ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM
Why should the mystic, in proportion as he dismisses the miscellany of
experience as so much illusion, feel that he becomes one with reality
and attains to absolute existence? I think that the same survival of
vulgar presumptions which leads the romantic solipsist to retain his
belief in his personal history and destiny, leads the mystic to retain,
and fondly to embrace, the feeling of existence. His speculation is
indeed inspired by the love of security: his grand objection to the
natural world, and to mortal life, is that they are deceptive, that they
cheat the soul that loves them, and prove to be illusions: the
assumption apparently being that reality must be permanent, and that he
who has hold on reality is safe for ever. In this the mystic, who so
hates illusions, is the victim of an illusion himself: for the reality
he has hold of is but the burden of a single moment, which in its
solipsism thinks itself absolute. What is reality? As I should like to
use the term, reality is being of any sort. If it means character or
essence, illusions have it as much as substance, and more richly. If it
means substance, then sceptical concentration upon inner experience, or
ecstatic abstraction, seems to me the last place in which we should look
for it. The immediate and the visionary are at the opposite pole from
substance; they are on the surface or, if you like, at the top; whereas
substance if it is anywhere is at the bottom. The realm of immediate
illusion is as real as any other, and very attractive; many would wish
it to be the only reality, and hate substance; but if substance exists
(which I am not yet ready to assert) they have no reason to hate it,
since it is the basis of those immediate feelings which fill them with
satisfaction. Finally, if reality means existence, certainly the mystic
and his meditation may exist, but not more truly than any other natural
fact; and what would exist in them would be a pulse of animal being,
kindling that momentary ecstasy, as animal life at certain intensities
is wont to do. The theme of that meditation, its visionary object, need
not exist at all; it may be incapable of existing if it is essentially
timeless and dialectical. The animal mind treats its data as facts, or
as signs of facts, but the animal mind is full of the rashest
presumptions, positing time, change, a particular station in the midst
of events yielding a particular perspective of those events, and the
flux of all nature precipitating that experience at that place. None of
these posited objects is a datum in which a sceptic could rest. Indeed,
existence or fact, in the sense which I give to these words, cannot be a
datum at all, because existence involves external relations and actual
(not merely specious) flux: whereas, however complex a datum may be,
with no matter what perspectives opening within it, it must be embraced
in a single stroke of apperception, and nothing outside it can belong to
it at all. The datum is a pure image; it is essentially illusory and
unsubstantial, however thunderous its sound or keen its edge, or however
normal and significant its presence may be. When the mystic asserts
enthusiastically the existence of his immediate, ideal, unutterable
object, Absolute Being, he is peculiarly unfortunate in his faith: it
would be impossible to choose an image less relevant to the agencies
that actually bring that image before him. The burden and glow of
existence which he is conscious of come entirely from himself; his
object is eminently empty, impotent, non-existent; but the heat and
labour of his own soul suffuse that emptiness with light, and the very
hum of change within him, accelerated almost beyond endurance and quite
beyond discrimination, sounds that piercing note.
The last step in scepticism is now before me. It will lead me to deny
existence to any datum, whatever it may be; and as the datum, by
hypothesis, is the whole of what solicits my attention at any moment, I
shall deny the existence of everything, and abolish that category of
thought altogether. If I could not do this, I should be a tyro in
scepticism. Belief in the existence of anything, including myself, is
something radically incapable of proof, and resting, like all belief, on
some irrational persuasion or prompting of life. Certainly, as a matter
of fact, when I deny existence I exist; but doubtless many of the other
facts I have been denying, because I found no evidence for them, were
true also. To bring me evidence of their existence is no duty imposed on
facts, nor a habit of theirs: I must employ private detectives. The
point is, in this task of criticism, to discard every belief that is a
belief merely; and the belief in existence, in the nature of the case,
can be a belief only. The datum is an idea, a description; I may
contemplate it without belief; but when I assert that such a thing
exists I am hypostatising this datum, placing it in presumptive
relations which are not internal to it, and worshipping it as an idol or
thing. Neither its existence nor mine nor that of my belief can be given
in any datum. These things are incidents involved in that order of
nature which I have thrown over; they are no part of what remains before
me.
