SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION
The ultimate position of the sceptic, that nothing given exists, may be
fortified by the authority of many renowned philosophers who are
accounted orthodox; and it will be worth while to stop for a moment to
invoke their support, since the scepticism I am defending is not meant
to be merely provisional; its just conclusions will remain fixed, to
remind me perpetually that all alleged knowledge of matters of fact is
faith only, and that an existing world, whatever form it may choose to
wear, is intrinsically a questionable and arbitrary thing. It is true
that many who have defended this view, in the form that all appearance
is illusion, have done so in order to insist all the more stoutly on the
existence of something occult which they call reality; but as the
existence of this reality is far easier to doubt than the existence of
the obvious, I may here disregard that compensatory dogma. I shall soon
introduce compensatory dogmas of my own, more credible, I think, than
theirs; and I shall attribute existence to a flux of natural events
which can never be data of intuition, but only objects of a belief which
men and animals, caught in that flux themselves, hazard instinctively.
Although a sceptic may doubt all existence, none being involved in any
indubitable datum, yet I think good human reasons, apart from
irresistible impulse, can be found for positing existing intuitions to
which data appear, no less than other existing events and things, which
the intuited data report or describe. For the moment, however, I am
concerned to justify further the contention of the sceptic that, if we
refuse to bow to the yoke of animal faith, we can find in pure intuition
no evidence of any existence whatsoever.
There is notably one tenet, namely, that all change is illusion, proper
to many deep-voiced philosophers, which of itself suffices to abolish
all existence, in the sense which I give to this word. Instead of change
they probably posit changeless substance or pure Being; but if substance
were not subject to change, at least in its distribution, it would not
be the substance of anything found in the world or happening in the
mind; it would, therefore, have no more lodgement in existence than has
pure Being, which is evidently only a logical term. Pure Being, as far
as it goes, is no doubt a true description of everything, whether
existent or non-existent; so that if anything exists, pure Being will
exist in it; but it will exist merely as pure colour does in all
colours, or pure space in all spaces, and not separately nor
exclusively. These philosophers, in denying change, accordingly deny all
existence. But though many of them have prized this doctrine, few have
lived up to it, or rather none have; so that I may pass over the fact
that in denying change they have inadvertently denied existence, even to
substance and pure Being, because they have inadvertently retained both
existence and change. The reality they attributed with so much unction
and conviction to the absolute was not that proper to this idea—one of
the least impressive which it is possible to contemplate—but was
obviously due to the strain of existence and movement within themselves,
and to the vast rumble, which hypnotised them, of universal mutation.
It is the Indians who have insisted most sincerely and intrepidly on the
non-existence of everything given, even adjusting their moral regimen to
this insight. Life is a dream, they say: and all experienced events are
illusions. In dreaming of nature and of ourselves we are deceived, even
in imagining that we exist and are deceived and dreaming. Some aver,
indeed, that there is a universal dreamer, Brahma, slumbering and
breathing deeply in all of us, who is the reality of our dreams, and the
negation of them. But as Brahma is emphatically not qualified by any of
the forms of illusory existence, but annuls them all, there is no need,
for my purpose, of distinguishing him from the reported state of
redeemed souls (where many souls are admitted) nor from the Nirvana into
which lives flow when they happily cease, becoming at last aware, as it
were, that neither they nor anything else has ever existed.
It would be rash, across the chasm of language and tradition that
separates me from the Indians, to accuse their formidable systems of
self-contradiction. Truth and reality are words which, in the mouths of
prophets, have often a eulogistic rather than a scientific force; and if
it is _better_ to elude the importunities of existence and to find a
sanctuary of intense safety and repose in the notion of pure Being,
there may be a dramatic propriety in saying that the view of the saved,
from which all memory of the path to salvation is excluded, is the true
view, and their condition the only reality; so that they are right in
thinking that they have never existed, and we wrong in thinking that we
now exist.
Here is an egotism of the redeemed with which, as with other egotisms, I
confess I have little sympathy. The blessed, in giving out that I do not
exist in my sins, because they cannot distinguish me, appear to me to be
deceived. The intrinsic blessedness of their condition cannot turn into
a truth this small oversight on their part, however excusable. I
suspect, or I like to imagine, that what the Indians mean is rather that
the principle of my existence, and of my persuasion that I exist, is an
_evil_ principle. It is sin, guilt, passion, and mad will, the natural
and universal source of illusion—very much what I am here calling animal
faith; and since this assertiveness in me (according to the Indians) is
wrong morally, and since its influence alone leads me to posit existence
in myself or in anything else, if I were healed morally I should cease
to assert existence; and I should, in fact, have ceased to exist.
