THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE
The loss of faith, as I have already observed, has no tendency to banish
ideas; on the contrary, since doubt arises on reflection, it tends to
keep the imagination on the stretch, and lends to the whole spectacle of
things a certain immediacy, suavity, and humour. All that is sordid or
tragic falls away, and everything acquires a lyric purity, as if the die
had not yet been cast and the ominous choice of creation had not been
made. Often the richest philosophies are the most sceptical; the mind is
not then tethered in its home paddock, but ranges at will over the
wilderness of being. The Indians, who deny the existence of the world,
have a keen sense for its infinity and its variegated colours; they play
with the monstrous and miraculous in the grand manner, as in the
_Arabian Nights_. No critic has had a sharper eye for the outlines of
ideas than Hume, who found it impossible seriously to believe that they
revealed anything. In the critic, as in the painter, suspension of
belief and of practical understanding is favourable to vision; the
arrested eye renders every image limpid and unequivocal. And this is not
merely an effect of physiological compensation, in that perhaps the
nervous energy withdrawn from preparations for action is allowed to
intensify the process of mere sensation. There ensues a logical
clarification as well; because so long as belief, interpretation, and
significance entered in, the object in hand was ambiguous; in seeking
the fact the mind overlooked or confused the datum. Yet each element in
this eager investigation—including its very eagerness—is precisely what
it is; and if I renounce for the moment all transitive intelligence, and
give to each of these elements its due definition, I shall have a much
richer as well as clearer collection of terms and relations before me,
than when I was clumsily attempting to make up my mind. Living beings
dwell in their expectations rather than in their senses. If they are
ever to _see_ what they see, they must first in a manner stop living;
they must suspend the will, as Schopenhauer put it; they must photograph
the idea that is flying past, veiled in its very swiftness. This
swiftness is not its own fault, but that of my haste and inattention; my
hold is loose on it, as in a dream; or else perhaps those veils and that
swiftness are the truth of the picture; and it is they that the true
artist should be concerned to catch and to eternalise, restoring to all
that the practical intellect calls vague its own specious definition.
Nothing is vague in itself, or other than just what it is. Symbols are
vague only in respect to their signification, when this remains
ambiguous.
It is accordingly an inapt criticism often passed upon Berkeley and Hume
that they overlooked vagueness in ideas, although almost every human
idea is scandalously vague. No, their intuition of ideas, at least
initially, was quite direct and honest. The ambiguity they overlooked
lay in the relation of ideas to physical things, which they wished to
reduce to groups or series of these pellucid ideas—a chimerical physics.
Had they abstained altogether from identifying ideas with objects of
natural knowledge (which are events and facts), and from trying to
construct material things out of optical and tactile images, they might
have much enriched the philosophy of specious reality, and discerned the
innocent realm of ideas as directly as Plato did, but more accurately.
In this they need not have confused or undermined faith in natural
things. Perception _is_ faith; more perception may extend this faith or
reform it, but can never recant it except by sophistry. These virgin
philosophers were like the cubists or futurists in the painting of
to-day. They might have brought to light curious and neglected forms of
direct intuition. They could not justly have been charged with absurdity
for seeing what they actually saw. But they lapse into absurdity, and
that irremediably, if they pretend to be the first and only masters of
anatomy and topography.
Far from being vague or abstract the obvious ideas remaining to a
complete sceptic may prove too absorbing, too multitudinous, or too
sweet. A moral reprobation of them is no less intelligible than is the
scientific criticism which rejects them as illusions and as no
constituents of the existing world. Conscience no less than business may
blame the sceptic for a sort of luxurious idleness; he may call himself
a lotus-eater, may heave a sigh of fatigue at doing nothing, and may
even feel a touch of the vertigo and wish to close the eyes on all these
images that entertain him to no purpose. But scepticism is an exercise,
not a life; it is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and
render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act
wisely; and meantime the pure sceptic need take no offence at the
multiplicity of images that crowd upon him, if he is scrupulous not to
trust them and to assert nothing at their prompting. Scepticism is the
chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon
or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and
proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct
and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
But the philosopher, when he is speculative only, is a sort of perpetual
celibate; he is bent on not being betrayed, rather than on being annexed
or inspired; and although if he is at all wise he must see that the true
marriage of the mind is with nature and science and the practical arts,
yet in his special theoretic vocation, it will be a boon to him to view
all experience simply, in the precision and distinctness which all its
parts acquire when not referred to any substance which they might
present confusedly, nor to any hypothesis or action which they might
suggest.
