DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Do I know, can I know, anything? Would not knowledge be an impossible
inclusion of what lies outside? May I not rather renounce all beliefs?
If only I could, what peace would descend into my perturbed conscience!
The spectacle of other men’s folly continually reawakens in me the
suspicion that I too am surely fooled; and the character of the beliefs
which force themselves upon me—the fantasticality of space and time, the
grotesque medley of nature, the cruel mockery called religion, the sorry
history and absurd passions of mankind—all invite me to disown them and
to say to what I call the world, “Come now; how do you expect me to
believe in _you_?” At the same time this very incredulity and wonder in
me are baseless and without credentials. What right have I to any
presumptions as to what would be natural and proper? Is not the most
extravagant fact as plausible as any other? Is not the most obvious
axiom a wanton dogma? Yet turn whichever way I will, and refine as I
may, the pressure of existence, of tyrannical absolute present being,
seems to confront me. Something is evidently going on, at least in
myself. I feel an instant complex strain of existence, forcing me to say
that I think and that I am. Certainly the words I use in such reflection
bring many images with them which may possess no truth. Thus when I say
“I,” the term suggests a man, one of many living in a world contrasted
with his thinking, yet partly surveyed by it. These suggestions of the
word “I” might well be false. This thinking might not belong to a member
of the human family, and no such race as this mankind that I am thinking
of might ever have existed. The natural world in which I fancy that race
living, among other races of animals, might also be imaginary. Yet, in
that case, what is imagination? Banish myself and my world as much as I
will, the present act of banishing them subsists and is manifest; and it
was this act, now unrolling itself consciously through various phases,
not any particular person in any environment, that I meant when I said,
“I find that I think and am.”
In like manner the terms thinking and finding, which I use for want of
anything better, imply contrasts and antecedents which I may disregard.
It is not a particular process called thinking, nor a particular
conjunction called finding, that I need assert to exist, but merely this
passing unrest, whatever you choose to call it: these pulsations and
phantoms which to deny is to produce and to strive to banish is to
redouble.
It might seem for a moment as if this pressing actuality of experience
implied a relation between subject and object, so that an indescribable
being called the ego or self was given with and involved in any actual
fact. This analysis, however, is merely grammatical, and if pressed
issues in mythical notions. Analysis can never find in the object what,
by hypothesis, is not there; and the object, by definition, is all that
is found. But there is a biological truth, discovered much later, under
this alleged analytic necessity: the truth that animal experience is a
product of two factors, antecedent to the experience and not parts of
it, namely, organ and stimulus, body and environment, person and
situation. These two natural conditions must normally come together,
like flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly. But
scepticism requires me to take the spark itself as my point of
departure, since it alone lives morally and lights up with its vital
flame the scene I seem to discover. This spark is single, though
changeful. Experience has no conditions for a critic of knowledge who
proceeds transcendentally, that is, from the vantage-ground of
experience itself. To urge, therefore, that a self or ego is presupposed
in experience, or even must have created experience by its absolute
fiat, is curiously to fail in critical thinking, and to renounce the
transcendental method. All transcendental system-makers are in fact
false to the very principle by which they criticise dogmatism; a
principle which admits of no system, tolerates no belief, but recalls
the universe at every moment into the absolute experience which posits
it here and now.
This backsliding of transcendentalism, when it forgets itself so far as
to assign conditions to experience, might have no serious consequences,
if transcendentalism were clearly recognised to be simply a romantic
episode in reflection, a sort of poetic madness, and no necessary step
in the life of reason. That its professed scepticism should so soon turn
into mythology would then seem appropriate in such a disease of genius.
But the delusion becomes troublesome to the serious critic of knowledge
when it perhaps inclines him to imagine that, in asserting that
experience is a product, and has two terms, he is describing the inner
nature of experience, and not merely its external conditions, as natural
history reports them. He may then be tempted to assign a metaphysical
status and logical necessity to a merely material fact. Instead of the
body, which is the true “subject” in experience, he may think he finds
an absolute ego, and instead of the natural environment of the body,
which is the true “object,” he may think he finds an illimitable
reality; and, to make things simpler, he may proceed to declare that
these two are one; but all this is myth.