Now in this doctrine, so stated, lies a great confirmation of my thesis
that nothing given exists; because it is only a dark principle,
transcendental in respect to the datum (that is, on the hither side of
the footlights) that calls up this datum at all, or leads me to posit
its existence. It is this sorry self of mine sitting here in the dark,
one in this serried pack of open-mouthed fools, hungry for illusion,
that is responsible for the spectacle; for if a foolish instinct had not
brought me to the playhouse, and if avid eyes and an idealising
understanding had not watched the performance, no part of it would have
abused me: and if no one came to the theatre, the actors would soon flit
away like ghosts, the poets would starve, the scenery would topple over
and become rubbish, and the very walls would disappear. Every part of
experience, as it comes, is illusion; and the source of this illusion is
my animal nature, blindly labouring in a blind world.
Such is the ancient lesson of experience itself, when we reflect upon
experience and turn its illusions into instruction: a lesson which a
bird-witted empiricism can never learn, though it is daily repeated. But
the Indian with a rare sensitiveness joined a rare recollection. He
_lived_: a religious love, a childish absorption in appearances as they
come (which busy empiricists do not share), led him to remember them
truly, in all their beauty, and therefore to perceive that they were
illusions. The poet, the disinterested philosopher, the lover of things
distilled into purity, frees himself from belief. This infinite chaos of
cruel and lovely forms, he cries, is all deceptive, all unsubstantial,
substituted at will for nothing, and soon found to sink into nothing
again, and to be nothing in truth.
I will disregard the vehemence with which these saintly scholastics
denounce the world and the sinful nature that attaches me to it. I like
the theatre, not because I cannot perceive that the play is a fiction,
but because I do perceive it; if I thought the thing a fact, I should
detest it: anxiety would rob me of all my imaginative pleasure. Even as
it is, I often wish the spectacle were less barbarous; but I am not
angry because each scene does not last for ever, and is likely to be
followed by a thousand others which I shall not witness. Such is the
nature of endless comedy, and of experience. But I wish to retain the
valuable testimony of the Indians to the non-existence of the obvious.
This testimony is the more valuable because the spectacle present to
their eyes was tropical; harder, therefore, to master and to smile at
than are the political and romantic medleys which fill the mind of
Europe. Yet amidst the serpents and hyænas, the monkeys and parrots of
their mental jungle, those sages could sit unmoved, too holily
incredulous for fear. How infinite, how helpless, how deserving of
forgiveness creative error becomes to the eye of understanding, that
loves only in pity, and has no concupiscence for what it loves! How like
unhappy animals western philosophers seem in comparison, with their
fact-worship, their thrift, their moral intolerance, their imaginative
poverty, their political zeal, and their subservience to intellectual
fashion!
It makes no difference for my purposes if the cosmology of the Indians
was fanciful. It could hardly be more extraordinary than the
constitution of the material world is in fact, nor more decidedly out of
scale with human data; truth and fancy in this matter equally convict
the human senses of illusion. Nor am I out of sympathy with their hope
of escaping from the universal hurly-burly into some haven of peace. A
philosopher has a haven in himself, of which I suspect the fabled bliss
to follow in other lives, or after total emancipation from living, is
only a poetic symbol: he has pleasure in truth, and an equal readiness
to enjoy the scene or to quit it. Liberation is never complete while
life lasts, and is nothing afterwards; but it flows in a measure from
this very conviction that all experience is illusion, when this
conviction is morally effective, as it was with the Indians. Their
belief in transmigration or in Karma is superfluous in this regard,
since a later experience could only change the illusion without
perfecting the liberation. Yet the mention of some ulterior refuge or
substance is indispensable to the doctrine of illusion, and though it
may be expressed mythically must be taken to heart too. It points to
other realms of being—such as those which I call the realms of matter,
truth, and spirit—which by nature cannot be data of intuition but must
be posited (if recognised by man at all) by an instinctive faith
expressed in action. Whether these ulterior realms exist or not is their
own affair: existence may be proper to some, like matter or spirit, and
not to others, like truth. But as to the data of intuition, their
non-existent and illusory character is implied in the fact that they are
given. A datum is by definition a theme of attention, a term in passing
thought, a visioned universal. The realm in which it lies, and in which
flying intuition discloses it for a moment, is the very realm of
non-existence, of inert or ideal being. The Indians, in asserting the
non-existence of every term in possible experience, not only free the
spirit from idolatry, but free the realm of spirit (which is that of
intuition) from limitation; because if nothing that appears exists,
anything may appear without the labour and expense of existing; and
fancy is invited to range innocently—fancies not murdering other fancies
as an existence must murder other existences. While life lasts, the
field is thus cleared for innocent poetry and infinite hypothesis,
without suffering the judgement to be deceived nor the heart enslaved.