Assurance of existence expresses animal watchfulness: it posits, within
me and round me, hidden and imminent events. The sceptic can easily cast
a doubt on the remoter objects of this belief; and nothing but a certain
obduracy and want of agility prevents him from doubting present
existence itself. For what could present existence mean, if the imminent
events for which animal sense is watching failed altogether, failed at
the very roots, so to speak, of the tree of intuition, and left nothing
but its branches flowering _in vacuo_? Expectation is admittedly the
most hazardous of beliefs: yet what is watchfulness but expectation?
Memory is notoriously full of illusion; yet what would experience of the
present be if the veracity of primary memory were denied, and if I no
longer believed that anything had just happened, or that I had ever been
in the state from which I suppose myself to have passed into this my
present condition?
It will not do for the sceptic to take refuge in the confused notion
that expectation _possesses_ the future, or memory the past. As a matter
of fact, expectation is like hunger; it opens its mouth, and something
probably drops into it, more or less, very often, the sort of thing it
expected; but sometimes a surprise comes, and sometimes nothing. Life
involves expectation, but does not prevent death: and expectation is
never so thoroughly stultified as when it is not undeceived, but
cancelled. The open mouth does not then so much as close upon nothing.
It is buried open. Nor is memory in a better case. As the whole world
might collapse and cease at any moment, nullifying all expectation, so
it might at any moment have sprung out of nothing: for it is thoroughly
contingent, and might have begun to-day, with this degree of complexity
and illusive memory, as well as long ago, with whatever energy or
momentum it was first endowed with. The backward perspective of time is
perhaps really an inverted expectation; but for the momentum of life
forward, we might not be able to space the elements active in the
present so as to assign to them a longer or a shorter history; for we
should not attempt to discriminate amongst these elements such as we
could still count on in the immediate future, and such as we might
safely ignore: so that our conception of the past implies, perhaps, a
distinction between the living and the dead. This distinction is itself
practical, and looks to the future. In the absolute present all is
specious; and to pure intuition the living are as ghostly as the dead,
and the dead as present as the living.
In the sense of existence there is accordingly something more than the
obvious character of that which is alleged to exist. What is this
complement? It cannot be a feature in the datum, since the datum by
definition is the whole of what is found. Nor can it be, in my sense at
least of the word existence, the intrinsic constitution or specific
being of this object, since existence comports external relations,
variable, contingent, and not discoverable in a given being when taken
alone: for there is nothing that may not lose its existence, or the
existence of which might not be conceivably denied. The complement added
to the datum when it is alleged to exist seems, then, to be added by
_me_; it is the finding, the occurrence, the assault, the impact of that
being here and now; it is the experience of it. But what can experience
be, if I take away from it the whole of what is experienced? And what
meaning can I give to such words as impact, assault, occurrence, or
finding, when I have banished and denied my body, my past, my residual
present being, and everything except the datum which I find? The sense
of existence evidently belongs to the intoxication, to the _Rausch_, of
existence itself; it is the strain of life within me, prior to all
intuition, that in its precipitation and terror, passing as it
continually must from one untenable condition to another, stretches my
attention absurdly over what is not given, over the lost and the
unattained, the before and after which are wrapped in darkness, and
confuses my breathless apprehension of the clear presence of all I can
ever truly behold.