The fact of experience, then, is single and, from its own point of view,
absolutely unconditioned and groundless, impossible to explain and
impossible to exorcise. Yet just as it comes unbidden, so it may fade
and lapse of its own accord. It constantly seems to do so; and my hold
on existence is not so firm that non-existence does not seem always at
hand and, as it were, always something deeper, vaster, and more natural
than existence. Yet this apprehension of an imminent non-existence—an
apprehension which is itself an existing fact—cannot be trusted to
penetrate to a real nothingness yawning about me unless I assert
something not at all involved in the present being, and something most
remarkable, namely, that I know and can survey the _movement_ of my
existence, and that it can actually have lapsed from one state into
another, as I conceive it to have lapsed.
Thus the sense of a complex strain of existence, the conviction that I
am and that I am thinking, involve a sense of at least possible change.
I should not speak of complexity nor of strain, if various opposed
developments into the not-given were not, to my feeling, striving to
take place. Doors are about to open, cords to snap, blows to fall,
pulsations to repeat themselves. The flux and perspectives of being seem
to be open within me to my own intuition.
Caution is requisite here. All this may be simply a present obsession,
destitute of all prophetic or retrospective truth, and carrying me no
further, if I wish to be honest, than a bare confession of how I feel.
Anything given in intuition is, by definition, an appearance and nothing
but an appearance. Of course, if I am a thorough sceptic, I may
discredit the existence of anything else, so that this appearance will
stand in my philosophy as the only reality. But, then, I must not
enlarge nor interpret nor hypostatise it: I must keep it as the mere
picture it is, and revert to solipsism of the present moment. One thing
is the _feeling_ that something is happening, an intuition which finds
what it finds and cannot be made to find anything else. Another thing is
the _belief_ that what is found is a report or description of events
that have happened already, in such a manner that the earlier phases of
the flux I am aware of existed first, before the later phases and
without them; whereas in my intuition now the earlier phases are merely
the first part of the given whole, exist only together with the later
phases, and are earlier only in a perspective, not in a flux of
successive events. If anything had an actual beginning, that first phase
must have occurred out of relation to the subsequent phases which had
not yet arisen, and only became manifest in the sequel: as the Old
Testament, if really earlier than the New Testament, must have existed
alone first, when it could not be called old. If it had existed only in
the Christian Bible, under that perspective which renders and calls it
old, it would be old only speciously and for Christian intuition, and
all revelation would have been really simultaneous. In a word, specious
change is not actual change. The unity of apperception which yields the
sense of change renders change specious, by relating the terms and
directions of change together in a single perspective, as respectively
receding, passing, or arriving. In so uniting and viewing these terms,
intuition of change excludes actual change in the given object. If
change has been actual, it must have been prior to, and independent of,
the intuition of that change.
Doubtless, as a matter of fact, this intuition of change is itself
lapsing, and yielding its place in physical time to vacancy or to the
intuition of changelessness; and this lapse of the intuition in physical
time is an actual change. Evidently, however, it is not a given change,
since neither vacancy nor the intuition of changelessness can reveal it.
It is revealed, if revealed at all, by a further intuition of specious
change _taken as a report_. Actual change, if it is to be known at all,
must be known by belief and not by intuition. Doubt is accordingly
always possible regarding the existence of actual change. Having
renounced my faith in nature, I must not weakly retain faith in
experience. This intuition of change might be false; it might be the
only fact in the universe, and perfectly changeless. I should then be
that intuition, but it would not bring me any true knowledge of anything
actual. On the contrary, it would be an illusion, presenting a false
object, since it would present nothing but change, when the only actual
reality, namely its own, was unchanging. On the other hand, if this
intuition of change was no illusion, but a change was actually occurring
and the universe had passed into its present state out of a previous
state which was different (if, for instance, this very intuition of
change had grown more articulate or more complex), I should then be
right in hazarding a very bold assertion, namely, that it is known to me
that what now is was not always, that there are things not given, that
there is genesis in nature, and that time is real.