European philosophers, even when called idealists, have seldom
reconciled themselves to regarding experience as a creature of fancy.
Instead of looking beneath illusion for some principle that might call
it forth or perhaps dispel it, as they would if endeavouring to
interpret a dream, they have treated it as dreams are treated by the
superstitious; that is, they have supposed that the images they saw were
themselves substances, or powers, or at least imperfect visions of
originals resembling them. In other words, they have been empiricists,
regarding appearances as constituents of substance. There have been
exceptions, but some of them only prove the rule. Parmenides and
Democritus certainly did not admit that the data of sense or imagination
existed otherwise than as illusions or conventional signs: but their
whole interest, for this reason, skipped over them, and settled heavily
on “Being,” or on the atoms and the void, which they severally supposed
underlay appearance. Appearance itself thereby acquired a certain
vicarious solidity, since it was thought to be the garment of substance;
somehow within the visionary datum, or beneath it, the most
unobjectionable substance was always to be found. Parmenides could not
have admitted, and Democritus had not discovered, that the sole basis of
appearances was some event in the brain, in no way resembling them; and
that the relation of data to the external events they indicated was that
of a spontaneous symbol, like an exclamatory word, and not that of a
copy or emanation. The simple ancients supposed (as some of my
contemporaries do also) that perception stripped material things of
their surface properties, or was actually these surface properties
peeled off and lodged in the observer’s head. Accordingly the denial of
existence to sensibles and to intelligibles was never hearty until
substance was denied also, and nothing existent was any longer supposed
to lurk within these appearances or behind them.
All modern idealists have perceived that an actual appearance cannot be
a part of a substance that does not appear; the given image has only the
given relations; if I assign other relations to it (which I do if I
attribute existence to it) I substitute for the pure datum one of two
other things: either a substance possessing the same form as that datum,
but created and dissolved in its own medium, at its own periods, apart
from all observation; or else, a perception of my own, a moment in my
experience, carrying the vision of such an image. The former choice
simply puts me back at the beginning of physics, when a merely pictorial
knowledge of the material world existed, and nothing of its true
mechanism and history had been discovered. The latter choice posits
human discourse, or as these philosophers call it, experience: and it is
certain that the status of a datum in discourse or experience is that of
a mere appearance, fluctuating, intermittent, never twice the same, and
dependent for its specious actuality on the movement of attention and
the shuffling of confused images in the fancy. In other words, what
exists—that is, what is carried on through the flux and has changing and
external relations—is a _life_, discourse itself, the voluminous
adventures of the mind in its wholeness. This is also what novelists and
literary psychologists endeavour to record or to imagine; and the
particular data, hardly distinguishable by the aid of a word clapped on
to them, are only salient sparks or abstract points of reference for an
observer intent on ulterior events. It is ulterior events, the whole of
human experience and history as conventionally reported, that is the
object of belief in this school, and the true existence.
Ostensibly empiricists seek to reduce this unmanageable object to
particular data, and to attribute existence to each scintilla taken
separately; but in reality all the relations of these intuitions (which
are not relations between the data), their temporal order, subordination
to habit and passion, associations, meaning, and embosoming
intelligence, are interpolated as if they were matters of course; and
indeed they are, because these are the tides of animal life on which the
datum sparkles for a moment. Empiricists are interested in practice, and
wish to work with as light an intellectual equipment as possible; they
therefore attribute existence to “ideas”—meaning intuitions but
professing to mean data. If they were interested in these data for their
own sake, they would perceive that they are only symbols, like words,
used to mark or express the crises in their practical career; and
becoming fervid materialists again in their beliefs, as they have always
been in their allegiances, they might soon go so far as to deny that
there is intuition of data at all: which is a radical way of denying
their existence. Discourse and experience would thus drop out of sight
altogether, and instead of data of intuition there would be only the
pictorial elements of physics—the other possible form in which anything
given may be asserted to exist.
