Except We Become ...
In this chapter we shall concern ourselves with a number of
personalities from the more or less recent past of the cultural life of
Britain, each of whom was a spiritual kinsman of Goethe, and so a
living illustration of the fact that the true source of knowledge in
man must be sought, and can be found, outside the limits of his modern
adult consciousness. Whilst none of them was a match for Goethe as
regards universality and scientific lucidity, they are all
characteristic of an immediacy of approach to certain essential truths,
which in the sense we mean is not found in Goethe. It enabled them to
express one or the other of these truths in a form that makes them
suitable as sign-posts on our own path of exploration. We shall find
repeated opportunity in the later pages of this book to remember just
what these men saw and thought.
* *
*
The first is Thomas Reid (1710-96), the Scottish philosopher and
advocate of common sense as the root of philosophy.1 After having
served for some years as a minister in the Church of Scotland, Reid
became professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, whence he
was called to Glasgow as the successor of Adam Smith. Through his birth
in Strachan, Kincardine, he belonged to the same part of Scotland from
which Kant's ancestors had come. Two brief remarks of Goethe show that
he knew of the Scotsman's philosophy, and that he appreciated his
influence on contemporary philosophers.2
Reid, like his contemporary Kant, felt his philosophical conscience
stirred by Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, and, like Kant, set himself
the task of opposing it. Unlike Kant, however, whose philosophic system
was designed to arrest man's reason before the abyss into which Hume
threatened to cast it, Reid contrives to detect the bridge that leads
safely across this abyss. Even though it was not granted to him
actually to set foot on this bridge (this, in his time, only Goethe
managed to do), he was able to describe it in a manner especially
helpful for our own purpose.
The first of the three books in which Reid set out the results of his
labours appeared in 1764 under the title, Inquiry into the Human Mind
on the Principles of Common Sense. The other two, Essays on the
Intellectual Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man,
appeared twenty years later. In these books Reid had in view a more
all-embracing purpose than in his first work. The achievement of this
purpose, however, required a greater spiritual power than was granted
to him. Comparing his later with his earlier work, Reid's biographer,
A. Campbell Fraser, says:
'Reid's Essays form, as it were, the inner court of the temple of which
the Aberdonian Inquiry is the vestibule. But the vestibule is a more
finished work of constructive skill than the inner court, for the aged
architect appears at last as if embarrassed by accumulated material.
The Essays, greater in bulk, perhaps less deserve a place among modern
philosophical classics than the Inquiry, notwithstanding its narrower
scope, confined as it is to man's perception of the extended world, as
an object lesson on the method of appeal to common sense.'
Whilst the ideas of Kant, by which he tried in his way to oppose Hume's
philosophy, have become within a short space of time the common
possession of men's minds, it was the fate of Reid's ideas to find
favour among only a restricted circle of friends. Moreover, they
suffered decisive misunderstanding and distortion through the efforts
of well-meaning disciples. This was because Kant's work was a late
fruit of an epoch of human development which had lasted for centuries
and in his time began to draw to its close, while Reid's work
represents a seed of a new epoch yet to come. Here lies the reason also
for his failure to develop his philosophy beyond the achievements
contained in his first work. It is on the latter, therefore, that we
shall chiefly draw for presenting Reid's thoughts.
*
The convincing nature of Hume's argumentation, together with the
absurdity of the conclusions to which it led, aroused in Reid a
suspicion that the premises on which Hume's thoughts were built, and
which he, in company with all his predecessors, had assumed quite
uncritically, contained some fundamental error. For both as a
Christian, a philosopher, and a man in possession of common sense, Reid
had no doubt as to the absurdity and destructiveness of the conclusions
to which Hume's reasoning had led him.
'For my own satisfaction, I entered into a serious examination of the
principles upon which this sceptical system is built; and was not a
little surprised to find that it leans with its whole weight upon a
hypothesis, which is ancient indeed, and hath been very generally
received by philosophers, but of which I could find no solid proof. The
hypothesis I mean is, That nothing is perceived but what is in the mind
which perceives it: That we do not really perceive the things that are
external, but only certain images and pictures of them imprinted upon
the mind, which are called impressions and ideas.
'If this be true, supposing certain impressions and ideas to exist
presently in my mind, I cannot, from their existence, infer the
existence of anything else; my impressions and ideas are the only
existences of which I can have any knowledge or conception; and they
are such fleeting and transitory beings, that they can have no
existence at all, any longer than I am conscious of them. So that, upon
this hypothesis, the whole universe about me, bodies and spirits, sun,
moon, stars, and earth, friends and relations, all things without
exception, which I imagined to have a permanent existence whether I
thought of them or not vanish at once:
'And, like the baseless fabric of this vision ... Leave not a rack
behind.
'I thought it unreasonable, upon the authority of philosophers, to
admit a hypothesis which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy, all
religion and virtue, and all common sense: and finding, that all the
systems which I was acquainted with, were built upon this hypothesis, I
resolved to enquire into this subject anew, without regard to any
hypothesis.'
The following passage from the first chapter of the Inquiry reveals
Reid as a personality who was not dazzled to the same extent as were
his contemporaries by the brilliance of the onlooker-consciousness:
'If it [the mind] is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes it,
I find I have been only in an enchanted castle, imposed upon by
spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how 1 have been
deluded; I am ashamed of my frame, and can hardly forbear expostulating
with my destiny: Is this thy pastime, O Nature, to put such tricks upon
a silly creature, and then to take off the mask, and show him how he
hath been befooled? If this is the philosophy of human nature, my soul
enter thou not into her secrets. It is surely the forbidden tree of
knowledge; I no sooner taste it, than I perceive myself naked, and
stript of all things - yea even of my very self. I see myself, and the
whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like
Epicurus's atoms, dance about in emptiness.