Indeed, so much am I a creature of movement, and of the ceaseless
metabolism of matter, that I should never catch even these glimpses of
the light, if there were not rhythms, pauses, repetitions, and nodes in
my physical progress, to absorb and reflect it here and there: as the
traveller, hurried in a cloud of smoke and dust through tunnel after
tunnel in the Italian Riviera, catches and loses momentary visions of
blue sea and sky, which he would like to arrest, but cannot; yet if he
had not been rushed and whistled along these particular tunnels, even
those snatches, in the form in which they come to him, would have been
denied him. So it is the rush of life that, at its open moments, floods
me with intuitions, partial and confused, but still revelations; the
landscape is wrapped in the smoke of my little engine, and turned into a
tantalising incident of my hot journey. What appears (which is an ideal
object and not an event) is thus confused with the event of its
appearance; the picture is identified with the kindling or distraction
of my attention falling by chance upon it; and the strain of my material
existence, battling with material accidents, turns the ideal object too
into a temporal fact, and makes it seem substantial. But this fugitive
existence which I egotistically attach to it, as if its fate was that of
my glimpses of it, is no part of its true being, as even my intuition
discerns it; it is a practical dignity or potency attributed to it by
the irrelevant momentum of my animal life. Animals, being by nature
hounded and hungry creatures, spy out and take alarm at any datum of
sense or fancy, supposing that there is something substantial there,
something that will count and work in the world. The notion of a moving
world is brought implicitly with them; they fetch it out of the depths
of their vegetating psyche, which is a small dark cosmos, silently
revolving within. By being noticed, and treated as a signal for I know
not what material opportunity or danger, the given image is taken up
into the business world, and puts on the garment of existence. Remove
this frame, strip off all suggestion of a time when this image was not
yet present, or a time when it shall be past, and the very notion of
existence is removed. The datum ceases to be an appearance, in the
proper and pregnant sense of this word, since it ceases to imply any
substance that appears or any mind to which it appears. It is an
appearance only in the sense that its nature is wholly manifest, that it
is a specific being, which may be mentioned, thought of, seen, or
defined, if any one has the wit to do so. But its own nature says
nothing of any hidden circumstances that shall bring it to light, or any
adventitious mind that shall discover it. It lies simply in its own
category. If a colour, it is just this colour; if a pain, just this
pain. Its appearance is not an event: its presence is not an experience;
for there is no surrounding world in which it can arise, and no watchful
spirit to appropriate it. The sceptic has here withdrawn into the
intuition of a surface form, without roots, without origin or
environment, without a seat or a locus; a little universe, an immaterial
absolute theme, rejoicing merely in its own quality. This theme, being
out of all adventitious relations and not in the least threatened with
not being the theme it is, has not the contingency nor the fortunes
proper to an existence; it is simply that which it inherently,
logically, and unchangeably is.
Existence, then, not being included in any immediate datum, is a fact
always open to doubt. I call it a fact notwithstanding, because in
talking about the sceptic I am positing his existence. If he has any
intuition, however little the theme of that intuition may have to do
with any actual world, certainly I who think of his intuition, or he
himself thinking of it afterwards, see that this intuition of his must
have been an event, and his existence at that time a fact; but like all
facts and events, this one can be known only by an affirmation which
posits it, which may be suspended or reversed, and which is subject to
error. Hence all this business of intuition may perfectly well be
doubted by the sceptic: the existence of his own doubt (however
confidently I may assert it for him) is not given to him then: all that
is given is some ambiguity or contradiction in images; and if afterwards
he is sure that he has doubted, the sole cogent evidence which that fact
can claim lies in the psychological impossibility that, so long as he
believes he has doubted, he should not believe it. But he may be wrong
in harbouring this belief, and he may rescind it. For all an ultimate
scepticism can see, therefore, there may be no facts at all, and perhaps
nothing has ever existed.
Scepticism may thus be carried to the point of denying change and
memory, and the reality of all facts. Such a sceptical dogma would
certainly be false, because this dogma itself would have to be
entertained, and that event would be a fact and an existence: and the
sceptic in framing that dogma discourses, vacillates, and lives in the
act of contrasting one assertion with another—all of which is to exist
with a vengeance. Yet this false dogma that nothing exists is tenable
intuitively and, while it prevails, is irrefutable. There are certain
motives (to be discussed later) which render ultimate scepticism
precious to a spiritual mind, as a sanctuary from grosser illusions. For
the wayward sceptic, who regards it as no truer than any other view, it
also has some utility: it accustoms him to discard the dogma which an
introspective critic might be tempted to think self-evident, namely,
that he himself lives and thinks. That he does so is true; but to
establish that truth he must appeal to animal faith. If he is too proud
for that, and simply stares at the datum, the last thing he will see is
himself.