuous and traceable; the conscious strand, the
sequence of mental events, flares up and dies down daily, if not hourly;
and the medley of its immediate features--images, words, moods--juxtaposes
China and Peru, past and future, in the most irresponsible confusion. On
the other hand, in human life it is a part of the conscious
element--intentions, affections, plans, and reasonings--that _explains_
the course of action: dispersed temporally, our dominant thoughts contain
the reason for our continuous behaviour, and seem to guide it. They are
not so much links in a chain of minute consecutive causes--an idea or an
act of will often takes time to work and works, as it were, only
posthumously--as they are general overarching moral inspirations and
resolves, which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often
rendering our thoughts more precise in the process, or totally
transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents.
The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate;
and our action in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition: betrays
it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares, and now
sadly disappointing it.
I leave it for the reader's reflection to decide whether we should call
such cohabitation of mind with body interaction, or not rather sympathetic
concomitance, self-annotation, and a partial prophetic awakening to a life
which we are leading automatically.
VII
Page 21. _To the confusion of common sense._
Berkeley and his followers sometimes maintain that common sense is on
their side, that they have simply analysed the fact of our experience of
the material world, and if there is any paradox in their idealism, it is
merely verbal and disappears with familiarity. All the "reality", they
say, all the force, obduracy, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished
after we discover that this reality resides, and can only reside, in the
fixed order of our experience.
But no: analysis of immediate experience will never disclose any fixed
order in it; the surface of experience, when not interpreted
materialistically, is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers,
when they look in this direction, towards nature and the rationale of
experience and science, are looking away from their own system, and
relying instead on the automatic propensity of human nature to routine, so
that we spontaneously prepare for repeating our actions (not our
experience) and even anticipate their occasions; a propensity further
biased by the dominant rhythms of the psyche, so that we assume a future
not so much similar to the past, as better. When developed, this
propensity turns into trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary
to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and from
the material continuity of external occasions. This appears clearly in our
trust in persons--a radical animal propensity--which is consonant with
common sense when these persons are living bodies, but becomes
superstitious, or at least highly speculative, when these persons are
disembodied spirits.
It is a pity that the beautiful system of Berkeley should have appeared in
an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory, and the
free spirit, where it stirred, was romantic and wilful. For that system
was essentially religious: it put the spirit face to face with God,
everywhere, always, and in everything it turned experience into a divine
language for the monition and expression of the inner man. Such an
instrument, in spiritual hands, might have served to dispel all natural
illusions and affections, and to disinfect the spirit of worldliness and
egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought. All they
wished was to substitute a social for a material world, precisely because
a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and might
induce mankind, against the evidence of their senses and the still small
voice in their hearts, to live as if their worldly interests were absolute
and must needs dominate the spirit.
Morally this system thus came to sanction a human servitude to material
things such as ancient materialists would have scorned; and theoretically
the system did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense against
which it protested. For far from withdrawing into the depths of the
private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the
evolution of all human ideas. This notion of "experience" originally
presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure that experience, and to
profit by it, by learning to live in better harmony with external
circumstances. Each agent or subject of experience might, at other times,
become an object of experience also: for they all formed part of a
material world, which they might envisage in common in their perceptions.
Now the criticism which repudiates this common material medium, like all
criticism or doubt, is secondary and partial: it continues to operate with
all the assumptions of common sense, save the one which it is expressly
criticising. So, in repudiating the material world, this philosophy
retains the notion of various agents or subjects gathering experience; and
we are not expected to doubt that there are just as many streams of
experience without a world, as there were people in the world when the
world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences have now
become undiscoverable, the material persons having been removed who
formerly were so placed as to gather easily imagined experiences, and to
be able to communicate them; and the very notion of experience has been
emptied of its meaning, when no external common world subsists to impose
that same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing
experiences _in vacuo_ that led common sense to assume a material world,
but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, and
regularly reproducible, experiences.
Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed
without leave, and rests on the belief in nature for which it is
substituted.
VIII
Page 21. _The literary psychologist may come very near to the truth of
experience._
Experience cannot be in itself an object of science, because it is
essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, and private; and although
it may be shared or repeated, the evidence for that repetition or that
unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another
experience by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its
agreement with the present experience must be imagined freely and credited
instinctively, in view of the known circumstances in which the absent
experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for
conceiving experience at large is accordingly private imagination; and
such imagination cannot be tested, although it may be guided and perhaps
recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language
of other people. For action and language, being contagious, and being the
material counterpart of experience in each of us, may voluntarily or
involuntarily suggest our respective experience to one another, by causing
each to re-enact more or less accurately within himself the experience of
the rest. Thus alien thoughts and feelings are revealed or suggested to us
in common life, not without a subjective transformation increasing, so to
speak, as the square of the distance: and even the record of experience in
people's own words, when these are not names for recognisable external
things, awakens in the reader, in another age or country, quite
incommensurable ideas. Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
lively dramatic literature.
