entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and
ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human
nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal
systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such
materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly
at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to
their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be
abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the
instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without
this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any
sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me
to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be
well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I
am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure for a principle
of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it
lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.
Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a
semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on
the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their
lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the
music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the
land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as
kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work,
but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make
natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative
system.
Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its
duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he
tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.
Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four,
they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned,
it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke,
that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved
if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
condition of Bradley's Absolute--feeling in which all distinctions are
transcended and merged--seems to be something of that kind; but there
would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
at all.
But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for
a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist
wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or
series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose
he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in
which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and
this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point
of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.
Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the
futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course,
what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as
their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but
it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in
the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not
there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it
leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never
existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold. But this is
evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each
cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps
something kindred may refill. A Hegel, after identifying himself for a
moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to
sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied
with the joys of an oyster. It is only their common form, or their common
worship, that can give to the quick moments of life any mutual relevance
or sympathy; and existence would not come at all within sight of a good,
either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising
some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you
will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would
be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so
many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences. For the
moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they
express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life,
and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and
evil.
We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what
is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor
the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically
distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its
potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires
society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly
social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the
individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good
for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society
that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or
the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes
invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the
contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so
that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline is a help to the spirit:
but even social relations, when like love, friendship, or sport they are
spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the
pressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden
in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the
spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of
essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up
for their tyranny by their instability: for the prevalent moral fashion is
always growing old, and human nature is always becoming young again.
World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is
in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul: and by a
curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul
in actual consciousness, where it also is not: for sensations and ideas
are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound
animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and
would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living
creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.
Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition
of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest
in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey _knowledge_,
it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external
things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice
which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this
momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms
for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and
informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense
or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences
which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly
run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition
of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature.
For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to
consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle
movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they
are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the
material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of
the soul and body which supports that consciousness.
There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest
examination of conscience in a reflective mind. Refutations and proofs
depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered
explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations. On any
different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and refutations fall
to the ground; and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at
all, how far the terms in either case describe anything existent. If by
"knowledge" we understand intuition of essences, idealism follows; but it
follows only in respect to essences given in intuition: nothing follows
concerning the seat, origin, conditions, or symptomatic value of such
intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs. Idealism,
therefore, without being refuted, may be hemmed in and humanised by
natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation; the
most recalcitrant materialist (like myself) might see its plausibility
during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness. Consciousness
itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of
action and passion, recognising it in its proud isolation and specious
autonomy, like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino.
German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a
self-conscious and reflective being: but it is hardly a system, since it
contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable; it may therefore be
readily swallowed, but it can never be digested. Neither of its two
ingredients--romantic scepticism and romantic superstition--agrees
particularly with the British stomach. Not romantic scepticism: for in
England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a
difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to
this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was
alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British
Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as
if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to
reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them
from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an
objective, non-psychological turn: events, and especially feelings and
ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display. Thus
Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other
in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if
only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in this way to
mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence;
and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which
might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind,
so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe
visible to omniscience.
As to romantic scepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be, when
left to itself, if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up
their idealism late and with open eyes. In Croce and Gentile the
transcendental attitude is kept pure: for them there is really no universe
save spirit creating its experience; and if we ask whence or on what
principle occasions arise for all this compulsory fiction, we are reminded
that this question, with any answer which spirit might invent for it,
belongs not to philosophy but to some special science like physiology,
itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus the
more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the
faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not
the remotest chance of reaching his imaginary bait--God, nature, or
truth; for to seek such things is to presuppose them, and to presuppose
anything, if spirit be absolute, is to invent it. Even those philosophies
of history which the idealist may for some secret reason be impelled to
construct would be superstitious, according to his own principles, if he
took them for more than poetic fictions of the historian; so that in the
study of history, as in every other study, all the diligence and sober
learning which the philosopher may possess are non-philosophical, since
they presuppose independent events and material documents. Thus perfect
idealism turns out to be pure literary sport, like lyric poetry, in which
no truth is conveyed save the miscellaneous truths taken over from common
sense or the special sciences; and the gay spirit, supposed to be living
and shining of its own sweet will, can find nothing to live or shine upon
save the common natural world.