The sceptic, then, as a consequence of carrying his scepticism to the
greatest lengths, finds himself in the presence of more luminous and
less equivocal objects than does the working and believing mind; only
these objects are without meaning, they are only what they are
obviously, all surface. They show him everything thinkable with the
greatest clearness and force; but he can no longer imagine that he sees
in these objects anything save their instant presence and their
face-value. Scepticism therefore suspends all knowledge worthy of the
name, all that transitive and presumptive knowledge of facts which is a
form of belief; and instead it bestows intuition of ideas,
contemplative, aesthetic, dialectical, arbitrary. But whereas transitive
knowledge, though important if true, may always be challenged,
intuition, on the contrary, which neither has nor professes to have any
ulterior object or truth, runs no risks of error, because it claims no
jurisdiction over anything alien or eventual.
In this lucidity and calmness of intuition there is something
preternatural. Imagine a child accustomed to see clothes only on living
persons and hardly distinguishing them from the magical strong bodies
that agitate them, and suddenly carry this child into a costumer’s shop,
where he will see all sorts of garments hung in rows upon manikins, with
hollow breasts all of visible wire, and little wooden nobs instead of
heads: he might be seriously shocked or even frightened. How should it
be possible for clothes standing up like this not to be people? Such
abstractions, he might say to himself, are metaphysically impossible.
Either these figures must be secretly alive and ready, when he least
expects it, to begin to dance, or else they are not real at all, and he
can only fancy that he sees them. Just as the spectacle of all these
gaunt clothes without bodies might make the child cry, so later might
the whole spectacle of nature, if ever he became a sceptic. The little
word _is_ has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things
with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if
therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too
lies the danger. Whenever I use the word _is_, except in sheer
tautology, I deeply misuse it; and when I discover my error, the world
seems to fall asunder and the members of my family no longer know one
another. Existence is the strong body and familiar motion which the
young mind expects to find in every dummy. The oldest of us are
sometimes no less recalcitrant to the spectacle of the garments of
existence—which is all we ever saw of it—when the existence is taken
away. Yet it is to these actual and familiar, but now disembowelled
objects, that scepticism introduces us, as if to a strange world; a vast
costumer’s gallery of ideas where all sorts of patterns and models are
on exhibition, without bodies to wear them, and where no human habits of
motion distract the eye from the curious cut and precise embroideries of
every article. This display, so complete in its spectacular reality, not
a button nor a feather wanting or unobserved, is not the living crowd
that it ought to be, but a mockery of it, like the palace of the
Sleeping Beauty. To my conventional mind, clothes without bodies are no
less improper than bodies without clothes; yet the conjunction of these
things is but human. All nature runs about naked, and quite happy; and I
am not so remote from nature as not to revert on occasion to that
nakedness—which is unconsciousness—with profound relief. But ideas
without things and apparel without wearers seem to me a stranger
condition; I think the garments were made to fit the limbs, and should
collapse without them. Yet, like the fig leaves of Eden, they are not
garments essentially. They become such by accident, when one or another
of them is appropriated by the providential buyer—not necessarily
human—whose instinct may choose it; or else it is perfectly content to
miss its chance, and to lie stacked for ever among its motley neighbours
in this great store of neglected finery.
It was the fear of illusion that originally disquieted the honest mind,
congenitally dogmatic, and drove it in the direction of scepticism; and
it may find three ways, not equally satisfying to its honesty, in which
that fear of illusion may be dispelled. One is death, in which illusion
vanishes and is forgotten; but although anxiety about error, and even
positive error, are thus destroyed, no solution is offered to the
previous doubt: no explanation of what could have called forth that
illusion or what could have dissipated it. Another way out is by
correcting the error, and substituting a new belief for it: but while in
animal life this is the satisfying solution, and the old habit of
dogmatism may be resumed in consequence without practical inconvenience,
speculatively the case is not at all advanced; because no criterion of
truth is afforded except custom, comfort, and the accidental absence of
doubt; and what is absent by chance may return at any time unbidden. The
third way, at which I have now arrived, is to entertain the illusion
without succumbing to it, accepting it openly as an illusion, and
forbidding it to claim any sort of being but that which it obviously
has; and then, whether it profits me or not, it will not deceive me.
What will remain of this non-deceptive illusion will then be a truth,
and a truth the being of which requires no explanation, since it is
utterly impossible that it should have been otherwise. Of course I may
still ask why the identity of this particular thing with itself should
have occurred to _me_; a question which could only be answered by
plunging into a realm of existence and natural history every part and
principle of which would be just as contingent, just as uncalled-for,
and just as inexplicable as this accident of my being; but that this
particular thing, or any other which might have occurred to me instead,
should be constituted as it is raises no problem; for how could _it_
have been constituted otherwise? Nor is there any moral offence any
longer in the contingency of my view of it, since my view of it involves
no error. The error came from a wild belief about it; and the
possibility of error came from a wild propensity to belief. Relieve now
the pressure of that animal haste and that hungry presumption; the error
is washed out of the illusion; it is no illusion now, but an idea. Just
as food would cease to be food, and poison poison, if you removed the
stomach and the blood that they might nourish or infect; and just as
beautiful things would cease to be beautiful if you removed the wonder
and the welcome of living souls, so if you eliminate your anxiety,
deceit itself becomes entertainment, and every illusion but so much
added acquaintance with the realm of form. For the unintelligible
accident of existence will cease to appear to lurk in this manifest
being, weighting and crowding it, and threatening it with being
swallowed up by nondescript neighbours. It will appear dwelling in its
own world, and shining by its own light, however brief may be my glimpse
of it: for no date will be written on it, no frame of full or of empty
time will shut it in; nothing in it will be addressed to me, nor
suggestive of any spectator. It will seem an event in no world, an
incident in no experience. The quality of it will have ceased to exist:
it will be merely the quality which it inherently, logically, and
inalienably is. It will be an ESSENCE.
