No one can read Clifford’s Lectures and Essays, without feeling that,
if their author is less known and valued as an original thinker than as
a master of mathematical analysis, it is only because having turned the
force of his genius onto mathematics first he had time to complete some
work in that direction, whereas his premature death in 1879 only allowed
him to give us an earnest of the philosophical work which he had it in
him to perform.
The short biography which Prof. F. Pollock contributed to the first
edition of his lectures and essays gives an interesting sketch of
the phases of opinion through which Clifford passed. It appears that
before he took his degree in 1867 and for a little time after he was
a high churchman; but, says Pollock, “there was an intellectual and
speculative activity about his belief which made it impossible that he
should remain permanently at that stage.” “He never slackened in the
pursuit of scientific knowledge and ideas,” and conscious of a hiatus
between orthodox views and some of the results of science he yet held
that religious beliefs are outside the region of scientific proof and
that there is a special theological faculty or insight, analogous to the
scientific, poetic, and artistic faculties, the persons in whom this
genius is exceptionally developed being the founders of new religions and
religious orders. This is not unlike the solution of religious doubts
which Hume playfully suggested and which John Henry Newman has seriously
adopted, namely that “divinity, or theology, has a foundation in _reason_
so far as it is supported by experience. But its best and most solid
foundation is _faith_ and divine revelation.” “When or how,” continues
his biographer, “Clifford first came to a clear perception that this
position of quasi-scientific Catholicism was untenable I do not exactly
know; but I know that the discovery cost him an intellectual and moral
struggle, of which traces may be found here and there in his essays. Most
readers of these essays would consider that Clifford is very unfair to
the Christian beliefs which he had abandoned and beyond doubt he felt
a certain grudge against them for having so long duped him.”[37] The
theories of Mr. Darwin and Herbert Spencer took the place in Clifford’s
mind of the old fashioned creed; Natural selection was to unriddle the
universe, to yield a new system of ethics and education. We read that
Clifford had an extraordinary power of taking up a theory provisionally,
of throwing himself into it, accepting it, applying it, and of rejecting
it in case it was not satisfactory; and this may account perhaps for his
somewhat dogmatic assertion in many cases of crude views. There is one
characteristic of Clifford however which all may emulate, and that is the
candor and fearlessness of his thinking and speaking. Let me quote a few
words from one of the best and most stirring of these essays:
“If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence,
there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be
true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in
outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards
man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is
not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is
great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose
the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then
it must sink back into savagery.... If a man, holding a belief
which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards,
keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in
his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company
of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as
impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without
disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against
mankind.”
The essay on the nature of things in themselves marks the furthest
limit at which Clifford’s speculation arrived. In it Clifford begins by
discarding the ordinary distinction between reality and ideas, eternal
object and eternal subject, of feeling and thing. The distinction
is really between two orders of feeling; there is the subjective or
inner order, in which sorrow succeeds the hearing of bad news, and the
objective or outward in which the feeling of letting go is followed
by sight of falling object. It is with the latter order that physical
science concerns itself, and all the inferences of natural science are
inferences of my real or possible feeling. Since an object is a set
of changes _in_ my consciousness and not anything out of it, is just
my feeling real or possible and therefore part of me, it might seem
as if we were shut up in ourselves and excluded from participation in
any other reality. So we should be, says Clifford, if we made no other
inferences beside those of physical science; but when I come to the
conclusion that _you_ are conscious and that you have objects in your
consciousness similar to those in mine, I am not inferring any actual or
possible feelings of my own, but _your_ feelings, which are not and can
never be objects in my consciousness. To feelings and consciousness thus
inferred to exist in another, Clifford gives the name of _eject_, because
in the very act of inference they are _thrown out_ of my consciousness,
recognised as outside of it, as _not_ being a part of me. “The existence
of my conception of you in my consciousness carries with it a belief in
the existence of you outside of my consciousness.... How this inference
is justified, how consciousness can testify to the existence of anything
outside of itself I do not pretend to say; I need not untie a knot which
the world has cut for me long ago.” (Vol. II, p. 73.)
