Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel,
is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us
the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of
its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.
What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the
opinions which supported them; what is the birth and the extinction
of religious and of political systems to life? What are the revolutions
of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements
of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe
of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their
motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great
miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well
that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once
so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would
otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its
object.
If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived
in his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, they
not existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, the
spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated it
by the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or had
he imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas,
and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of
the forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colours
which attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the
atmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing,
truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been a
vain boast to have said of such a man, 'Non merita nome di creatore,
se non Iddio ed il Poeta.' But now these things are looked on with
little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is
esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary
person. The multitude of men care not for them. It is thus with
Life--that which includes all.
What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will,
and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is
unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live
on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it
to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly
used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is
much. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is
birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What
is birth and death?
The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life,
which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which
the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished
in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene
of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse
my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that
nothing exists but as it is perceived.
It is a decision against which all our persuasions struggle, and we
must be long convicted before we can be convinced that the solid
universe of external things is 'such stuff as dreams are made
of.' The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind
and matter, its fatal consequences in morals, and their violent
dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted
me to materialism. This materialism is a seducing system to young and
superficial minds. It allows its disciples to talk, and dispenses
them from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of
things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, 'looking
both before and after,' whose 'thoughts wander through eternity,'
disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable of
imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and
the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be.
Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit
within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the
character of all life and being. Each is at once the centre and
the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and
the line in which all things are contained. Such contemplations as
these, materialism and the popular philosophy of mind and matter
alike forbid; they are only consistent with the intellectual system.
It is absurd to enter into a long recapitulation of arguments
sufficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writer
on abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the most
clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be
found in Sir William Drummond's Academical Questions.
After such an exposition, it would be idle to translate into other
words what could only lose its energy and fitness by the change.
Examined point by point, and word by word, the most discriminating
intellects have been able to discern no train of thoughts in the
process of reasoning, which does not conduct inevitably to the
conclusion which has been stated.
What follows from the admission? It establishes no new truth, it
gives us no additional insight into our hidden nature, neither its
action nor itself. Philosophy, impatient as it may be to build,
has much work yet remaining, as pioneer for the overgrowth of ages.
It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error, and the
roots of error. It leaves, what it is too often the duty of the
reformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.
It reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted,
but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its own
creation. By signs, I would be understood in a wide sense, including
what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In
this latter sense, almost all familiar objects are signs, standing,
not for themselves, but for others, in their capacity of suggesting
one thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts. Our whole life
is thus an education of error.
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and
intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves! Many of
the circumstances of social life were then important to us which
are now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on
which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that
we saw and felt, from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute
one mass. There are some persons who, in this respect, are always
children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel
as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe,
or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being.
They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which
precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid
apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays,
and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Thus feelings and
then reasonings are the combined result of a multitude of entangled
thoughts, and of a series of what are called impressions, planted
by reiteration.
The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the
intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as
it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two
classes of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names
of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of
reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to
that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise
found to be a delusion. The words _I_, YOU, THEY, are not signs of
any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts
thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different
modifications of the one mind.
Let it not be supposed that this doctrine conducts to the monstrous
presumption that I, the person who now write and think, am that one
mind. I am but a portion of it. The words _I_, and YOU, and THEY,
are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement, and totally
devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to
them. It is difficult to find terms adequate to express so subtle
a conception as that to which the Intellectual Philosophy has
conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what
wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little
we know. The relations of THINGS remain unchanged, by whatever system.
By the word THINGS is to be understood any object of thought, that
is any thought upon which any other thought is employed, with an
apprehension of distinction.
The relations of these remain unchanged; and such is the material
of our knowledge. What is the cause of life? that is, how was it
produced, or what agencies distinct from life have acted or act
upon life? All recorded generations of mankind have weariedly busied
themselves in inventing answers to this question; and the result
has been,--Religion. Yet, that the basis of all things cannot be,
as the popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident.
Mind, as far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond
that experience how vain is argument! cannot create, it can only
perceive. It is said also to be the cause. But cause is only a
word expressing a certain state of the human mind with regard to
the manner in which two thoughts are apprehended to be related to
each other. If any one desires to know how unsatisfactorily the
popular philosophy employs itself upon this great question, they
need only impartially reflect upon the manner in which thoughts
develop themselves in their minds. It is infinitely improbable that
the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar to mind.
[1815; publ. 1840]