Retrenchment has its rewards. When by a difficult suspension of
judgement I have deprived a given image of all adventitious
significance, when it is taken neither for the manifestation of a
substance nor for an idea in a mind nor for an event in a world, but
simply if a colour for that colour and if music for that music, and if a
face for that face, then an immense cognitive certitude comes to
compensate me for so much cognitive abstention. My scepticism at last
has touched bottom, and my doubt has found honourable rest in the
absolutely indubitable. Whatever essence I find and note, that essence
and no other is established before me. I cannot be mistaken about it,
since I now have no object of intent other than the object of intuition.
If for some private reason I am dissatisfied, and wish to change my
entertainment, nothing prevents; but the change leaves the thing I first
saw possessed of all its quality, for the sake of which I perhaps
disliked or disowned it. That, while one essence is before me, some one
else may be talking of another, which he calls by the same name, is
nothing to the purpose; and if I myself change and correct myself,
choosing a new essence in place of the old, my life indeed may have
shifted its visions and its interests, but the characters they had when
I harboured them are theirs without change. Indeed, only because each
essence is the essence defined by instant apprehension can I truly be
said to have changed my mind; for I can have discarded any one of them
only by substituting something different. This new essence could not be
different from the former one, if each was not unchangeably itself.
There is, then, a sort of play with the non-existent, or game of
thought, which intervenes in all alleged knowledge of matters of fact,
and survives that knowledge, if this is ever questioned or disproved. To
this mirage of the non-existent, or intuition of essence, the pure
sceptic is confined; and confined is hardly the word; because though
without faith and risk he can never leave that thin and bodiless plane
of being, this plane in its tenuity is infinite; and there is nothing
possible elsewhere that, as a shadow and a pattern, is not prefigured
there. To consider an essence is, from a spiritual point of view, to
enlarge acquaintance with true being; but it is not even to broach
knowledge of fact; and the ideal object so defined may have no natural
significance, though it has æsthetic immediacy and logical definition.
The modest scope of this speculative acquaintance with essence renders
it infallible, whilst the logical and æsthetic ideality of its object
renders that object eternal. Thus the most radical sceptic may be
consoled, without being rebuked nor refuted; he may leap at one bound
over the whole human tangle of beliefs and dogmatic claims, elude human
incapacity and bias, and take hold of the quite sufficient assurance
that any essence or ideal quality of being which he may be intuiting has
just the characters he is finding in it, and has them eternally.
This is no idle assurance. After all, the only thing that can ultimately
interest me in other men’s experience or, apart from animal egotism, in
my own, is just this character of the essences which at any time have
swum into our ken; not at all the length of time through which we may
have beheld them, nor the circumstances that produced that vision;
unless these circumstances in turn, when considered, place before the
mind the essences which it delights to entertain. Of course, the choice
and the interest of essences come entirely from the bent of the animal
that elicits the vision of them from his own soul and its adventures;
and nothing but affinity with my animal life lends the essences I am
able to discern their moral colour, so that to my mind they are
beautiful, horrible, trivial, or vulgar. The good essences are such as
accompany and express a good life. In them, whether good or bad, that
life has its eternity. Certainly when I cease to exist and to think, I
shall lose hold on this assurance; but the theme in which for a moment I
found the fulfilment of my expressive impulses will remain, as it always
was, a theme fit for consideration, even if no one else should consider
it, and I should never consider it again.
Nor is this all. Not only is the character of each essence inalienable,
and, so long as it is open to intuition, indubitable, but the realm of
essences is infinite. Since any essence I happen to have hit upon is
independent of me and would possess its precise character if I had never
been born, or had never been led by the circumstances of my life and
temperament to apprehend that particular essence, evidently all other
essences, which I have not been led to think of, rejoice in the same
sort of impalpable being—impalpable, yet the only sort of being that the
most rugged experience can ever actually find. Thus a mind enlightened
by scepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports,
and free from all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes or
existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very sweet and
marvellous solitude. The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open
out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and
peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise
where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have
lost their urgency and their venom.