Thus, _objects_ in the sense of things presented in _my_ consciousness,
my phenomena, are not the sole or chief reality; ejects are equally real
and my conviction of your existence as a conscious being like myself is
coeval and of equal weight with my belief in my own conscious existence.
You and your feelings are strictly speaking the only things which are
real outside of myself and my consciousness. For though my objects or
phenomena are external to my body they are not outside my consciousness,
but part and parcel thereof. Nay, more than this an individual object,
i. e. an object which is mine and mine only, never exists at all,
according to Clifford, in the mind of man; for with each object as it
exists in my mind is bound up the thought of similar objects existing in
other men’s minds. All the objects in fact of which we are ever conscious
are objects of consciousness in general, are in Clifford’s phrase social
objects. “A fixed habit causes an object as it is found in my mind to
be formed as a social object and insensibly embodies in it a reference
to the minds of other men.” This belief in ejects is moreover the root
of all language and all morals:—of language, because any sound which,
becoming a sign to my neighbor, becomes thereby a mark to myself, must
by the nature of the case be a mark of the social object and not of the
individual object: of morals, because the “first great commandment,
evolved in the light of day by healthy processes wherever men have lived
together, is, ‘Put yourself in his place.’”
So far there is nothing to distinguish Clifford’s theory from ordinary
Idealism, which denies that the universe is real except as a phenomenon
or appearance before a Self conscious thereof. The future course of
Clifford’s argument turns upon two assumptions. One of these, borrowed
from the current physiology of the brain, is this: that the changes in my
consciousness—ejective facts he calls them—run parallel with the changes
in my brain, which are objective facts. The parallelism between them is
one of complexity, an analogy of structure. The complex ejective facts
are the same sort of complication of simple ejects as the complex motions
of the brain are of simple molecular movements. Clifford illustrates the
points from the relation of speech to writing, the sentence spoken is the
same function of the elementary sounds as the same sentence written is of
the corresponding letters. In like manner the complex human mind is the
same function of simple feelings as the brain is of primary atoms.
The other assumption is based upon the current doctrine of evolution. Our
bodies have been evolved step by step out of inorganic matter, and we
have before our eyes a line of organisms connecting man with the simplest
atom of matter. In this series there is no hiatus between one form and
another, no breach of morphological continuity, but one species arises
by insensible gradation out of its predecessors. Now in the case of
organisms of a certain complexity we cannot help inferring consciousness,
and as we go back along the line we not only see the complexity of the
organism and of its nervous system insensibly diminishing, but for the
first part of our course we have reason to think that the complexity
of consciousness insensibly diminishes also.[38] The conclusion is
forced upon us that nature is animate from top to bottom and that the
humblest atom has an elementary feeling or eject of its own as simple in
comparison with the complex intelligence of man as the atom is itself
simple in comparison with his very complex brain. Unless we admit this we
are in a dilemma. The ejective facts which we cannot help inferring in
the case of all animals must extend further down through vegetables to
inorganic phenomena, or else there must be a point at which we could say:
here the object begins to have an inner or ejective fact corresponding
to it as my mind corresponds to my body. But the series of objective
forms presents no sudden break anywhere, not even between animals and
vegetables, such as to warrant our supposing that ejective facts extend
thus far down in the series and no further.
Clifford is not quite as explicit about the nature of the elementary
ejects, which answer to moving molecules, as we should like him to be.
Of one thing however he is quite certain; they are elementary feelings
which yet are neither modifications of a consciousness nor yet imply
a consciousness in which alone they can exist. Every feeling may be
part of a consciousness, but it need not be so. Consciousness is only a
derivative and secondary result, following on the arrangement of feeling
in a particular way and it is evolved at a very late period in the
history of the world. In itself a feeling is an absolute _Ding-an-sich_,
whose existence is not relative to anything else. _Sentitur_ is all that
can be said of it.