If anything, therefore, exists at all when an appearance arises, this
existence is not the unit that appears, but either a material fact
presenting such an appearance, though constituted by many other
relations, or else an actual intuition evoking, creating, or dreaming
that non-existent unit. Idealists, if they are thorough, will deny both;
for neither a material thing nor an actual intuition has its being in
being perceived: both, by definition, exist on their own account, by
virtue of their internal energy and natural relations. Therefore either
existence apart from givenness is admitted, inconsistently with
idealism, or existence is denied altogether. It is allowed, and in fact
urged, by all complete idealists that appearance, far from involving the
existence of what appears, positively excludes it. _Esse est percipi_
was a maxim recalled by an intelligible literary impulse, as Faust said,
_Gefühl ist Alles!_ Yet that maxim was uttered without reflection,
because what those who uttered it really meant was the exact opposite,
namely, that only spirits, or perhaps one spirit, existed, which were
beings perfectly imperceptible. It was the beautiful and profound part
of such a sentiment that whatever is pictorial is nonexistent. Data
could be only forms assumed by animal sensibility, like the camel and
the weasel seen by Hamlet in a cloud; as these curious creatures could
have no zoological existence in that nebula, so the units of human
apperception have no existence anywhere.
When idealists say, therefore, that ideas are the only objects of human
knowledge and that they exist only in the mind, their language is
incoherent, because knowledge of ideas is not knowledge, and presence to
intuition is not existence. But this incoherence enables two different
philosophies to use the same formula, to the extreme confusion both of
doctrine and feeling. One philosophy under the name idea conceives of a
fact or phenomenon, a phase in the flux of fortune or experience,
existing at a given moment, and known at other moments to have existed
there: in other words, its ideas are recollected events in nature, the
subject-matter of psychology and physics. This philosophy, when carried
out, becomes materialism; its psychology turns into a record of
behaviour and its phenomenalistic view of nature into a mathematical
calculus of invisible processes. The other philosophy (which alone
concerns me here) under the name idea understands the terms of sensation
and thought, and their pictorial or rhetorical synthesis. Since these
themes of intuition are called upon to absorb all reality, and no belief
is accepted as more than a fresh datum in thought, this philosophy
denies the transcendence of knowledge and the existence of anything.
Although the temper of absolute idealists is often far from sceptical,
their method is scepticism itself: as appears not only in their
criticism of all dogma, but in the reasons they give for their own
views. What are these reasons? That the criticism of knowledge proves
that actual thinking is the only reality; that the objects of knowledge
can live, move, and have their being only within it; that existence is
something merely imputed; and that truth is coherence among views having
themselves no objects. A fact, these critics say, is a concept. This
statement might seem absurd, since a concept means at most the idea or
supposition of a fact; but if the statement is taken sympathetically,
for what the malicious criticism of knowledge means by it, it amounts to
this: that there are no facts, but that what we call facts, and believe
to be such, are really only conventional fictions, imaginations of what
facts would be if facts were possible at all. That facts are ideals,
impossible to realise, is clear on transcendental principles, since a
fact would be an event or existence which knowledge would have to
approach and lay siege to somehow from the outside, so that for
knowledge (the only reality on this system) they would always remain
phantoms, creatures of a superstitious instinct, terms for ever posited
but never possessed, and therefore perpetually unreal. If fact or truth
had any separate being it could not be an integral part of knowledge;
what modicum of reality facts or truths can possess they must borrow
from knowledge, in which they perforce remain ideals only; so that it is
only as unreal that they are real at all. Transcendentalists are sure
that knowledge is everything, not because they presume that everything
is known, but precisely because they see that there is nothing to know.
If anything existed actually, or if there was any independent truth, it
would be unknowable, as these voracious thinkers conceive knowledge. The
glorious thing about knowledge, in their eyes, is that, as there is
nothing to know, knowledge is a free and a sure creation, new and
self-grounded for ever.