'But what if these profound disquisitions into the first principles of
human nature, do naturally and necessarily plunge a man into this abyss
of scepticism? May we not reasonably judge from what hath happened? Des
Cartes no sooner began to dig in this mine, than scepticism was ready
to break in upon him. He did what he could to shut it out. Malebranche
and Locke, who dug deeper, found the difficulty of keeping out this
enemy still to increase; but they laboured honestly in the design. Then
Berkeley, who carried on the work, despairing of securing all,
bethought himself of an expedient: By giving up the material world,
which he thought might be spared without loss, and even with advantage,
he hoped by an impregnable partition to secure the world of spirits.
But, alas! the Treatise of Human Nature wantonly sapped the foundation
of this partition and drowned all in one universal deluge.' (Chapter I,
Sections vi-vii.)
What Reid so pertinently describes here as the 'enchanted castle' is
nothing else than the human head, which knows of no occurrence beyond
its boundaries, because it has forgotten that it is only the
end-product of a living existence outside of, and beyond, itself. We
see here that Reid is gifted with the faculty of entering this castle
without forfeiting his memory of the world outside; and so even from
within its walls, he could recognize its true nature. To a high degree
this helped him to keep free of those deceptions to which the majority
of his contemporaries fell victim, and to which so many persons are
still subject to-day.
It is in this way that Reid could make it one of the cardinal
principles of his observations to test all that the head thinks by
relating it to the rest of human nature and to allow nothing to stand,
which does not survive this test. In this respect the argument he sets
over against the Cartesian, 'cogito ergo sum' is characteristic: ' "I
am thinking," says he, "therefore I am": and is it not as good
reasoning to say, I am sleeping, therefore I am? If a body moves, it
must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest, it must exist likewise.'
The following summarizes the position to which Reid is led when he
includes the whole human being in his philosophical inquiries.
Reid admits that, when the consciousness that has become aware of
itself surveys that which lies within its own horizon, it finds nothing
else there but transient pictures. These pictures in themselves bring
to the mind no experience of a lasting existence outside itself. There
is no firm evidence of the existence of either an outer material world
to which these pictures can be related, or of an inner spiritual entity
which is responsible for them. To be able to speak of an existence in
either realm is impossible for a philosophy which confines its
attention solely to the mere picture-content of the waking
consciousness.
But man is not only a percipient being; he is also a being of will, and
as such he comes into a relationship with the world which can be a
source of rich experience. If one observes this relationship, one is
bound to notice that it is based on the self-evident assumption that
one possesses a lasting individuality, whose actions deal with a
lasting material world. Any other way of behaviour would contradict the
common sense of man; where we meet with it we are faced with a lunatic.
Thus philosophy and common sense seem to stand in irreconcilable
opposition to each other. But this opposition is only apparent. It
exists so long as philosophy thinks it is able to come to valid
conclusions without listening to the voice of common sense, believing
itself to be too exalted to need to do so. Philosophy, then, does not
realize 'that it has no other root but the principles of Common Sense;
it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them: severed from
this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots.'
(I, 5.)
At the moment when the philosophical consciousness ceases to regard
itself as the sole foundation of its existence and recognizes that it
can say nothing about itself without considering the source from which
it has evolved, it attains the possibility of seeing the content of its
experience in a new light. For it is no longer satisfied with
considering this content in the completed form in which it presents
itself. Rather does it feel impelled to investigate the process which
gives rise to this content as an end-product (the 'impressions' and
'ideas' of Hume and his predecessors).
Reid has faith in the fact - for his common sense assures him of it -
that a lasting substantiality lies behind the world of the senses, even
if for human consciousness it exists only so long as impressions of it
are received via the bodily senses. Similarly, he has faith in the fact
that his consciousness, although existing but intermittently, has as
its bearer a lasting self. Instead of allowing this intuitively given
knowledge to be shaken by a mere staring at fugitive pictures, behind
which the real existence of self and world is hidden, he seeks instead
in both directions for the origin of the pictures and will not rest
until he has found the lasting causes of their transient appearances.
In one direction Reid finds himself led to the outer boundary of the
body, where sense perception has its origin. This prompts him to
investigate the perceptions of the five known senses: smelling,
tasting, hearing, touching and seeing, which he discusses in this
order. In the other direction he finds himself led - and here we meet
with a special attribute of Reid's whole philosophical outlook - to the
realm of human speech. For speech depends upon an inner, intelligent
human activity, which, once learnt, becomes a lasting part of man's
being, quite outside the realm of his philosophizing consciousness, and
yet forming an indispensable instrument for this consciousness.
The simplest human reasoning, prompted only by common sense, and the
subtlest philosophical thought, both need language for their
expression. Through his ability to speak, man lifts himself above an
instinctive animal existence, and yet he develops this ability at an
infantile stage, when, in so far as concerns the level of his
consciousness and his relationship to the world, he hardly rises above
the level of the animal. It requires a highly developed intelligence to
probe the intricacies of language, yet complicated tongues were spoken
in human history long before man awoke to his own individual
intelligence. Just as each man learns to think through speaking, so did
humanity as a whole. Thus speech can become a means for acquiring
insight into the original form of human intelligence. For in speech the
common sense of man, working unconsciously within him, meets the fully
awakened philosophical consciousness.3
The way in which the two paths of observation have here been set out
must not give rise to the expectation that they are discussed by Reid
in a similarly systematic form. For this, Reid lacked the sufficient
detachment from his own thoughts. As he presents his observations in
the Inquiry they seem to be nothing but a systematic description of the
five senses, broken into continually by linguistic considerations of
the kind indicated above. So, for example, many of his more important
statements about language are found in his chapter on 'Hearing'.
