ILLUSION
The doctrine that the world that appears is essentially unlike the
world that is is neither new nor peculiar to any particular theory of
philosophy. It has received a new interest and a new interpretation
lately in the theory that we are now considering, that the clue to the
appearance of the world to us is to be found in the conception of the
nature of the utility of the intellect and in the mode of its activity.
The idea that we are perhaps disqualified by our very nature itself
from beholding reality and knowing truth is illustrated in the
well-known allegory in the _Republic_ of Plato:
"And now let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or
unenlightened. Behold! human beings living in an underground den,
which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the
den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and
necks chained so that they cannot move and can only see before them,
being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above
and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire
and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look,
a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette
players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. And
men are passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and
statues, and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various
materials, which appear over the wall....
"They are strange prisoners, like ourselves, and they see only their
own shadows or the shadows of one another which the fire throws on the
opposite wall of the cave. And so also of the objects carried and of
the passers-by; to the prisoners the truth would be literally nothing
but the shadows of the images.
{68}
"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the
prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when
any of them, is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn
his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer
sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see
the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows.
And then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an
illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being, and his
eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, and
what will be his reply? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he
formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?...
"And suppose that he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is
he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light
his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at
all of what are now called realities."
The thought that Plato has expressed in this wonderful allegory has
entered deeply into all philosophy. What we first take for reality is
merely a shadow world. But in Plato's view it is the intellect which
gives us the means of escape, the power to turn from the illusion to
behold the reality. It is not until now that philosophy has sought the
clue to the illusion in the nature of the intellect itself. The very
instrument of truth is unfitted to reveal to us the reality as it is,
because its nature and purpose is to transform reality, to make reality
appear in a form which, though of paramount importance to us as active
beings, is essentially an illusion. The intellectual bent of our mind
leads us away from, and not towards a vision of reality in its purity.
The more our intellect progresses, and the more and more clearly we
{69} see into a greater and ever greater number of things, the farther
are we from, and not the nearer to a grasp of reality as it is. To
obtain this vision of reality we have to turn away from the intellect
and find ourselves again in that wider life out of which the intellect
is formed. Life, as it lives, is an intuition that is nonintellectual.
"Human intelligence," writes Bergson, "is not at all what Plato taught
in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to look at passing
shadows, nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun.
It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy
task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the
plough, and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are
acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only
in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished
and the furrow that is being ploughed, such is the function of human
intelligence."
The illusion to which our intellectual nature subjects us is the
necessity we are under to regard the things of the universe as more
ultimate, as more fundamental than the movement which actuates the
universe. It seems to us impossible that there could exist movement or
change, unless there already existed things to be moved or changed,
things whose nature is not altered, but only their form and their
external relations, when they are moved or changed. This necessity of
thought seems to have received authoritative recognition in all
attempts, religious and scientific, to conceive origins. Thus we read
in the Book of Genesis:
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth
was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
{70} The matter of the universe, it is felt, must be in existence
before the movement which vivifies it. The dead inert stuff must be
created before it can receive the breath of life. And if God the
creator is conceived as living before the matter which He has created,
it is as an external principle, the relation of which to the creation
is by most religious minds thought to transcend the power of the finite
understanding to conceive.
The same fundamental conception of the primacy of matter over movement
is evident in the scientific theories of the nature and origin of life.
Life appears to science as a form of energy that requires things,
matter occupying space, to support it. According to one view, life is
the result of a certain combination or synthesis of chemical or
physical elements, previously existing separately--a combination of
very great complexity, and one that may possibly have occurred once
only in the long process of nature, but which nevertheless might be,
and some think probably, or even certainly, will be brought about by a
chemist working in his laboratory. This is the mechanistic or
materialist view. On the other hand, there is the theory of vitalism.
Life, it is contended, cannot be due to such a synthesis of material
elements as the mechanistic view supposes, because it is of the nature
of an "entelechy"--that is, an individual existence which functions, as
a whole, in every minutest part of the organism it "vitalises." Life
has supervened upon, and not arisen out of the material organism which
it guides and controls not by relating independent parts, but by making
every part subserve the activity and unity of the whole. But the
vitalist theory, as well as the mechanistic theory, conceives the
movement and change which is life as dependent on the previous
existence of a matter or stuff which is moved or changed. The
philosophical {71} conception differs, therefore, from both these
theories. It is that life is an original movement, and that this
movement is the whole reality of which things, inert matter, even
spatial extension, are appearances. True duration is change, not the
permanence of something amidst change. There are no unchanging things.
Everything changes. Reality is the flux; things are views of the flux,
arrests or contractions of the flowing that the intellect makes. The
appearance of the world to us is our intellectual grasp of a reality
that flows. This original movement is the life of the universe.