Thus strictly speaking it is not _consciousness_ which extends throughout
the series of objective forms from man down to the molecule. It is
only feeling. Consciousness proper only belongs to the later and higher
members of the series. “If we make a jump from man say to the tunicate
mollusks, we see no reason there to infer the existence of consciousness
at all.” Therefore the doctrine of evolution itself forbids us to regard
all ejects as being of the _same_ substant as mind. They are only of like
substance ὁμοιούσιον not ὁμοούσιον, only quasi-mental[39] and not in
themselves either rational, intelligent, or conscious.[40]
Besides the evolutionist’s reason that it is absurd to attribute
consciousness and personality to tunicate mollusks there is another
reason drawn from human introspection for asserting elementary feelings
to be absolute and unrelated existence. “A feeling, at the instance when
it _exists_, exists _an und für sich_ and not as _my_ feeling.”[41] The
self-perception of the ego, the sense that in all my various feelings it
is _I_ who am conscious, this “unity of apperception” does not exist in
the instantaneous consciousness which it unites, but only in subsequent
reflection upon it. It consists further in the power of establishing a
certain connexion between the memories of any two feelings which we had
at the same instant.
There is one other point of extreme importance to be noticed in
Clifford’s account of the elementary feelings or ejects. They are
connected together in their sequence and coexistence by counterparts
of the physical laws of matter. Were it not so their correspondence
with motions of matter could not be kept up. That they should be
thus connected with one another militates at first sight with the
characteristic of absoluteness above ascribed to them by Clifford. We
must suppose therefore that when Clifford says that their existence is
not relative to anything else, he means no more than that they are not
ultimately related to a personal consciousness. We must suppose that it
is these laws of the sequence and coexistence of elementary feelings
which, “when molecules are so combined together as to form the film on
the under side of a jelly-fish, so combine the elements of mind-stuff
which go along with them as to form the faint beginnings of sentience.
The same laws combine feelings so as to form some kind of consciousness,
when the molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous
system of a vertebrate” (p. 85).
We are now after these preliminary explanations in a position to
appreciate what is the gist and core of Clifford’s speculations. It is
this, that the reality external to our minds which is represented in
our minds as matter is in itself mind-stuff or elementary feelings. The
universe consists entirely of mind-stuff. Some of this is woven into the
complex form of human minds containing imperfect representations of the
mind-stuff outside them and of themselves also, as a mirror reflects
its own image in another mirror, _ad infinitum_. Such an imperfect
representation is called a material universe. The two chief points
therefore of the doctrine as summed up by Clifford himself are:
1) Matter is a mental picture in which mind-stuff is the thing
represented.
2) Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex which
is made up of elements themselves not rational, not intelligent, not
conscious.
We shall do Clifford an injustice if we interpret the foregoing theory as
a dualistic and not as a monistic view, i. e. as a view which postulates
two ultimate principles of reality rather than one. Clifford however
often speaks as if feeling and matter were two coördinate aspects of
reality, irreducible to one another. For example he allows himself to
speak of mind-stuff as going along with the material object, of laws
connecting the elements of mind-stuff which are only _counterparts_ of
the physical laws of matter and not those laws themselves. Again he
writes (p. 78) as follows: “The distinction between eject and object,
forbids us to regard the eject, another man’s mind, as coming into the
world of objects in any way, or as standing in the relation of cause
or effect to any changes in that world.” Such language reminds us of
Spinoza’s doctrine that body alone can determine body to move and only
thought determine thought to think, but we must not therefore suppose
that for Clifford as for Spinoza the two rival kingdoms of thought
and extended matter are irreconcilably severed or nominally united by
the figment of a single substance of which they are attributes: What
Clifford means is that the thing _is_ a feeling so far as it is anything
at all and that, if things coexist or succeed each other according to
laws, they only coexist and follow _as_ feelings and conformably to
laws of feeling. Not only is the elementary feeling a thing itself, but
things-in-themselves are elementary feelings.
