NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS
Scepticism is not sleep, and in casting a doubt on any belief, or
proving the absurdity of any idea, the sceptic is by no means losing his
sense of what is proposed. He is merely doubting or denying the
_existence_ of any such object. In scepticism, therefore, everything
turns on the meaning of the word existence, and it will be worth while
to stop a moment here to consider it further.
I have already indicated roughly how I am using the word existence,
namely, to designate such being as is in flux, determined by external
relations, and jostled by irrelevant events. Of course this is no
definition. The term existence is only a name. In using it I am merely
pointing out to the reader, as if by a gesture, what this word
designates in my habits of speech, as if in saying Cæsar I pointed to my
dog, lest some one should suppose I meant the Roman emperor. The Roman
emperor, the dog, and the sound Cæsar are all indefinable; but they
might be described more particularly, by using other indicative and
indefinable names, to mark their characteristics or the events in which
they figured. So the whole realm of being which I point to when I say
existence might be described more fully; the description of it would be
physics or perhaps psychology; but the exploration of that realm, which
is open only to animal faith, would not concern the sceptic.
The sceptic turns from such indefinite confusing objects to the
immediate, to the datum; and perhaps for a moment he may fancy he has
found true existence there; but if he is a good sceptic he will soon be
undeceived. Certainly in the immediate he will find freedom from the
struggle of assertion and counter-assertion: no report there, no
hypothesis, no ghostly reduplication of the obvious, no ghostly
imminence of the not-given. Is not the obvious, he might ask, the truly
existent? Yet the obvious is only the apparent; and this in both senses
of this ambiguous word. The datum is apparent in the sense of being
self-evident and luminous; and it is apparent also in the sense of
merely appearing and being unsubstantial. In this latter sense, the
apparent threatens to become the non-existent. Does not the existent
profess to be more than apparent: to be not so much the self-evident as
that which I am seeking evidence for, in the sense of testimony? Is not
the existent, then (which from its own point of view, or physically, is
more than the apparent), cognitively and from my point of view less than
the apparent? Does it not need witnesses to bear testimony to its being?
And what can recommend those witnesses to me except their intrinsic
eloquence? I shall prove no sceptic if I do not immediately transfer all
my trust from the existence reported to the appearance reporting it, and
substitute the evidence of my senses for all lawyer’s evidence. I shall
forget the murders and embroglios talked about in the court, and gaze at
the judge in his scarlet and ermine, with the pale features of an old
fox under his grey wig; at the jury in their stolidity; at the witness
stammering; at the counsel, officially insolent, not thinking of what he
is saying mechanically, but whispering something that really interests
him in an aside, almost yawning, and looking at the clock to see if it
is time for luncheon; and at the flood of hazy light falling aslant on
the whole scene from the high windows. Is not the floating picture, in
my waking trance, the actual reality, and the whole world of existence
and business but a perpetual fable, which this trance sustains?
The theory that the universe is nothing but a flux of appearances is
plausible to the sceptic; he thinks he is not believing much in
believing it. Yet the residuum of dogma is very remarkable in this view;
and the question at once will assail him how many appearances he shall
assert to exist, of what sort, and in what order, if in any, he shall
assert them to arise; and the various hypotheses that may be suggested
concerning the character and distribution of appearances will become
fresh data in his thought; and he will find it impossible to decide
whether any such appearances, beyond the one now passing before him, are
ever actual, or whether any of the suggested systems of appearances
actually exists. Thus existence will loom again before him, as something
problematical, at a distance from that immediacy into which he thought
he had fled.
Existence thus seems to re-establish itself in the very world of
appearances, so soon as these are regarded as facts and events occurring
side by side or one after the other. In each datum taken separately
there would be no occasion to speak of existence. It would be an obvious
appearance; whatever appeared there would be simply and wholly apparent,
and the fact that it appeared (which would be the only fact involved)
would not appear in it at all. This fact, the existence of the
intuition, would not be asserted until the appearance ceased to be
actual, and was viewed from the outside, as something that presumably
had occurred, or would occur, or was occurring elsewhere. In such an
external view there might be truth or error; not so in each appearance
taken in itself, because in itself and as a whole each is a pure
appearance and bears witness to nothing further. Nevertheless, when some
term within this given appearance comes to be regarded as a sign of some
other appearance not now given, the question is pertinent whether that
other appearance exists or not. Thus existence and non-existence seem to
be relevant to appearances in so far as they are problematical and
posited from outside, not in so far as they are certain and given.
Hence an important conclusion which at first seems paradoxical but which
reflection will support; namely, that the notion that the datum exists
is unmeaning, and if insisted upon is false. That which exists is the
fact that the datum is given at that particular moment and crisis in the
universe; the intuition, not the datum, is the fact which occurs; and
this fact, if known at all, must be asserted at some other moment by an
adventurous belief which may be true or false. That which is certain and
given, on the contrary, is something of which existence cannot be
predicated, and which, until it is used as a description of something
else, cannot be either false or true.