Briefly stated, the argument on which the theory is based is that it is
logically impossible to explain change by changelessness, movement by
immobility. Real change cannot be a succession of states themselves
fixed and changeless; real movement cannot be the immobile positions in
which some thing is successively at rest. On the other hand, if
movement is original, the interruption of movement, in whatever way
effected, will appear as things. The experience which confirms this
argument is the insight that everyone may obtain of the reality of his
own life as continuous movement, unceasing change, wherein all that
exists exists together in a present activity. To develop this argument
would exceed the limits of this book, and would be outside its purpose.
It is essential, however, that such a theory should be understood, for
clearly it is possible to hold not only that we are subject to
illusion, but that illusion is of the very nature of intellectual
apprehension. If, then, the understanding works illusion for the sake
of action, is it thereby disqualified as an instrument for the
attainment of truth?
We are brought, then, to the critical point of our inquiry. If
illusion is the essential condition of human activity, if the
intellect, the very instrument of truth, {72} is itself affected, what
is to save us from universal scepticism? If the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? The intellect with its frames
and moulds shapes living change and movement into fixed immobile
states; the process of knowing alters profoundly the reality known.
Must we not conclude that knowledge, however useful, is not true? And
to what shall we turn for truth? There is, indeed, if this be so, a
deeper irony in the question, What is truth? than even Pilate could
have imagined. We have absolutely no practical concern with truth--we
must leave it to the mystic, to the unpractical, the contemplative man
who has turned aside from the stern task of busy life.
It is not so. The problem that seems so fundamental admits a quite
simple solution. Illusion is not error, nor is it falsehood; it is the
appearance of reality. It is the reality that appears, and when we
grasp the principle of utility we understand the shape that the
appearance must assume. This shape may seem to us a distortion, but in
recognising appearance we are in touch with reality, and practical
interest is the key that opens to us the interpretation of intellectual
experience. And it is not only by the intellect that we interpret the
nature of reality, for besides logic there is life, and in life we
directly perceive the reality that in logic we think about.
The intellect, then, does not make truth, neither does it make reality;
it makes reality take the form of spatial things, and it makes things
seem to be the ground of reality. Were our nature not intellectual, if
all consciousness was intuitive, the world would not then appear as
things--there would be no things. But, notwithstanding that our world
is an illusion, it is not the less on that account a true world, and
our science is true knowledge, in the objective meaning of truth, for
{73} once an illusion is interpreted, it becomes an integral part of
the conception of reality. It would be easy to find abundant
illustration of this fact within science itself. Thus in the familiar
case of the straight stick which appears bent when partly immersed in
water, as soon as the illusion is understood as due to the different
refraction of light in media of different density, air and water, it
ceases to be an illusion. We then recognise that if a partly immersed
stick did not appear bent, it would really be bent. Again, the
illusion that clings to us most persistently throughout our experience
is that which is connected with movement and rest. The system of
movement in which we are ourselves carried along appears to us
stationary, while that which is outside it seems alone to move. In
very simple cases, such as viewing the landscape from a
railway-carriage window, habit has long caused the illusion to cease,
but we all remember the child's feeling that the trees and fields were
flying past us. The earth's motion never becomes to us a real
experience of movement, we accept the fact and never doubt the
scientific evidence on which it rests, yet we always speak and think of
sunrise and sunset; and this is not merely due to the accident that our
language was fixed before the nature of the celestial movement was
known, but to a natural illusion which it is far more convenient to
retain than to abandon.
The fact of illusion is not the tenet of any particular philosophy, nor
even of philosophy itself; it is a recognised factor in common life and
in physical science, but in instancing the theory of Bergson's
philosophy I am choosing an extreme case. Berkeley held that illusion
is practically universal; Kant taught that the apparent objectivity of
phenomena is the form that the understanding imposes on things; but
Bergson teaches {74} not only that all material reality is illusion,
but also that this very illusion is the work of the intellect, that the
intellect is formed for this purpose, intellect and matter being
correlative, evolving _pari passu_. To such a doctrine there is of
necessity a positive side, for it is impossible that it can rest on
universal scepticism--scepticism both of knowledge and of the
instrument of knowledge. If the intellectual view of reality as solid
matter in absolute space is illusion, it must be possible to apprehend
the reality from which the judgment that it is illusion is derived. If
the intellect distorts, there must be an intuition which is pure, and
the relation between these will be the relation between reality and
appearance. Neither, then, is reality truth, nor appearance error.
There is a truth of appearance, a truth that is a value in itself, a
truth that is more than the mere negation that appearance is not
reality. The appearance is our hold upon the reality, our actual
contact with it, the mode and direction of our action upon it. What,
then, is error? It cannot consist in the fact that we know appearance
only, not reality, for we can only know reality by its appearance. It
cannot be an appearance behind which there is no reality, for non-being
cannot appear. It cannot be nothing at all or pure non-being, for to
think of absolute nothing is not to think. In error there is some
object of thought which is denied real being. What this is is the
problem of error.