It is incumbent therefore on us to ask if an elementary feeling is
equal to the double burden put upon it by this theory of being the real
universe of things and of creating the human intelligence. In answering
this question we must be careful to divest feelings beforehand of any
characteristics which they only possess as gathered up into the unity
of a self, for at the stage in which we are considering reality selves
have not yet arisen. It is hard to conceive what is left of feeling after
these characteristics have been removed, nor does introspection help us
here, for, as Clifford very truly says, the fundamental deliverance of
consciousness affirms its own complexity and it seems impossible, as I
am at present constituted, to have only one absolutely simple feeling at
a time. Elementary feelings however could hardly constitute the cosmos
without they follow one another, coexist, and connect themselves together
in their groupings according to certain laws, i. e. by some inherent
necessity always take up the same attitudes toward each other, and this
much Clifford assumes that they do. Yet these assumptions will not bear
examination. Let us examine first the postulate that feelings follow in
a fixed order; call them _a_ _b_ _c_ _d_, _b_ succeeds _a_ and precedes
_c_ and it makes a difference, which comes after or before the other. Now
being absolute feelings, not only is _a_ past and non-existent before _b_
begins to be, so _b_ before _c_, but each is in turn the entire reality
and there is no consciousness before which they pass in procession. The
real would thus fall into disconnected and mutually indifferent moments
_a_ _b_ _c_ _d_; and as each of these in turn exhausts reality and is
also unconscious of what goes before and after, there would be no real
succession at all. In a real succession it makes a difference whether _b_
comes before _or_ after _a_, but in the case we suppose it could make no
difference. In truth there can be no relation of before and after between
two terms except for a self, which takes note of the one disappearing and
of the other appearing; and whenever we speak of things following one
another we tacitly presuppose a self before whom the procession passes.
It is even more difficult to understand how elementary feelings can be
grouped and complicated in a fixed order of coexistence. Mind has not
yet emerged, so we must suppose that the grouping takes place in space.
In that case one feeling must be right or left, above or below another.
The futility of such speculation will come home to anyone who will try to
realise how a feeling of smell can be above or below one of taste.
We have next to consider Clifford’s account of the genesis out of
elementary feelings of personal consciousness. The hypothesis of
mind-stuff, we must remember, was framed in order to preserve the same
continuity of ejective facts as we see to exist in the case of objective
facts, to provide, that is, a gradual development of the human mind out
of the simpler feelings of amœbæ and even of atoms. It must be denied
however that the hypothesis is a success if we retain the usual meanings
of the words continuity and development. Properly speaking a thing can
only be said to grow or develop when it remains the same with itself all
through the process and unfolds therein capacities which were anyhow
latent in it to start with. Thus a tadpole develops into a frog, a grub
into a butterfly, and the child grows into the man. But in the series
of ejects which begins from atoms and after running through amœba and
ape finally culminates in the human intelligence there is no point of
identity, no community between the first and last terms. The eject which
is the molecule is denied by Clifford to be either conscious or rational,
nor has it even will, like the philosophical factotum of Schopenhauer or
Von Hartmann. It is a purely negative conception, the abstract opposite
of that mind into which it is to ultimately develop. The hiatus between
our intelligence and a thing in itself, which call it feeling, or
mind-stuff, or what we will, is merely all that our intelligence is not,
is none the less of a hiatus, because it is, with the help of apes and
amœbæ, spread out thin, so to speak. It would be better frankly to avow
the chasm that exists than to gloss over it with words like evolution and
development.