Our task will be to summarize Reid's work, taking from his description,
so often full of profound observations, only what is essential to
illustrate his decisive discoveries. This requires that (keeping to Mr.
Eraser's picture) we consider separately the two pillars supporting the
roof of the temple's forecourt: speech and sense-impressions. We will
start with speech.
*
Reid notes as a fundamental characteristic of human language that it
includes two distinct elements: first, the purely acoustic element,
represented by the sheer succession of sounds, and secondly the variety
of meanings represented by various groups of sounds, meanings which
seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such. This state of
language, where the sound-value of the word and its value as a sign to
denote a thing signified by it, have little or nothing to do with one
another, is certainly not the primeval one. In the contemporary state
of language, which Reid calls artificial language, we must see a
development from a former condition, which Reid calls natural language.
So long as this latter condition obtained, man expressed in the sound
itself what he felt impelled to communicate to his fellows. In those
days sound was not merely an abstract sign, but a gesture, which
moreover was accompanied and supported by the gestures of the limbs.
Even to-day man, at the beginning of his life, still finds himself in
that relationship to language which was natural to all men in former
times. The little child acquires the ability to speak through the
imitation of sounds, becoming aware of them long before it understands
the meaning accorded to the various groups of sounds in the artificial
state of contemporary adult speech. That the child's attention should
be directed solely to the sound, and not to the abstract meaning of the
individual words, is indeed the prerequisite of learning to speak. If,
says Reid, the child were to understand immediately the conceptual
content of the words it hears, it would never learn to speak at all.
When the adult of to-day uses language in its artificial state, words
are only signs for things signified by them. As he speaks, his
attention is directed exclusively towards this side of language; the
pure sound of the words he uses remains outside the scope of his
awareness. The little child, on the other hand, has no understanding of
the meaning of words and therefore lives completely in the experience
of pure sound. In the light of this, Reid comes to the conclusion, so
important for what follows, that with the emergence of a certain form
of consciousness, in this case that of the intellectual content of
words, another form submerges, a form in which the experience of the
pure sound of words prevails. The adult, while in one respect ahead of
the child, yet in another is inferior, for the effect of this change is
a definite impoverishment in soul-experience. Reid puts this as
follows:
'It is by natural signs chiefly that we give force and energy to
language; and the less language has of them, it is the less expressive
and persuasive. ... Artificial signs signify, but they do not express;
they speak to the understanding, as algebraic characters may do, but
the passions and the affections and the will hear them not: these
continue dormant and inactive, till we speak to them in the language of
nature, to which they are all attention and obedience.'
We have followed Reid so far in his study of language, because it is
along this way that he came to form the concepts that were to serve him
as a key for his all-important findings in the realm of
sense-experience. These are the concepts which bear on the connexion
between the sign and the thing signified; the distinction between the
artificial and the natural state of language; and the disappearance of
certain primeval human capacities for experience, of which Reid says
that they are brought by the child into the world, but fade as his
intellectual capacities develop.
*
As soon as one begins to study Reid's observations in the realm of
sense-experience, one meets with a certain difficulty, noticeable
earlier but not so strikingly. The source of it is that Reid was
obliged to relate the results of his observations only to the five
senses known in his day, whereas in fact his observations embrace a far
greater field of human sense-perception. Thus a certain disharmony
creeps into his descriptions and makes his statements less convincing,
especially for someone who does not penetrate to its real cause.
However this may be, it need not concern us here; what matter to us are
Reid's actual observations. For these led him to the important
distinction between two factors in our act of acquiring knowledge of
the outer world, each of which holds an entirely different place in
ordinary consciousness. Reid distinguishes them as 'sensation' and
'perception'. It is through the latter that we become aware of the
object as such. But we are mistaken if we regard the content of this
perception as identical with the sum total of the sensations which are
caused in our consciousness by the particular object. For these
sensations are qualitatively something quite different, and, although
without them no perception of the object is possible, they do not by
themselves convey a knowledge of the thing perceived. Only, because our
attention is so predominantly engaged by the object under perception,
we pay no heed to the content of our sensation.
To take an example, the impressions of roundness, angularity,
smoothness, roughness, colour, etc., of a table contain, all told,
nothing that could assure us of the existence of the object 'table' as
the real content of an external world. How, then, do we receive the
conviction of the latter's existence? Reid's answer is, by entering
into an immediate intuitive relationship with it. It is true that to
establish this relationship we need the stimuli coming from the
impressions which our mind receives through the various senses. Yet
this must not induce us to confuse the two.
When nature speaks to man through his senses, something occurs exactly
analogous to the process when man communicates with man through the
spoken word. In both cases the perception, that is, the result of the
process of perception, is something quite other than the sum of
sensations underlying it. Per-ceiving by means of the senses is none
other than a re-ceiving of nature's language; and this language, just
like human language, bears two entirely different elements within it.
According as one or the other element prevails in man's intercourse
with nature, this intercourse will be either 'natural' or 'artificial'
- to use the terms by which Reid distinguished the two stages of human
speech.
Just as every human being must once have listened only to the pure
sound of the spoken word on a wholly sentient level in order to acquire
the faculty of speaking, so also, in order to learn nature's language,
the soul must once have been totally surrendered to the pure
impressions of the senses. And just as with time the spoken word
becomes a symbol for that which is signified by it, the consciousness
turning to the latter and neglecting the actual sound-content of the
word, so also in its intercourse with nature the soul, with its growing
interest in the thing signified, turns its attention more and more away
from the actual experiences of the senses.
From this it follows that a philosophy which seeks to do justice to
man's whole being must not be satisfied with examining the given
content of human consciousness, but must strive to observe the actual
process to which this content owes its emergence. In practice this
means that a philosopher who understands his task aright must strive to
reawaken in himself a mode of experience which is naturally given to
man in his early childhood. Reid expresses this in the Inquiry in the
following way:
'When one is learning a language, he attends to the sounds, but when he
is master of it, he attends only to the sense of what he would express.