All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
to be without scientific value.
II
FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH IDEALISM[10]
After fifty years, an old milestone in the path of philosophy, Bradley's
_Ethical Studies_, has been set up again, as if to mark the distance which
English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular
dogmatism to universal bewilderment; and a chief agent in the change has
been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit,
his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his
conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David
against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or
empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his
sling! How fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that
composite monster, if only it had had a forehead! Some of them might even
have done murderous execution in Bradley's own camp: for instance, this
pebble cast playfully at the metaphysical idol called "Law": "It is
_always_ wet on half-holidays because of the Law of Raininess, but
_sometimes_ it is _not_ wet, because of the Supplementary Law of
Sunshine".
Bradley and his friends achieved a notable victory in the academic field:
philosophic authority and influence passed largely into their hands in all
English-speaking universities. But it was not exactly from these seats of
learning that naturalism and utilitarianism needed to be dislodged; like
the corresponding radicalisms of our day, these doctrines prevailed rather
in certain political and intellectual circles outside, consciously
revolutionary and often half-educated; and I am afraid that the braggart
Goliaths of today need chastening at least as much as those of fifty years
ago. In a country officially Christian, and especially in Oxford, it is
natural and fitting that academic authority should belong to orthodox
tradition--theological, Platonic, and Aristotelian. Bradley, save for a
few learned quotations, strangely ignored this orthodoxy entrenched
behind his back. In contrast with it he was himself a heretic, with first
principles devastating every settled belief: and it was really this
venerable silent partner at home that his victory superseded, at least in
appearance and for a season. David did not slay Goliath, but he dethroned
Saul. Saul was indeed already under a cloud, and all in David's heart was
not unkindness in that direction. Bradley might almost be called an
unbelieving Newman; time, especially, seems to have brought his suffering
and refined spirit into greater sympathy with ancient sanctities.
Originally, for instance, venting the hearty Protestant sentiment that
only the Christianity of laymen is sound, he had written: "I am happy to
say that 'religieux' has no English equivalent". But a later note says:
"This is not true except of Modern English only. And, in any case, it
won't do, and was wrong and due to ignorance. However secluded the
religious life, it may be practical indirectly _if_ through the unity of
the spiritual body it can be taken as vicarious". The "_if_" here saves
the principle that all values must be social, and that the social organism
is the sole moral reality: yet how near this bubble comes to being
pricked! We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether
spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever
is stirred and hallowed into spiritual life.
All this, however, in that age of progress, was regarded as obsolete:
there was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times. True,
the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of
religious devotion, with some dubious help from aestheticism: but against
the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy, and against
the mania for rewriting history, traditional philosophy then seemed
helpless and afraid to defend itself: it is only now beginning to recover
its intellectual courage. For the moment, speculative radicals saw light
in a different quarter. German idealism was nothing if not self-confident;
it was relatively new; it was encyclopaedic in its display of knowledge,
which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling, if not stable,
results; it was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle; and
altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly
turning the tables on the threatened naturalism. By developing romantic
intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the
universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly
spiritual, personal, and subjective.
The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality
was consciousness.
"People find", writes Bradley, "a subject and an object correlated
in consciousness.... To go out of that unity is for us literally to
go out of our minds.... When mind is made only a part of the whole,
there is a question which _must_ be answered.... If about any
matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it?
Can we even say that it is? And if it is not in consciousness, how
can we know it?... And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not
mind."
Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument; and not
being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps
not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of
the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any
figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing
material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?
Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield
occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy,
provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or
ignored. So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining
knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own
phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a
self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material: and they
continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often
more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.
What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who on principle might not
trespass beyond the limits of consciousness? Only ethical sentiment.
Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day,
without seeking to transform it. The most intentionally eloquent passage
in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people:
that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim,
even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe
moral experience, without proposing a different form for it. A man must be
a man of his own time, or nothing; to set up to be better than the world
was the beginning of immorality; and virtue lay in accepting one's station
and its duties. The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture
of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own
ideals upon that tree; this need not prevent moral consciousness from
including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health,
beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern
moralists. Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any
painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral
consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in "something
higher". Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at
first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view. In the
panorama that would ultimately fill the mind these so-called goods and
virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and
evils. Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference might
ultimately be superseded: they might appear to have belonged to a partial
and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.
With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect, why
should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?
Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite
consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to
transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a
different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral
passion--for he had it, caustic and burning clear--was purely
intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should
have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the
positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously,
that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics
at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were
concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the
conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human
wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming
society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a
decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.
They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind,
and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a
philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians
were at least intent on existence and on the course of events; they wished
to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human
nature by those new institutions so that it might better realise its
latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts
and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much
to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used
catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort
politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like
their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on
wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than
tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in
contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes,
however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact, and speak for the
soul; whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and
may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human
nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every
rebellion; it was the _moral_ side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion
against irrational morality.