“When a material organism,” writes Clifford, “has reached a certain
complexity of nervous structure, the complex of ejective facts which goes
along with its action reaches that mode of complication which is called
consciousness. When a stream of feelings is so compacted together that
at each instant it consists of (1) new feelings, (2) fainter repetitions
of previous ones, and (3) links connecting these repetitions, the stream
is called a consciousness. Consciousness is thus a relative thing, a
mode of complication of certain elements, and a property of the complex
so produced.” If we look into this statement we see that it only amounts
to this: that feelings constitute a conscious self when they become the
feelings of a conscious self and not before, for except as gathered up in
the unity of a self which has memory and remains the same throughout its
differences feelings can be neither new nor repeated nor joined by links.
1) That a feeling is new means that I attend to it, contrast it with
former ones, and decide that I have not felt it before.
2) That a feeling is a previous feeling now repeated means that I
recognise it as having already occurred.
3) If feelings are joined by links of what nature are these links?
Clifford does not say that they also are feelings, so presumably they are
not; in that case no link is left save a connecting self. But even if the
link is a feeling it cannot be less than a feeling of the togetherness
of two other feelings, but such a feeling would involve memory of those
feelings and memory involves self-hood. It is really, however, an abuse
of words to apply the term feeling in such a case. We might with Hume ask
of this feeling which links other feelings “Is it a taste, a smell, a
sound, an impression of sight or touch?”
Clifford makes a reference to Haeckel’s treatise upon “Zellseelen und
Seelenzellen.”[42] Haeckel’s view is that every protoplasmic cell has
a soul of its own and that when a number of these are combined under
certain conditions, as in the human brain, they generate as their
resultant the human soul. He helps out his theory by pointing to such
phrases as national spirit, a nation’s conscience, a people’s will.
Nothing, he contends, could be more real than these entities, which
are yet only resultants of the wills, spirits, and consciences of the
separate individuals who compose the nation.
This is an interesting speculation, which it would be a pity to dismiss
abruptly merely because it is groundless. No doubt our bodies and brains
may be regarded as colonies of protoplasmic units of which each has an
independent life of its own, of which each is born, nourishes itself,
reproduces itself, and at last breaks up and dies. The colorless cells
especially in our blood are such units and have as good a claim to be
called individuals as the amœba which we find swimming about by itself
in any pond. These units are certainly alike and must be allowed to
have inner states of their own. It may also be freely conceded that the
existence of certain inward states in these cells of which my brain and
nerves are composed is the condition of certain states of feeling and
emotion arising in me. But all these admissions fail to advance us a step
toward Haeckel’s conclusion. That any number of atoms of protoplasm have
souls and soul-states is not enough _per se_ to produce an extra soul
which is none of them, yet _like_ their souls and possessed of a life of
its own. Even if the molecules of my brain were each in possession of a
self-consciousness as ample as my own, their mere juxtaposition could not
give rise to my self-consciousness. From first to last their soul-states
remain theirs, mine remain mine. The reasoning employed by Haeckel
involves a fallacy of composition:—because each of a colony of cells _a_,
_b_, _c_, _d_, has a soul of its own, therefore the colony as a whole has
a soul of its own, which is not the soul of any one of them. Nor do the
analogies Haeckel invokes help him at all, for the life of a nation does
not exist at all except as the lives of the individuals composing that
nation, nor do we expect to find any traits in our so-called national
spirit which are not ultimately contributed by individuals; Haeckel
however would have us believe that the mere composition of the primitive
and simple souls of separate amœbæ results in a _human_ soul with its
wealth of intuitions and interests. The utmost we are entitled to say is
that given a certain collocation of cells in the brain there may by an
entirely new act of the infinite be generated a human soul. It is only by
playing fast and loose with words that we can deduce this new soul from
an aggregate of other souls either like or unlike itself.
It is surprising that Clifford should have recognised that the reality
underlying so-called matter is akin to mind and yet have identified
it rather with the quasi-mental facts of an amœba or of an atom than
with the intelligence of man. The argument by which he arrives at
this conclusion is as follows: You as a face, a voice, a touch, as an
object to my senses in short, are a mere phantasm or appearance in my
consciousness, part and parcel of myself and not distinct from me in
any way. But I cannot help inferring an eject, to wit feelings and a
consciousness like my own, behind the sensible show of your person; and
this consciousness of yours which I address as _you_, is the truth of
the object or appearance, which I have. _You_ are the reality which I
really perceive, so far as I perceive anything more than my own feelings.