If this is the case, we must become as little children again, if we
will be philosophers: we must overcome habits which have been gathering
strength ever since we began to think; habits, the usefulness of which
atones for the difficulty it creates for the philosopher in discovering
the first principles of the human mind.'
'We must become as little children again, if we will be philosophers!'
The phrase appears here almost in passing, and Reid never came back to
it again. And yet in it is contained the Open Sesame which gives access
to the hidden spirit-treasures of the world. In this unawareness of
Reid's of the importance of what he thus had found we must see the
reason for his incapacity to develop his philosophy beyond its first
beginnings. This handicap arose from the fact that in all his thinking
he was guided by a picture of the being of man which - as a child of
his time, dominated by the contemporary religious outlook - he could
never realize distinctly. Yet without a clear conception of this
picture no justice can be done to Reid's concept of common sense. Our
next task, therefore, must be to evoke this picture as clearly as we
can
* *
*
The following passage in Reid's Inquiry provides a key for the
understanding of his difficulty in conceiving an adequate picture of
man's being. In this passage Reid maintains that all art is based on
man's experience of the natural language of things, and that in every
human being there lives an inborn artist who is more or less crippled
by man's growing accustomed to the state of artificial language in his
intercourse with the world. In continuation of the passage quoted on
page 99 Reid says:
'It were easy to show, that the fine arts of the musician, the painter,
the actor, and the orator, so far as they are expressive; although the
knowledge of them requires in us a delicate taste, a nice judgment, and
much study and practice; yet they are nothing else but the language of
nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have unlearned by
disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering it.
'Abolish the use of articulate sounds and writing among mankind for a
century, and every man would be a painter, an actor, and an orator. We
mean not to affirm that such an expedient is practicable; or if it
were, that the advantage would counterbalance the loss; but that, as
men are led by nature and necessity to converse together they will use
every means in their power to make themselves understood; and where
they cannot do this by artificial signs, they will do it as far as
possible by natural ones: and he that understands perfectly the use of
natural signs, must be the best judge in all expressive arts.'
When Reid says that there are certain characteristics - and these just
of the kind whose development truly ennobles human life - which the
soul brings with it into the world, a picture of man is evoked in us in
which the supersensible part of his being appears as an entity whose
existence reaches further back than the moment of birth and even the
first beginnings of the body. Now such a conception of man is in no way
foreign to humanity, in more ancient times it was universally
prevalent, and it still lives on to-day, if merely traditionally, in
the eastern part of the world. It is only in the West that from a
certain period it ceased to be held. This was the result of a change
which entered into human memory in historical times, just as the
re-dawning of the old knowledge of man's pre-existence, of which Reid
is a symptom, is a result of another corresponding alteration in the
memory-powers of man in modern times.
For men of old it was characteristic that alongside the impressions
they received in earthly life through the senses (which in any case
were far less intense than they are to-day), they remembered
experiences of a purely supersensible kind, which gave them assurance
that before the soul was knit together with a physical body it had
existed in a cosmic state purely spiritual in nature. The moment in
history when this kind of memory disappeared is that of the transition
from the philosophy of Plato to that of Aristotle. Whereas Plato was
convinced by clear knowledge that the soul possesses characteristics
implanted in it before conception, Aristotle recognized a bodiless
state of the soul only in the life after death. For him the beginning
of the soul's existence was identical with that of the body.
The picture of man, taught for the first time by Aristotle, still
required about twice four hundred years - from the fourth pre-Christian
to the fourth post-Christian century - before it became so far the
common possession of men that the Church Father Augustine (354-430)
could base his teaching on it - a teaching which moulded man's outlook
on himself for the coming centuries right up to our own time.
The following passage from Augustine's Confessions shows clearly how he
was compelled to think about the nature of the little child:
'This age, whereof I have no remembrance, which I take on others'
words, and guess from other infants that I have passed, true though the
guess be, I am yet loath to count in this life of mine which I live in
this world. For no less than that which I lived in my mother's womb, is
it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness. But if I was shapen in
iniquity and in sin my mother did conceive me, where, I beseech thee, O
my God, where, Lord, or when, was I thy servant guiltless? But lo! that
period I pass by; and what have I to do with that of which I can recall
no vestige?'4
On the grounds of such experience, Augustine was unable to picture
man's being in any other way than by seeing him, from the first moment
of his life, as subject to the condition of the human race which
resulted from the Fall. Thus he exclaims in his Confessions: 'Before
Thee, O God, no-one is free from sin, not even the child which has
lived but a single day on the earth.' In so far as there was any
question of the soul's arising from this fallen state, it was deemed
unable to attain this by any effort of its own, but to depend on the
gifts of grace which the Church was able to dispense through the
Sacraments.
Compare with this the present-day scientific conception of human
nature, as it dominates the thought of specialist and layman alike.
Here man appears, both in body and soul, as a sum of inherited
characteristics, of characteristics, that is to say, which have been
passed on by way of sexual propagation and gradually emerge into full
manifestation as the individual grows up. Apart from this inherited
predestination the soul is held to present itself, in Locke's classical
phrase, as a tabula rasa upon which are stamped all manner of external
impressions.
The similarity between this modern picture of man and the earlier
theological one is striking. In both cases the central assumption is
that human development from child to man consists in the unfolding of
certain inherited characteristics which are capable of further specific
modification under influences proceeding from outside. The only
difference between the two pictures is that in the modern one the
concepts of heredity and adaptation have been formed without special
application to the ethical characteristics of the soul.