Such at least would be the case if romantic superstition did not
supervene, demanding that the spirit should impose some arbitrary rhythm
or destiny on the world which it creates: but this side of idealism has
been cultivated chiefly by the intrepid Germans: some of them, like
Spengler and Keyserling, still thrive and grow famous on it without a
blush. The modest English in these matters take shelter under the wing of
science speculatively extended, or traditional religion prudently
rationalised: the scope of the spirit, like its psychological
distribution, is conceived realistically. It might almost prove an
euthanasia for British idealism to lose itself in the new metaphysics of
nature which the mathematicians are evolving; and since this metaphysics,
though materialistic in effect, is more subtle and abstruse than popular
materialism, British idealism might perhaps be said to survive in it,
having now passed victoriously into its opposite, and being merged in
something higher.
[10] _Ethical Studies_, by F.H. Bradley, O.M., LL.D. (Glasgow), late
Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; second edition revised, with
additional notes by the Author. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1927.
III
REVOLUTIONS IN SCIENCE
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, science has gained notably
in expertness, and lost notably in authority. We are bombarded with
inventions; but if we ask the inventors what they have learned of the
depths of nature, which somehow they have probed with such astonishing
success, their faces remain blank. They may be chewing gum; or they may
tell us that if an aeroplane could only fly fast enough, it would get home
before it starts; or they may urge us to come with them into a dark room,
to hold hands, and to commune with the dear departed.
Practically there may be no harm in such a division of labour, the
inventors doing the work and the professors the talking. The experts may
themselves be inexpert in verbal expression, or content with stock
phrases, or profoundly sceptical, or too busy to think. Nevertheless,
skill and understanding are at their best when they go together and adorn
the same mind. Modern science until lately had realised this ideal: it was
an extension of common perception and common sense. We could trust it
implicitly, as we do a map or a calendar; it was not true for us merely in
an argumentative or visionary sense, as are religion and philosophy.
Geography went hand in hand with travel, Copernican astronomy with
circumnavigation of the globe: and even the theory of evolution and the
historical sciences in the nineteenth century were continuous with liberal
reform: people saw in the past, as they then learned to conceive it,
simply an extension of those transformations which they were witnessing in
the present. They could think they knew the world as a man knows his
native town, or the contents of his chest of drawers: nature was our home,
and science was our home knowledge. For it is not intrinsic clearness or
coherence that make ideas persuasive, but connection with action, or with
some voluminous inner response, which is readiness to act. It is a sense
of on-coming fate, a compulsion to do or to suffer, that produces the
illusion of perfect knowledge.
I call it illusion, although our contact with things may be real, and our
sensations and thoughts may be inevitable and honest; because nevertheless
it is always an illusion to suppose that our images are the intrinsic
qualities of things, or reproduce them exactly. The Ptolemaic system, for
instance, was perfectly scientific; it was based on careful and prolonged
observation and on just reasoning; but it was modelled on an image--the
spherical blue dome of the heavens--proper only to an observer on the
earth, and not transferable to a universe which is diffuse, centreless,
fluid, and perhaps infinite. When the imagination, for any reason, comes
to be peopled with images of the latter sort, the modern, and especially
the latest, astronomy becomes more persuasive. For although I suspect that
even Einstein is an imperfect relativist, and retains Euclidean space and
absolute time at the bottom of his calculation, and recovers them at the
end, yet the effort to express the system of nature as it would appear
from _any_ station and to _any_ sensorium seems to be eminently
enlightening.