Similarly when I watch an amœba, what I perceive as a somewhat formless
mass of protoplasm is really in itself the struggling life within. Lastly
what I handle and perceive as a crystal or metal is really the eject. If
here we read force or unconscious will instead of eject or mind-stuff,
Clifford’s view would practically coincide with Schopenhauer’s; for force
is truly an eject in Clifford’s sense, not an object or appearance to me.
Now the human intelligence arises late in the history of things and is
altogether a secondary and derivative thing. Consequently the world
is not really what it is for my consciousness. My _Weltanschauung_ is
false in proportion as my mind is complex and derivative. Conversely,
the _Weltanschauung_ of each being approximates to truth and becomes
less and less illusive in proportion as the eject which it in reality is
approaches the primitive simplicity of mind-stuff. I am _really_ very
little of what I am _consciously_. If you want a truer exponent of the
truth of things you must go to the amœba or lower still. It, as compared
with me, is _consciously_ most of what it is _really_. The absolutely
simple atom is probably the only being who is quite free from delusions.
The conclusion then to which Clifford conducts us is this: that the
universe is not really such as it appears to our intelligence, still
less, I presume, such as it would appear to a higher intelligence than
ours. It is really such and such only as it would appear to the being
whose eject is the lowest rung in the ladder of mind-stuff. Our universe
spread out in space and time, with all its splendours and harmonies,
is a delusion; nay, more, the human soul with its æsthetic and moral
sensibilities, its fears and aspirations, is the parent delusion which
breeds the delusion of a cosmos. “We are such stuff as dreams are made
of.”
The loose way in which Clifford used the word feeling, as equivalent
to any form of consciousness, blinded him to the fact that a qualified
thing as such is not given in feeling at all and led him to suppose
that the universe as we know it would continue to stand in the absence
of all complex ejects whatever. Mr. Green has shown that all theories
of the object which ignore the workmanship of thought manifest therein
and identify the _esse_ of things with their _percipi_ lead straight to
nihilism. To such nihilism Clifford’s doctrine, like Hume’s which it
resembles, immediately bring us. But Hume did not take seriously the
demolition of reality involved in his theory that things are only real
as they are felt and that feelings are “entirely loose and separate”
(Treatise I, 559) while the solid framework of reality is an illusion
bred of a propensity of our minds to feign connections and relations
where there are none. Hume tells us that he regarded his own speculations
as “philosophical melancholy and delirium,” as “clouds to be dispelled”
(Treatise I, 501). He writes “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I
converse and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four
hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so
cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to
enter into them any further.” But Clifford, like Huxley, took Hume _au
grand serieux_, forgetting that feeling as such does not reveal an object
at all. There is a passage in a letter of Clifford’s written to Professor
Pollock in September, 1874, à propos of Green’s introduction to Hume,
which evinces pretty clearly that Clifford did not discern the true drift
of Hume’s speculations in the way Hume did himself. “I hope,” he writes,
“you have seen Sidgwick’s remarks on the introduction; he points out
that to prove Hume insufficient is not to do much at the present day....