It is clear that from both Augustine's and the modern scientific
viewpoint there is no sense in requiring - as Reid did - those who seek
the truth about themselves and the world to recover a condition which
had been theirs as children. Nor from this point of view is there any
justification to call on a Common Sense, innate in man, to sit in
judgment on the philosophical efforts of the adult reason.
*
That even in the days of Augustine the original conception of human
nature had not disappeared entirely, is shown by the appearance of
Augustine's opponent Pelagius, called the 'arch-heretic'. To consider
him at this point in our discussion will prove helpful for our
understanding of Reid's historic position in the modern age.
What interests us here in Pelagius's doctrine (leaving aside all
questions concerning the meaning of the Sacraments, etc.), is the
picture of man which must have lived in him for him to teach as he did.
Leaving his Irish-Scottish homeland and arriving about the year 400 in
Rome, where on account of the unusual purity of his being he soon came
to be held in the highest esteem, Pelagius found himself obliged to
come out publicly against Augustine, for he felt that Augustine's
teachings denied all free will to man. In the purely passive surrender
of man to the will of God, as Augustine taught it, he could not but see
danger for the future development of Christian humanity. How radically
he diverged from Augustine in his view of man we may see from such of
his leading thoughts as follow:
'Each man begins his life in the same condition as Adam.'
'All good or evil for which in life we are deserving of praise or blame
is done by ourselves and is not born with us.'
'Before the personal will of man comes into action there is nothing in
him but what God has placed there.'
'It is therefore left to the free will of man whether he falls into
sin, as also whether through following Christ he raises himself out of
it again.'
Pelagius could think in this way because he came from a part of Europe
where the older form of human memory, already at that time almost
extinct in the South, was in some degree still active. For him it was
therefore a matter of direct experience that the development of man
from childhood onwards was connected with a diminution of certain
original capacities of the soul. Yet he was so far a child of his age
as to be no longer capable of seeing whence these capacities
originated.
To provide the necessary corrective to Augustine's doctrine of
inheritance, Pelagius would have had to be able to see in the first
years of life both a beginning of the earthly and a termination of the
pre-earthly existence of the soul. The imperfections of his picture of
man, however, led him to underestimate, even to deny, the significance
of heredity and so of original sin in human life. For an age which no
longer had any direct experience of the soul's pre-natal life, the
doctrines of Augustine were undoubtedly more appropriate than those of
Pelagius; Augustine was in fact the more modern of the two.
And now, if we move forward a dozen centuries and compare Thomas Reid
and Immanuel Kant from this same point of view, we find the same
conception of man again triumphant. But there is an essential
difference: Kant carried all before him because he based himself on an
age-old view of human nature, whereas Reid, uncomprehended up to our
own day, pointed to a picture of man only just then dawning on the
horizon of the future. Just as through Pelagius there sounded something
like a last call to European humanity not to forget the cosmic nature
of the soul, so through Reid the memory of this nature announced its
first faint renewal. It is common to both that their voices lacked the
clarity to make themselves heard among the other voices of their times;
and with both the reason was the same: neither could perceive in
fullness - the one no longer, the other not yet - the picture of man
which ensouled their ideas.
The certainty of Reid's philosophical instinct, if such an expression
be allowed, and at the same time his tragic limitations, due to an
inability fully to understand the origin of this instinct, come out
clearly in the battle he waged against the 'idea' as his immediate
predecessors understood it. We know that Plato introduced this word
into the philosophical language of mankind. In Greek ιδÎα (from ιδεá¿Î½, to see) means something of
which one knows that it exists, because one sees it. It was therefore
possible to use the word 'to see' as Plato did, because in his day it
covered both sensible and supersensible perception. For Plato, knowing
consisted in the soul's raising itself to perceiving the objective,
world-forming IDEAS, and this action comprised at the same time a
recollection of what the soul had seen while it lived, as an Idea among
Ideas, before its appearance on earth.
As long as Plato's philosophy continued to shape their thought, men
went on speaking more or less traditionally of Ideas as real
supersensible beings. When, however, the Aristotelian mode of thinking
superseded the Platonic, the term 'Idea' ceased to be used in its
original sense; so much so that, when Locke and other modern
philosophers resorted to it in order to describe the content of the
mind, they did so in complete obliviousness of its first significance.
It is thus that in modern philosophy, and finally in ordinary modern
usage, 'idea' came to be a word with many meanings. Sometimes it
signifies a sense-impression, sometimes a mental representation,
sometimes the thought, concept or essential nature of a thing. The only
thing common to these various meanings is an underlying implication
that an idea is a purely subjective item in human consciousness,
without any assured correspondence to anything outside.
It was against this view of the idea that Reid took the field, going so
far as to label the philosophy holding it the 'ideal system'. He failed
to see, however, that in attacking the abstract use of the term he was
actually in a position to restore to it its original, genuine meaning.
If, instead of simply throwing the word overboard, he had been able to
make use of it in its real meaning, he would have expressed himself
with far greater exactitude and consistency.5 He was prevented from
doing this by his apparent ignorance of the earlier Greek philosophers,
Plato included. All he seems to have known of their teachings came from
inferior, second-hand reports of a later and already decadent period.
* *
*
There are two historic personalities, both in England, who witness to
the fact that the emergence of Reid's philosophy on the stage of
history was by no means an accidental event but that it represents a
symptom of a general reappearance of the long-forgotten picture of man,
in which birth no more than death sets up an absolute limit to human
existence. They are Thomas Traherne (1638-74) and William Wordsworth
(1770-1850).
Wordsworth's work and character are so well known that there is no need
to speak of them here in detail.6 For our purpose we shall pay special
attention only to his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood, where he shows himself in possession
of a memory (at any rate at the time when he wrote the poem) of the
pre-natal origin of the soul, and of a capacity for experiencing, at
certain moments, the frontier which the soul crosses at birth.