I see here how halting is the scepticism of those modern philosophers
who have supposed that to exist is to be an idea in the mind, or an
object of consciousness, or a fact of experience, if by these phrases no
more is meant than to be a datum of intuition. If there is any existence
at all, presence to consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient to
render it an existence. Imagine a novelist whose entire life was spent
in conceiving a novel, or a deity whose only function was to think a
world. That world would not exist, any more than the novel would
comprise the feelings and actions of existing persons. If that novelist,
in the heat of invention, believed his personages real, he would be
deceived: and so would that deity if he supposed his world to exist
merely because he thought of it. Before the creation could be actual, or
the novel historical, it would have to be enacted elsewhere than in the
mind of its author. And if it was so enacted, it would evidently not be
requisite to its existence that any imaginative person, falsely
conceiving himself to be its author, should form an image of it in his
mind. If he did so, that remarkable clairvoyance would be a fact
requiring explanation; but it would be an added harmony in the world,
not the ground of its existence.
If for the sake of argument I accept the notion that presence to
intuition is existence, I may easily disprove it by a _reductio ad
absurdum_. If nothing not given in intuition can exist, then all those
beliefs in existing facts beyond my intuition, by which thought is
diversified when it is intelligent, would be necessarily false, and all
intelligence would be illusion. This implication might be welcome to me,
if I wished not to entertain any opinions which might conceivably be
wrong. But the next implication is more disconcerting, namely, that the
intuitions in which such illusion appears can have no existence
themselves: for being instances of intuition they could not be data for
any intuition. At one moment I may _believe_ that there are or have been
or will be other moments; but evidently they would not be _other_
moments, if they were data to me now, and nothing more. If presence to
intuition were necessary to existence, intuition itself would not exist;
that is, no other intuition would be right in positing it; and as this
absence of transcendence would be mutual, nothing would exist at all.
And yet, since presence to intuition would be sufficient for existence,
everything mentionable would exist without question, the non-existent
could never be thought of, to deny anything (if I knew what I was
denying) would be impossible, and there would be no such thing as fancy,
hallucination, illusion, or error.
I think it is evidently necessary to revise a vocabulary which lends
itself to such equivocation, and if I keep the words existence and
intuition at all, to lend them meanings which can apply to something
possible and credible. I therefore propose to use the word existence (in
a way consonant, on the whole, with ordinary usage) to designate not
data of intuition but facts or events believed to occur in nature. These
facts or events will include, _first_, intuitions themselves, or
instances of consciousness, like pains and pleasures and all remembered
experiences and mental discourse; and _second_, physical things and
events, having a transcendent relation to the data of intuition which,
in belief, may be used as signs for them; the same transcendent relation
which objects of desire have to desire, or objects of pursuit to
pursuit; for example, such a relation as the fact of my birth (which I
cannot even remember) has to my present persuasion that I was once born,
or the event of my death (which I conceive only abstractly) to my
present expectation of some day dying. If an angel visits me, I may
intelligibly debate the question whether he exists or not. On the one
hand, I may affirm that he came in through the door, that is, that he
existed before I saw him; and I may continue in perception, memory,
theory, and expectation to assert that he was a fact of nature: in that
case I believe in his existence. On the other hand, I may suspect that
he was only an event in me, called a dream; an event not at all included
in the angel as I saw him, nor at all like an angel in the conditions of
its existence; and in this case I disbelieve in my vision: for visiting
angels cannot honestly be said to exist if I entertain them only in
idea.
Existences, then, from the point of view of knowledge, are facts or
events affirmed, not images seen or topics merely entertained. Existence
is accordingly not only doubtful to the sceptic, but odious to the
logician. To him it seems a truly monstrous excrescence and superfluity
in being, since anything existent is more than the description of it,
having suffered an unintelligible emphasis or materialisation to fall
upon it, which is logically inane and morally comic. At the same time,
existence suffers from defect of being and obscuration; any ideal
nature, such as might be exhaustively given in intuition, when it is
materialised loses the intangibility and eternity proper to it in its
own sphere; so that existence doubly injures the forms of being it
embodies, by ravishing them first and betraying them afterwards.
Such is existence as approached by belief and affirmed in animal
experience; but I shall find in the sequel that considered physically,
as it is unrolled amidst the other realms of being, existence is a
conjunction of natures in adventitious and variable relations. According
to this definition, it is evident that existence can never be given in
intuition; since no matter how complex a datum may be, and no matter how
many specious changes it may picture, its specious order and unity are
just what they are: they can neither suffer mutation nor acquire new
relations: which is another way of saying that they cannot exist. If
this whole evolving world were merely given in idea, and were not an
external object posited in belief and in action, it could not exist nor
evolve. In order to exist it must enact itself ignorantly and
successively, and carry down all ideas of it in its own current.