Transcendentalism, when it is thorough, accordingly agrees with the
Indian systems in maintaining that the illusion that given objects exist
has itself no existence. Any actual sensation, any instance of thinking,
would be a self-existing fact; but facts are only concepts, that is,
inert terms in absolute thought: if illusions occurred actually, they
would not be concepts but events, and though their visionary objects
might be non-existent, the vision of them would exist; and they would be
the sort of independent facts which transcendental logic excludes as
impossible. Acts of judging or positing or imagining cannot be admitted
on this system until they in their turn have been posited in another
judgement; that is, until they cease to hide their heads in the
obscurity of self-existence, and become purely ideal themes of actual
intuition. When they have thus become phenomenal, intent and judgement
may posit them and depute them to exist; but the belief that they exist
otherwise than as present postulates is always false. Imputed existence
is the only existence possible, but must always be imputed falsely. For
example, the much-talked-of opinions of ancient philosophers, if they
had existed at all, would have had to exist before they became objects
of intuition to the historian, or to the reader of history, who judges
them to have existed; but such self-existence is repugnant to
transcendental logic: it is a ghost cut off from knowledge and from the
breath of life in me here and now. Therefore the opinions of
philosophers exist only in history, history exists only in the
historian, and the historian only in the reader; and the reader himself
exists only for his self-consciousness, which is not really his own, but
absolute consciousness thinking about him or about all things from his
point of view. Thus everything exists only ideally, by being falsely
supposed to exist. The only knowable reality is unreal because specious,
and all other reality is unreal because unknowable.
Transcendentalists are thus driven, like Parmenides and the Vedanta
philosophy, to withdraw into a dark interior yet omnipresent principle,
the unfathomable force that sets all this illusion going, and at the
same time rebukes and annuls the illusion. I am here concerned, let me
repeat, with scepticism, not with compensatory dogmas; but for the
transcendentalist, who fundamentally abhors substance, the compensatory
dogma itself is one more denial of existence. For what, in his system,
is this transcendental seat of all illusion, this agent in all
judgements and positings? Not an existing spirit, if such a phrase could
have a meaning. Absolute thought cannot exist first, before it imputes
existence to other things or to itself. If it needed to possess
existence before imputing it, as the inexpert in logic might suppose,
the whole principle of transcendental criticism would be abandoned and
disproved, and nothing would any longer prevent the existence of
intuitions or of material things before any one posited them. But if
non-existent, what can absolute spirit be? Just a principle, a logic to
be embodied, a self-creating programme or duty, asserting itself without
any previous instrument, ground, or occasion. Existence is something
utterly unworthy of such a transcendental spirit, and repugnant to it.
Spirit is here only a name for absolute law, for the fatality or chance
that one set of appearances instead of another insists upon arising. No
doubt this fatality is welcome to the enthusiast in whom this spirit is
awake, and its very groundlessness takes on the form of freedom and
creative power to his apprehension: but this sympathy with life, being
expressly without any natural basis, is itself a happy accident, and
precarious: and sometimes conscience may suddenly turn against it, and
call it vain, mad, and criminal. Fichte once said that he who truly
wills anything must will that very thing for ever; and this saying may
be interpreted consistently with transcendentalism, if it is understood
to mean that, since transcendental will is dateless and creates its own
universe wherever it exerts itself, the character of this will is
unalterable in that phase of it, producing just that vision and that
world, which being out of time cannot be devoured by time. But perhaps
even Fichte was not free from human weakness, and he may also have
meant, or half-meant, that a thorough education, such as Prussia was
called to create, could fix the will of mankind and turn it into an
unalterable habit; and that a philosopher could pledge the absolute
always to posit the same set of objects. So understood, the maxim would
be contrary to transcendentalism and to the fervent conviction of Fichte
himself, which demanded “new worlds for ever.” Even if he meant only
that the principle of perpetual novelty at least was safe and could
never be betrayed by the event, he would have contradicted the absolute
freedom of “Life” to be what it willed, and his own occasional fears
that, somewhere and some day, Life might grow weary, and might consent
to be hypnotised and enslaved by the vision of matter which it had
created.