If, despite the widespread familiarity of the Ode, we here quote
certain passages from it, we do so because, like many similar things,
it has fallen a victim to the intellectualism of our time in being
regarded merely as a piece of poetic fantasy. We shall take the poet's
words as literally as he himself uttered them. We read:
'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended."
And later:
'Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.''
The fact that Wordsworth in his later years gave no further indication
of such experiences need not prevent us from taking quite literally
what he says here. The truth is that an original faculty faded away
with increasing age, somewhat as happened with Reid when he could no
longer continue his philosophical work along its original lines.
Wordsworth's Ode is the testament of the childhood forces still
persisting but already declining within him; it is significant that he
set it down in about the same year of life (his thirty-sixth) as that
in which Traherne died and in which Goethe, seeking renewal of his
being, took flight to Italy.7
*
Of Traherne, too, we shall say here only as much as our present
consideration and the further aims of this book require. We cannot
concern ourselves with the remarkable events which led, half a century
ago, to the discovery and identification of his long-lost writings by
Bertram Dobell. Nor can we deal with the details of the eventful life
and remarkable spiritual development of this contemporary of the Civil
War. These matters are dealt with in Dobell's introduction to his
edition of Traherne's poems, as also by Gladys I. Wade in her work,
Thomas Traherne. Our gratitude for the labours of these two writers by
which they have provided mankind with the knowledge of the character
and the work of this unique personality cannot hinder us, however, from
stating that both were prevented by the premises of their own view of
the world from rightly estimating that side of Traherne which is
important for us in this book, and with which we shall specially
concern ourselves in the following pages.
Later in this chapter we shall discuss Dobell's philosophical
misinterpretation of Traherne, to which he fell victim because he
maintained his accustomed spectator standpoint in regard to his object
of study. Miss Wade has, indeed, been able to pay the right tribute to
Traherne, the mystic, whose inner (and also outer) biography she was
able to detect by taking seriously Traherne's indications concerning
his mystical development. Her mind, however, was too rigidly focused on
this side of Traherne's life - his self-training by an iron inner
discipline and his toilsome ascent from the experience of Nothingness
to a state of Beatific Vision. This fact, combined with her
disinclination to overcome the Augustinian picture of man in herself,
prevented her from taking Traherne equally seriously where he speaks as
one who is endowed with a never interrupted memory of his primeval
cosmic consciousness - notwithstanding the fact that Traherne himself
has pointed to this side of his nature as the most significant for his
fellow-men.
Of the two works of Traherne which Dobell rescued from oblivion, on
both of which we shall draw for our exposition, one contains his poems,
the other his prose writings. The title of the latter is Centuries of
Meditations. The title page of one of the two manuscripts containing
the collection of the poetical writings introduces these as Poems of
Felicity, Containing Divine Reflections on the Native Objects of an
Infant-Eye. As regards the title 'Centuries of Meditations' we are
ignorant of the meaning Traherne may have attached to it, and what he
meant by calling the four parts of the book, 'First', 'Second', etc.,
Century. The book itself represents a manual of devotion for meditative
study by the reader.
Let our first quotation be one from the opening paragraph of the third
'Century' in which Traherne introduces himself as the bearer of certain
uncommon powers of memory and, arising from these powers, a particular
mission as a teacher:
'Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that
divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I
can see the Universe. By the gift of God they attended me into the
world, and by His special favour I remember them till now. Verily they
seem the greatest gifts His wisdom could bestow, for without them all
other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by books, and
therefore I will teach them by experience.' (Ill, 1.)
The picture thus remaining with him of his nature of soul in his
earliest years on earth he describes as follows:
'Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious
apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared
new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and
beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world
was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was
Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostacy, I
collected again by the highest reason. I was entertained like an Angel
with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the
peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and
could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Eternity,
and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be
the heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of
the learned never unfold?' (Ill, 1, 2.)
In a different form the same experience comes to expression in the
opening lines of Traherne's poem, Wonder:
'How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here I
When first among his Works I did appear
O how their GLORY did me crown!
The World resembled his ETERNITIE,
In which my Soul did Walk;
And evry Thing that I did see
Did with me talk.'8
The picture of man thus sketched by Traherne is as close to Reid's as
it is remote from Augustine's. This remoteness comes plainly to
expression in the way Traherne and Augustine regard the summons of
Christ to His disciples to become as little children, a summons to
which Reid was led, as we have seen, on purely philosophical grounds.
Let us first of all recall the words of Christ as recorded by Matthew
in his 18th and 19th chapters:
'And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of
them, and said: Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and
become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of
Heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child,
the same is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven.' (xviii, 2-4.)
'Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me: for of
such is the kingdom of Heaven.' (xix, 14.)
Augustine refers to these words when he concludes that examination of
his childhood memories which he undertook in order to prove the
depravity of the soul from its first day on earth. He says: 'In the
littleness of children didst Thou, our king, give us a symbol of
humility when Thou didst say: Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.'
If we glance back from what Augustine says here to the original
passages in the Gospel just quoted, we see what a remarkable alteration
he makes. Of the first passage only the last sentence is taken, and
this in Augustine's mind is fused into one with the second passage.
Thereby the admonition of Christ through one's own effort to become as
one once was as a child disappears completely. The whole passage thus
takes on a meaning corresponding to that passive attitude to the divine
will inculcated by Augustine and opposed by Pelagius, and it is in this
sense that the words of Christ have sunk into the consciousness of
Western Christianity and are usually taken to-day.
We may see how differently this injunction of Christ lived in
Traherne's consciousness from the following passage out of his
Centuries:
'Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, ye must be born again and become
a little child that will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, is deeper
far than is generally believed. It is not only in a careless reliance
upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in
the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our
passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity
also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended.' (Ill, 5.)