Theory and practice in the latest science are still allied, otherwise
neither of them would prosper as it does; but each has taken a leap in its
own direction. The distance between them has become greater than the naked
eye can measure, and each of them in itself has become unintelligible. We
roll and fly at dizzy speeds, and hear at incredible distances; at the
same time we imagine and calculate to incredible depths. The technique of
science, like that of industry, has become a thing in itself; the one
veils its object, which is nature, as the other defeats its purpose, which
is happiness. Science often seems to be less the study of things than the
study of science. It is now more scholastic than philosophy ever was. We
are invited to conceive organisms within organisms, so minute, so free,
and so dynamic, that the heart of matter seems to explode into an endless
discharge of fireworks, or a mathematical nightmare realised in a thousand
places at once, and become the substance of the world. What is even more
remarkable--for the notion of infinite organisation has been familiar to
the learned at least since the time of Leibniz--the theatre of science is
transformed no less than the actors and the play. The upright walls of
space, the steady tread of time, begin to fail us; they bend now so
obligingly to our perspectives that we no longer seem to travel through
them, but to carry them with us, shooting them out or weaving them about
us according to some native fatality, which is left unexplained. We seem
to have reverted in some sense from Copernicus to Ptolemy: except that the
centre is now occupied, not by the solid earth, but by _any_ geometrical
point chosen for the origin of calculation. Time, too, is not measured by
the sun or stars, but by _any_ "clock"--that is, by any recurrent rhythm
taken as a standard of comparison. It would seem that the existence and
energy of each chosen centre, as well as its career and encounters, hang
on the collateral existence of other centres of force, among which it must
wend its way: yet the only witness to their presence, and the only known
property of their substance, is their "radio-activity", or the physical
light which they shed. Light, in its physical being, is accordingly the
measure of all things in this new philosophy: and if we ask ourselves why
this element should have been preferred, the answer is not far to seek.
Light is the only medium through which very remote or very minute
particles of matter can be revealed to science. Whatever the nature of
things may be intrinsically, science must accordingly express the universe
in terms of light.
These reforms have come from within: they are triumphs of method. We make
an evident advance in logic, and in that parsimony which is dear to
philosophers (though not to nature), if we refuse to assign given terms
and relations to any prior medium, such as absolute time or space, which
cannot be given with them. Observable spaces and times, like the facts
observed in them, are given separately and in a desultory fashion.
Initially, then, there are as many spaces and times as there are
observers, or rather observations; these are the specious times and spaces
of dreams, of sensuous life, and of romantic biography. Each is centred
here and now, and stretched outwards, forward, and back, as far as
imagination has the strength to project it. Then, when objects and events
have been posited as self-existent, and when a "clock" and a system of
co-ordinates have been established for measuring them, a single
mathematical space and time may be deployed about them, conceived to
contain all things, and to supply them with their respective places and
dates. This gives us the cosmos of classical physics. But this system
involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through
media previously existing, and being carried down, like a boat drifting
down stream, by a flowing time which has a pace of its own, and imposes it
on all existence. In reality, each "clock" and each landscape is
self-centred and initially absolute: its time and space are irrelevant to
those of any other landscape or "clock", unless the objects or events
revealed there, being posited as self-existent, actually coincide with
those revealed also in another landscape, or dated by another "clock". It
is only by travelling along its own path at its own rate that experience
or light can ever reach a point lying on another path also, so that two
observations, and two measures, may coincide at their ultimate terms,
their starting-points or their ends. Positions are therefore not
independent of the journey which terminates in them, and thereby
individuates them; and dates are not independent of the events which
distinguish them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light
distend time by their pulses, they distend space by their deployments.
This, if I understand it, is one half the new theory; the other half is
not less acceptable. Newton had described motion as a result of two
principles: the first, inertia, was supposed to be inherent in bodies; the
second, gravity, was incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent
inertia can only be observed relatively: it makes no difference to me
whether I am said to be moving at a great speed or absolutely at rest, if
I am not jolted or breathless, and if my felt environment does not change.
Inertia, or weight, in so far as it denotes something intrinsic, seems to
be but another name for substance or the principle of existence: in so far
as it denotes the first law of motion, it seems to be relative to an
environment. It would therefore be preferable to combine inertia and
attraction in a single formula, expressing the behaviour of bodies towards
one another in all their conjunctions, without introducing any inherent
forces or absolute measures. This seems to have been done by Einstein, or
at least impressively suggested: and it has been found that the new
calculations correspond to certain delicate observations more accurately
than the old.