But the frailty even of the greatest idealists is nothing against
idealism, and the principle that existence is something always imputed,
and never found, is not less cogent if idealists, for the sake of
courtesy, sometimes say that when existence is imputed necessarily it is
imputed truly; and it makes no difference for my object whether they
call fiction truth because it is legal, or call legality illusion
because it is false. In any case, I can invoke the authority of this
whole school, in which consciousness has been studied and described with
admirable sincerity, for the thesis I have at heart. They deny with one
voice that anything given can exist on its own account, or can be
anything but a theme chosen by the spirit, a theme which no substantial
thing or event existing outside could ever force the spirit to conceive
or to copy. Nothing existent can appear, and nothing specious can exist.
An apparition is a thought, its whole life is but mine in thinking it;
and whatever monition or significance I may attribute to its presence,
it can never be anything but the specious thing it is. In the routine of
animal life, an appearance may be normal or abnormal, and animal faith
or practical intellect may interpret it in a way practically right or
wrong; but in itself every appearance, just because it is an appearance,
is an illusion.
Confirmation of this thesis may also be found in an entirely different
quarter, in natural history. The sensibility of animals, as judged by
their motions and behaviour, is due to their own structure. The
surrounding facts and forces are like the sun shining and the rain
falling on the just and the unjust; they condition the existence of the
animal and reward any apt habits which he may acquire; but he survives
mainly by insensibility, and by a sort of pervasive immunity to most of
the vibrations that run through him. It is only in very special
directions, to very special occasional stimulations, that he develops
instinctive responses in special organs: and his intuitions, if he has
them, express these reactions. If the stimulus is cut off, the material
sources of it may continue to be what they were, but they will not be
perceived. If the stimulus, or anything equivalent to it, reaches the
brain from any source, as in dreams, the same intuition will appear, in
the absence of the material object. The feelings of animals express
their bodily habit; they do not express directly either the existence or
the character of any external thing. The intent to react on these
external things is independent of any presumptive data of intuition and
antecedent to their appearance: it is an animal endeavour in pursuit or
avoidance, or an animal expectation; but the signals by which intuition
may mark the crises of this animal watch or animal struggle are the same
signals as appear in a dream, when nothing is afoot. The immediate
visionary datum is never the intended object, but always a pathological
symptom, a term in discourse, a description proffered at that moment by
that feeling for that object, different for each channel of sense,
translating digestibility into taste, salubrity into freshness, distance
into size, refraction into colour, attitude into outline, distribution
into perspective, and immersing everything in a moral medium, where it
becomes a good or an evil, as it cannot be save to animal sympathy.
All these transcripts, however original in character, remain symbols in
function, because they arise in the act of focussing animal sensibility
or animal endeavour upon some external influence. In a healthy life they
become the familiar and unmistakable masks of nature, lending to
everything in the environment its appropriate aspect in human discourse,
its nickname in the human family. For this reason, when imagination
works in a void (as it can do in dreams or under the influence of
violent passion) it becomes illusion in the bad sense of this word; that
is, it is still taken for a symbol, when it is the symbol of nothing.
All these data, if by a suspension of practical reference they came to
be regarded in themselves, would cease to be illusions cognitively,
since no existence would be suggested by any of them; but a practical
man might still call them illusions for that very reason, because
although free from error they would be devoid of truth. In order to
reach existences intent must transcend intuition, and take data for what
they mean, not for what they are; it must credit them, as understanding
credits words, accepting the passing vision as a warrant for something
that once was, or that will be, or that lies in an entirely different
medium, that of material being, or of discourse elsewhere. Intuition
cannot reveal or discriminate any fact; it is pure fancy; and the more I
sink into it, and the more absolute I make it, the more fanciful it
becomes. If ever it ceases to mean anything at all, it becomes pure
poetry if placid, and mere delirium if intense. So a pain, when it is
not sorrow at some event or the sign of some injury or crisis in bodily
life, becomes sheer horror, and a sort of wanton little hell, existing
absolutely; because the rending of the organism has raised intuition to
an extreme intensity without giving it direction upon anything to be
found or done in the world, or contemplated in the fancy; and pain, when
it reaches distraction, may be said to be that moral monster, intuition
devouring itself, or wasted in agony upon nothing.
Thus scientific psychology confirms the criticism of knowledge and the
experience of life which proclaim that the immediate objects of
intuition are mere appearances and that nothing given exists as it is
given.