With Traherne also the passage in question has been fused together with
another utterance of Christ, from John's account of Christ's
conversation with Nicodemus:
'Verily, verily I say unto you, except a man be born again, he cannot
see the Kingdom of God.' (John iii, 3.)
What conception of the infant condition of man must have existed in a
soul for it to unite these two passages from the Gospels in this way?
Whereas for Augustine it is because of its small stature and
helplessness that the child becomes a symbol for the spiritual
smallness and helplessness of man as such, compared with the
overwhelming power of the divine King, for Traherne it is the child's
nearness to God which is most present to him, and which must be
regained by the man who strives for inner perfection.
Traherne could bear in himself such a picture of man's infancy because,
as he himself emphasizes, he was in possession of an unbroken memory of
the experiences which the soul enjoys before it awakens to earthly
sense-perception. The following passage from the poem, My Spirit, gives
a detailed picture of the early state in which the soul has experiences
and perceptions quite different from those of its later life. (We may
recall Reid's indication of how the child receives the natural language
of things.)
'An Object, if it were before
Mine Ey, was by Dame Nature's Law
Within my Soul: Her Store
Was all at once within me; all her Treasures
Were my immediat and internal Pleasures;
Substantial Joys, which did inform my Mind.
'... I could not tell
Whether the Things did there
Themselvs appear,
Which in my Spirit truly seem'd to dwell:
Or whether my conforming Mind
Were not ev'n all that therein shin'd.'
Further detail is added to this picture by the description, given in
the poem The Praeparative, of the soul's non-experience of the body at
that early stage. The description is unmistakably one of an experience
during the time between conception and birth.
'My Body being dead, my Limbs unknown;
Before I skill'd to prize
Those living Stars, mine Eys;
Before or Tongue or Cheeks I call'd mine own,
Before I knew these Hands were mine,
Or that my Sinews did my Members join;
When neither Nostril, Foot, nor Ear,
As yet could be discerned or did appear;
I was within
A House I knew not; newly cloath'd with Skin.
Then was my Soul my only All to me,
A living endless Ey,
Scarce bounded with the Sky,
Whose Power, and Act, and Essence was to see;
I was an inward Sphere of Light,
Or an interminable Orb of Sight,
Exceeding that which makes the Days,
A vital Sun that shed abroad its Rays:
All Life, all Sense,
A naked, simple, pure Intelligence.''
In the stanza following upon this, Traherne makes a statement which is
of particular importance in the context of our present discussion.
After some additional description of the absence of all bodily needs he
says:
'Without disturbance then I did receiv
The tru Ideas of all Things'
The manuscript of this poem shows a small alteration in Traherne's hand
in the second of these two lines. Where we now read 'true Ideas', there
originally stood 'fair Ideas'. 'Fair' described Traherne's experience
as he immediately remembered it; the later alteration to 'true' shows
how well aware he was that his contemporaries might miss what he meant
by 'Idea', through taking it in the sense that had already become
customary in his time, namely, as a mere product of man's own mental
activity.
This precaution, however, has not saved Traherne from being
misinterpreted in our own day in precisely the way he feared - indeed,
by no less a person than his own discoverer, Dobell. It is the
symptomatic character of this misinterpretation which prompts us to
deal with it here.
*
In his attempt to classify the philosophical mode of thought behind
Traherne's writings, Dobell, to his own amazement, comes to the
conclusion that Traherne had anticipated Bishop Berkeley (1684-1753).
They seemed to him so alike that he does not hesitate to call Traherne
a 'Berkeleyan before Berkeley was born'. In proof of this he refers to
the poems, The Praeparative and My Spirit, citing from the latter the
passage given above (page 112), and drawing special attention to its
two concluding lines. Regarding this he says: 'I am much mistaken if
the theory of non-existence of independent matter, which is the essence
of Berkeley's system, is not to be found in this poem. The thought that
the whole exterior universe is not really a thing apart from and
independent of man's consciousness of it, but something which exists
only as it is perceived, is undeniably found in My Spirit:
The reader who has followed our exposition in the earlier parts of this
chapter can be in no doubt that, to find a philosophy similar to
Traherne's, he must look for it in Reid and not in Berkeley. Reid
himself rightly placed Berkeley amongst the representatives of the
'ideal system' of thought. For Berkeley's philosophy represents an
effort of the onlooker-consciousness, unable as it was to arrive at
certainty regarding the objective existence of a material world outside
itself, to secure recognition for an objective Self behind the flux of
mental phenomena. Berkeley hoped to do this by supposing that the
world, including God, consists of nothing but 'idea'-creating minds,
operating like the human mind as man himself perceives it. His world
picture, based (as is well known) entirely on optical experiences, is
the perfect example of a philosophy contrived by the one-eyed,
colourblind world-spectator.
We shall understand what in Traherne's descriptions reminded Dobell of
Berkeley, if we take into account the connexion of the soul with the
body at the time when, according to Traherne, it still enjoys the
untroubled perception of the true, the light-filled, Ideas of things.
In this condition the soul has only a dim and undifferentiated
awareness of its connexion with a spatially limited body ('I was within
a house I knew not, newly clothed with skin') and it certainly knows
nothing at all of the body as an instrument, through which the will can
be exercised in an earthly-spatial way ('My body being dead, my limbs
unknown'). Instead of this, the soul experiences itself simply as a
supersensible sense-organ and as such united with the far spaces of the
universe ('Before I skilled to prize those living stars, mine eyes. ...
Then was my soul my only All to me, a living endless eye, scarce
bounded with the sky').