Green, for instance, points out that Hume has no complete theory of the
object;—to find fault with Hume for the omission is like blaming Newton
for not including Maxwell’s electricity in the Principia.” Here Clifford
hardly writes as if he saw that his own theory of the object as e. g. an
unrelated feeling is open to exactly the same criticisms as Hume’s, as
if he understood, what Hume had an inkling of, that, in proving the ego
to be a relative thing instead of the heart and centre of reality, you
dissipate the universe into nothing. There are several other features in
Clifford’s doctrine that call for criticism. It should for example be
pointed out that the entire view that ejects are the truth of objects
is in the first instance a deliverance of consciousness itself. I only
transcend my individual feelings, says Clifford, so far as I infer
a consciousness more or less like my own to underlie them; and this
underlying eject is the sole reality. “How this inference is justified,
how consciousness can testify to the existence of anything outside of
itself, I do not pretend to say; I need not untie a knot which the world
has cut for me long ago.” (Vol. II, p. 73.) But if consciousness is but
the property of a temporary conjunction of unconscious feelings, what
value shall we attach to its assurances? They are certainly not valid
except for itself; they do not hold good for the atomic feelings of which
the world ultimately consists. But my belief that the real is in the
last resort an atom of feeling is simply an extension of my conviction
that ejects are the truth of my feelings. Prove this conviction an
illusion—and Clifford does prove it to be such, when he declares
consciousness to be a relative thing—and you prove the entire theory an
illusion. Thus the tail of Clifford’s theory is bitten off by the head.
The hypothesis that feelings can be felt, without being felt as my
feelings, is a very noteworthy one. “A feeling at the instant when it
_exists_, exists _an und für sich_, and not as my feeling.” This is
why a Greek said δέδορκα in the sense of I see, because the act of
perception is necessarily over, when we become conscious of it. “When,”
continues Clifford, “I remember the feeling as _my_ feeling, there
comes up not merely a faint repetition of the feeling, but inextricably
connected with it a whole set of connections with the general stream of
my consciousness.” This is very truly and acutely observed but it is an
admission that the unrelated feeling is no element in our experience,
that in our cosmos at least there is no ὕλη whatever, but that every
corner of it is illumined by the presence of a relating self. _My_
consciousness never directly testifies at all to the existence of an
absolute feeling. To be _my_ feeling a feeling must already be brought by
connections of content into the web of my experience, but what do I know
of feelings which are not mine. Are not “absolute feelings” an inference
based on observation of low organisms like the amœba, which we are
convinced have no self and yet feel? It should be also noticed that this
supposition that we are not directly but only _ex post facto_ conscious
of our feelings ἔξεισιν εις ἄπειρον. Thus Clifford writes: “This memory
(of a feeling which existed _an und für sich_ as _my_ feeling) is, _qua_
memory, relative to the past feeling, which it partially recalls; but
in so far as it is itself a feeling, _it_ is absolute, _Ding an sich_.”
That is to say, I am not directly but only _ex post facto_ conscious even
of what I remember. To be conscious of the content of a memory I must
_remember_ that I remember it. Surely this new memory in turn cannot be
known _ex post facto_ and so I must _remember_ that I remember that I
remember _et sic ad infinitum_, before I become really _conscious_ of
anything at all.
One other point might be raised. What is the nature and origin of the
laws which govern the sequence and coexistence of feelings. We have
already seen that feelings as such neither follow nor coexist apart from
a self.
“These laws are counterparts of the laws which govern physical
phenomena.” Clifford in writing thus conducts his speculation Without
prejudice to his common-sense belief in a world of necessarily and
rationally related things. He does not see that with the reduction of
the real to a feeling physical facts disappear and with these facts the
laws to which laws of feeling shall correspond. He is evidently confusing
the laws of feeling with the psychological laws of association which
depend upon the environment of the individual’s senses by a world already
real. He does not see that the problem he really imposes on himself is
this: starting from no world at all to arrive at one, or starting from
the world as it may be supposed to picture itself in the feelings of an
amœba to arrive at it as it exists for the human intelligence. We must
not concede to Clifford any more than to Hume this postulate of a real
cosmical order which shall give the cue to feelings when and how to
follow and coexist. Huxley only allows it to Hume, because not having
passed the threshold of Idealistic philosophy he cannot divest himself
of it. If, however, this postulate be denied, then the doctrine that the
_esse_ of things lies in their _percipi_ will recommend itself to no one.