APPEARANCE AND REALITY
Our conscious life is one unceasing change. From the first awakening
of consciousness to the actual present, no one moment has been the mere
repetition of another, and the moments which as we look back seem to
have made up our life are not separable elements of it but our own
divisions of a change that has been continuous. And as it has been, so
we know it will be until consciousness ceases with death.
Consciousness and life are in this respect one and the same, although
when we speak of our consciousness we think chiefly of a passive
receptivity, and when we speak of our life we think of an activity.
Consciousness as the unity of knowing and acting is a becoming. The
past is not left behind, it is with us in the form of memory; the
future is not a predetermined order which only a natural disability
prevents us from knowing, it is yet uncreated; conscious life is the
enduring present which grows with the past and makes the future.
This reality of consciousness is our continually changing experience.
But there is also another reality with which it seems to be in
necessary relation and also in complete contrast--this is the reality
of the material or physical universe. The world of physical reality
seems to be composed of a matter that cannot change in a space that is
absolutely unchangeable. This physical world seems made up of solid
things, formed out of matter. Change in physical science is only a
rearrangement of matter or an alteration of position in space.
This physical reality is not, as psychical reality is, {16} known to us
directly; it is an interpretation of our sense experience. Immediate
experience has objects, generally called sense data. These objects are
what we actually see in sensations of sight, what we actually hear in
sensations of sound, and so on; and they lead us to suppose or infer
physical objects--that is, objects that do not depend upon our
experience for their existence, but whose existence is the cause of our
having the experience. The process by which we infer the nature of the
external world from our felt experience is logical. It includes
perceiving, conceiving, thinking or reasoning. The object of the
logical process, the aim or ideal to which it seeks to attain, is
truth. Knowledge of reality is truth.
There are therefore two realities, the reality of our felt experience
from which all thinking sets out, and the reality which in thinking we
seek to know. The one reality is immediate; it is conscious experience
itself. The other reality is that which we infer from the fact of
experience, that by which we seek to explain our existence. The one we
feel, the other we think. If the difference between immediate
knowledge and mediate knowledge or inference lay in the feeling of
certainty alone or in the nature of belief, the distinction would not
be the difficult one that it is. The theories of idealism and realism
show how widely philosophers are divided on the subject. We are quite
as certain of some of the things that we can only infer as we are of
the things of which we are immediately aware. We cannot doubt, for
instance, that there are other persons besides ourselves, yet we can
have no distinct knowledge of any consciousness but one--our own. Our
knowledge that there are other minds is an inference from our
observation of the behaviour of some of the things we {17} directly
experience, and from the experience of our own consciousness. And even
those things which seem in direct relation to us--the things we see, or
hear, or touch--are immediately present in only a very small, perhaps
an infinitesimal, part of what we know and think of as their full
reality; all but this small part is inferred. From a momentary
sensation of sight, or sound, or touch we infer reality that far
exceeds anything actually given to us by the sensation.
Thinking is questioning experience. When our attention is suddenly
attracted by something--a flash of light, or a sound, or a twinge of
pain--consciously or unconsciously we say to ourself, What is that?
The _that_--a simple felt experience--contains a meaning, brings a
message, and we ask _what_? We distinguish the existence as an
appearance, and we seek to know the reality. The quest of the reality
which is made known to us by the appearance is the logical process of
thought. The end or purpose of this logical process is to replace the
immediate reality of the felt experience with a mediated-reality--that
is, a reality made known to us. Directly, therefore, that we begin to
think, the immediately present existence becomes an appearance, and
throughout the development of our thought it is taken to be something
that requires explanation. We seek to discover the reality which will
explain it.
It is in this distinction of appearance and reality that the problem of
truth arises. It does not depend upon any particular theory of
knowledge. The same fact is recognised by idealists and by realists.
Idealism may deny that the knowledge of independent reality is
possible; realism may insist that it is implied in the very fact of
consciousness itself--whichever is right, the reality which thinking
brings before the mind is quite {18} unlike and of a different order to
that which we immediately experience in feeling. And even if we know
nothing of philosophy, if we are ignorant of all theories of knowledge
and think of the nature of knowledge simply from the standpoint of the
natural man, the fact is essentially the same--the true reality of
things is something concealed from outward view, something to be found
out by science or by practical wisdom. Our knowledge of this reality
may be true, in this case only is it knowledge; or it may be false, in
which case it is not knowledge but opinion or error.
The reality then, the knowledge of which is truth, is not the immediate
reality of feeling but the inferred reality of thought. To have any
intelligible meaning, the affirmation that knowledge is true supposes
that there already exists a distinction between knowledge and the
reality known, between the being and the knowing of that which is
known. In immediate knowledge, in actual conscious felt experience
there is no such distinction, and therefore to affirm truth or error of
such knowledge is unmeaning. I cannot have a toothache without knowing
that I have it. In the actual felt toothache knowing and being are not
only inseparable--they are indistinguishable. If, however, I think of
my toothache as part of an independent order of reality, my knowledge
of it may be true or false. I am then thinking of it as the effect of
an exposed nerve, or of an abscess or of an inflammation--as something,
that is to say, that is conditioned independently of my consciousness
and that will cease to exist when the conditions are altered. In the
same way, when I behold a landscape, the blue expanse of sky and
variegated colour of the land which I actually experience are not
either true or false, they are immediate experience in {19} which
knowing is being and being is knowing. Truth and error only apply to
the interpretation of that experience, to the independent reality that
I infer from it. We can, then, distinguish two kinds of knowledge
which we may call immediate and mediate, or, better still, acquaintance
and description. Accordingly, when we say that something is, or when
we say of anything that it if real, we may mean either of two things.
We may mean that it is part of the changing existence that we actually
feel and that we call consciousness or life, or we may mean that it is
part of an independent order of things whose existence we think about
in order to explain, not what our feeling is (there can be no
explanation of this), but how it comes to exist. We know by
description a vast number of things with which we never can be actually
acquainted. Such, indeed, is the case with all the knowledge by which
we rule our lives and conceive the reality which environs us. Yet we
are absolutely dependent on the reality we know by acquaintance for all
our knowledge of these things. Not only is immediate sense experience
and the knowledge it gives us by acquaintance the only evidence we have
of the greater and wider reality, but we are dependent on it for the
terms wherewith to describe it, for the form in which to present it,
for the matter with which to compose it. And this is the real ground
of the study of philosophy, the justification of its standpoint. It is
this fact--this ultimate undeniable fact--that all reality of whatever
kind and in whatever way known, whether by thought or by feeling,
whether it is perceived or conceived, remembered or imagined, is in the
end composed of sense experience: it is this fact from which all the
problems of philosophy arise. It is this fact that our utilitarian men
of science find {20} themselves forced to recognise, however scornful
they may be of metaphysical methods and results.
The special problem of the nature of truth is concerned, then, with the
reality that we have distinguished as known by description, and
conceived by us as independent in its existence of the consciousness by
which we know it. What is the nature of the seal by which we stamp
this knowledge true?