At the time when the soul has experiences of the kind described by
Traherne, it is in a condition in which, as yet, no active contact has
been established between itself and the physical matter of the body and
thereby with gravity. Hence there is truth in the picture which
Traherne thus sketches from actual memory. The same cannot be said of
Berkeley's world-picture. The fact that both resemble each other in
certain features need not surprise us, seeing that Berkeley's picture
is, in its own way, a pure 'eye-picture' of the world. As such,
however, it is an illusion - for it is intended for a state of man for
which it is not suited, namely for adult man going upright on the
earth, directing his deeds within its material realm, and in this way
fashioning his own destiny.
Indeed, compared with Berkeley's eye-picture of the world, that of Reid
is in every respect a 'limb-picture'. For where he seeks for the origin
of our naïve assurance that a real material world exists, there he reverts
- guided by his common sense - to the experiences available to the soul
through the fact that the limbs of the body meet with the resistant
matter of the world. And whenever he turns to the various senses in his
search, it is always the will-activity of the soul within the sense he
is investigating - and so the limb-nature within it - to which he first
turns his attention. Because, unlike Berkeley, he takes into account
the experiences undergone by the soul when it leaves behind its primal
condition, Reid does not fall into illusion, but discovers a
fundamental truth concerning the nature of the world-picture
experienced by man in his adult age. This, in turn, enables him to
discover the nature of man's world picture in early childhood and to
recognize the importance of recovering it in later life as a foundation
for a true philosophy.
Assuredly, the philosopher who discovered that we must become as little
children again if we would be philosophers, is the one to whom we may
relate Traherne, but not Berkeley. And if we wish to speak of Traherne,
as Dobell tried to do, we speak correctly only if we call him a
'Reidean before Reid was born'.
* *
*
A little more than a hundred years after Thomas Traherne taught his
fellow-men 'from experience' that there is an original condition of
man's soul, before it is yet able to prize 'those living stars, mine
eyes', in which it is endowed with the faculty to see 'the true (fair)
Ideas of all things', Goethe was led to the realization that he had
achieved the possibility of 'seeing Ideas with the very eyes'. Although
he was himself not aware of it, the conception of the Idea was at this
moment restored through him to its true and original Platonic
significance.
The present chapter has shown us how this conception of the Idea is
bound up with the view that is held of the relationship between human
nature in early childhood and human nature in later life. We have seen
that, when Plato introduced the term Idea as an expression for
spiritual entities having a real and independent existence, men were
still in possession of some recollection of their own pre-earthly
existence. We then found Traherne saying from his recollections that in
the original form of man's consciousness his soul is endowed with the
faculty of seeing 'true' Ideas, and we found Reid on similar grounds
fighting the significance which the term 'idea' had assumed under his
predecessors. By their side we see Goethe as one in whom the faculty of
seeing Ideas appears for the first time in adult man as a result of a
systematic training of observation and thought.
If our view of the interdependence of the Platonic conception of the
Idea with the picture man has of himself is seen rightly, then Goethe
must have been the bearer of such a picture. Our expectation is shown
to be right by the following two passages from Goethe's autobiography,
Truth and Fiction.
In that part of his life story where Goethe concludes the report of the
first period of his childhood (Book II), he writes:
'Who is able to speak worthily of the fullness of childhood? We cannot
behold the little creatures which flit about before us otherwise than
with delight, nay, with admiration; for they generally promise more
than they perform and it seems that nature, among the other roguish
tricks that she plays us, here also especially designs to make sport of
us. The first organs she bestows upon children coming into the world,
are adapted to the nearest immediate condition of the creature, which,
unassuming and artless, makes use of them in the readiest way for its
present purposes. The child, considered in and for itself, with its
equals, and in relations suited to its powers, seems so intelligent and
rational, and at the same time so easy, cheerful and clever, that one
can hardly wish it further cultivation. If children grew up according
to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.'9
We find further evidence in Goethe's account of an event in his seventh
year, which shows how deeply his soul was filled at that time with the
knowledge of its kinship with the realm from which nature herself
receives its existence. This knowledge led him to approach the 'great
God of Nature' through an act of ritual conceived by himself. The boy
took a four-sectioned music stand and arranged on it all kinds of
natural specimens, minerals and the like, until the whole formed a kind
of pyramidal altar. On the top of this pyramid he placed some
fumigating candles, the burning of which was to represent the 'upward
yearning of the soul for its God'. In order to give nature herself an
active part in the ritual, he contrived to kindle the candles by
focusing upon them through a magnifying-glass the light of the rising
sun. Before this symbol of the unity of the soul with the divine in
nature the boy then paid his devotions.
'Unity of the soul with the divine in nature' - this was what lived
vividly as a conviction in the seven-year-old boy, impelling him to act
as 'nature's priest' (Wordsworth). The same impulse, in a metamorphosed
form, impelled the adult to go out in quest of an understanding of
nature which, as Traherne put it, was to bring back through highest
reason what once had been his by way of primeval intuition.
1 The present writer's interest in Reid was first aroused by a remark
of Rudolf Steiner, in his book A Theory of 'Knowledge according to
Goethe's World Conception.
2 In a comment on a letter Carlyle had written to him, and in a note
dealing with the contemporary philosophy in Germany.
3 This observation of Reid's shows that the origin of language is very
different from what the evolutionists since Darwin have imagined it to
be.
4 Confessions, Book I, Chapter 8.
5 As we have seen, the word had better luck with Goethe.
6 Wordsworth, with all his limitations, had a real affinity with Goethe
in his view of nature. Mr. Norman Lacey gives some indication of this
in his recent book, Wordsworth's View of Nature.
7 This same period of life played a decisive part in the spiritual
evolution of Rudolf Steiner, as may be seen in his autobiography, The
Story of My Life.
8 The difference in spelling between the prose and poetry excerpts
arises from the fact that whereas we can draw on Miss Wade's new
edition of the poems for Traherne's original spelling, we have as yet
only Dobell's edition of the Centuries, in which the spelling is
modernized.
9 Oxenford's translation.